Public transportation booking platform provider BuuPass, which is looking to bring sanity to Kenya and Africa’s chaotic public transport by providing easy to use online booking platforms, has raised over Kshs 160 million in its latest round of funding.
The pre-seed round was raised from the Founders Factory Africa, FrontEnd Ventures, Adaverse, Gullit, Five35, Renew Capital, Changecom, XA Network, Ajim Capital, Artha Ventures, Daba Finance, Google Black Founders Fund, and several angel investors to allow BuuPass scale its operations in Kenya and Uganda.
Founded by Wycliffe Omondi and Sonia Kabra in Kenya 7 years ago as ‘Magic Bus’, BuuPass currently boasts of having over 12,000 transactions daily across its booking channels and has reportedly recorded over 9 million ticket sales so far.
BuuPass, which describes itself as “a B2B2C full-stack marketplace”, offers bus operators with a bus management system (BMS) that helps them to manage operations, inventory, and sales.
The system incorporates a point-of-sale (POS) solution and a parcel management module, allowing operators to manage their fleets and businesses more effectively, access data, reduce cash leakages, and increase sales from online bookings and is widely in sync with bus operations in the East African region where they act as both passenger carriers as well as parcel and package couriers.
“The funding will enable us to invest in growth activities, increasing our market share in East Africa, with a focus on Kenya and Uganda. We will hire a team, especially on the growth side, and technology experts so that we can build systems for scale because our plan is to become a pan-African infrastructure for long-distance transportation,” co-founder Kabra, who also doubles up as the startup’s co-CEO, says in a statement.
BuuPass was one of 12 Kenyan and 60 African startups to make it to the second cohort of the Google for Startups Black Founders Fund for Africa late last year. The Google Black Founders Fund, as noted above, is one of the funders in this funding round.
