RailYatri hires former Times Group exec to lead intercity bus biz

Noida-based travel tech startup RailYatri has appointed former Times Group executive Vivek Madhukar as business head of IntrCity SmartBus, its intercity bus travel vertical.

Madhukar will be responsible for accelerating the growth and spearheading the business operations for the intercity bus vertical, an official statement said.

“We want to create a differentiated fleet, set new benchmarks in the intercity bus category and continue to scale rapidly,” Manish Rathi, CEO and co-founder of RailYatri.in, said in the statement.

An alumnus from Institute of Management Technology, Ghaziabad, Madhukar had previously co-founded ProsperX, an online investment management transaction platform for retail investors. In his earlier stint, he had served as the chief operating officer of the classifieds division of the Times Group. Prior to that, he had also worked at automotive firms Tata Motors and Eicher.

“The RailYatri team has created an amazing platform with over 20 million active users and has achieved a significant brand recall in the minds of the users,” Madhukar said.

RailYatri

The company, which started operations with train travel bookings, has launched intercity bus services in the following routes: Delhi to Lucknow, Kanpur, Shimla, Chandigarh, Amritsar, Ludhiana, Jalandhar, Manali. Recently, it has also expanded operations to Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad and Coimbatore.  

Last month, the Nandan Nilekani-backed travel services provider partnered with Delhi-based offline app-based solutions provider GoldSeat to offer internet of things-based tracking, WiFi and entertainment for its managed fleet of IntrCity SmartBuses.

At the time of the announcement, the company claimed that its fleet included 50 buses running in north and south India, and will be expanding to more than 300 buses by the end of the year

Operated by Stelling Technologies, RailYatri was founded by Rathi, Kapil Raizada and Sachin Saxena in 2011. It started off as a platform that enabled users to book train tickets, check live train running status, check train PNR Status, offline train time table, check seat availability with confirmation prediction and order food on trains. 

Subsequently, it also expanded its services to intercity bus travel.

Last year, in April, it raised an undisclosed sum in a Series B round led by impact investor Omidyar Network.

In January last year, RailYatri acqui-hired food-delivery technology startup YatraChef.

In October 2016, it raised a follow-on round of funding from all its existing investors—Nandan Nilekani, Helion Ventures, Omidyar Partners and Blume Ventures.