Bus aggregator Shuttl hires ex-Uber exec Suryansh Kumar

Bus aggregation platform Shuttl has appointed former Uber executive as Suryansh Kumar as vice president–growth.

Prior to his appointment, Kumar served as general manager at Uber India, where he was responsible for the company's operations and marketing.

"Suryansh's understanding of the transportation sector and his experience of managing operations with a huge team will help Shuttl grow rapidly. His contribution will be crucial in providing a seamless transportation solution to commuters. Suryansh's experience in his past roles will also be extremely valuable for us as we are growing and adding more routes and buses each month," said Amit Singh, co-founder of Shuttl, in a statement.

Kumar, an alumnus of IIT-Bombay and Indian School of Business, has a decade's experience of working with companies such as Bharat Matrimony and Bharti Wal-mart.

In November last year, Shuttl appointed former Bharti Airtel executive Venkatesh Rangachari as its head of growth, and Amit Kumar Gupta from Snapdeal as head of engineering.

Gurgaon-based Shuttl raised $20 million in Series A funding from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Sequoia India and Times Internet Ltd. in December last year. It had raised $3 million from Sequoia and angel investors in August, according to data from VCCEdge, the data research platform of VCCircle.

Shuttl, owned by Super Highway Labs Pvt Ltd, was founded by Singh and Deepanshu Malviya in April last year. It offers economic shuttle services to commuters across 20 routes in Delhi-NCR. Commuters can register on the Shuttl app, choose pickup and destination locations and view bus timings on the network. Users can then book seats by cashless payment on the app via their accounts. Its buses are air-conditioned and GPS-enabled.

The Delhi government has been working on a draft policy to regulate app-based bus aggregators, realising that such services help solve the urban commuter's problems, especially when it is trying to reign in pollution caused by increasing traffic. Bus aggregators are allowed to run their shuttle services under the contract carriage permit system.

Several bus aggregation startups have received investment lately. Cityflo, which aggregates private mini-buses for daily commuters, received $750,000 (around Rs 4.9 crore) in seed funding from IDG Ventures and an unnamed investor recently.

Mumbai-based rBus, which provides AC bus services, has raised an undisclosed amount in seed funding from India Quotient, People Group founder Anupam Mittal and other investors.