Boston's Wanderu has trekked a long way since it got an early boost at the 2013 SXSW, where the Kayak-esque site for ground travel booking took the top prize for new Web technologies.
Since then, the startup has raised a seed round, begun offering booking of Greyhound bus tickets and other bus lines, and expanded to offer trips to much of the U.S. Now, Wanderu has graduated to the Series A funding level, with a $5.6 million round that aims to help its growth to continue in the U.S. and Canada—and beyond into Mexico.
Notable investors in the new round included former Greyhound CEO Craig Lentzsch and Brad Feld, the prominent Foundry Group venture capitalist and co-founder of Techstars.
Wanderu's service aims to help users easily find the cheapest fares and most-ideal itineraries for bus travel (and some train travel), which it accomplishes by presenting the options from all carriers together in one place.
It's free to use for consumers, though the bus companies pay a fee to Wanderu. Stations reachable via the service are located through much of the U.S. and some parts of Canada (a screenshot of the current coverage map is on the right).
Beyond Greyhound, bus lines available for booking on Wanderu include Megabus, Boltbus and Peter Pan—and more are planned. In an email, Wanderu CEO and co-founder Polina Raygorodskaya offered some more details:
We plan to continue adding more partners and expanding across the U.S. and Canada as well as launch in Mexico. We are now serving 600K users per month, but what's most exciting is that we've seen our conversion rate double over the past four months, driven by strong return and repeat user rates, and our push to rapidly roll out new coverage and features that users are asking for.
Plenty of hurdles still remain for Wanderu to reach mainstream status. For one: booking bus tickets online really isn't that hard, and so the promise of making it a bit easier or cheaper might never lure a massive number of consumers.
Booking bus tickets online really isn't that hard, and so the promise of making it a bit easier or cheaper might never lure a massive number of consumers.
Raygorodskaya, however, makes the point that the site offers more than easier and cheaper booking—it can sometimes open up entirely new itinerary options for users. Wanderu lets users tap multiple carriers so that they can reach destinations they just couldn't otherwise; nearly 20 percent of the site's bookings are only possible because of that feature on Wanderu, she said.
Wanderu had previously raised a $2.5 million seed round in August 2013. For the Series A, Metamorphic Ventures of New York City led the round; and along with Feld and Lentzsch, other investors included Alta Ventures, 500 Startups and Barbara Corcoran Venture Partners (yes, that's Shark Tank's Barbara Corcoran).
So are happy trails ahead for Wanderu? Yes, if you see things similarly to Metamorphic Ventures managing partner Marc Michel, who offered this proclamation: "I believe that, over the long term, Wanderu will become the go-to travel brand for millennials.”
