Boston travel tech startup Wanderu is building major momentum. But the ‘KAYAK and ITA for buses and trains’ company’s biggest moves are yet to come.
In late August 2013, the former PayPal Start Tank company launched out of beta and pocketed $2.45 million in a round of seed funding led by Alta Ventures, Jeff Clarke (chairman of Orbitz), Bill Kaplan (chairman of HerCampus), and Boston angel investor and recently named Techstars Boston director Semyon Dukach, among others. The startup has been busy gaining traction ever since. Wanderu also successfully expanded its service into the Southwest, Midwest and Canada, tacking onto its initial Northeast market. The company just clocked its millionth ride last week.
“You can take a bus all the way from Vancouver to San Diego, from Toronto to Texas,” Wanderu co-founder and CEO Polina Raygorodskaya told BostInno. “We have a good amount of those regions covered, but we’ll be rolling out across the entire country in the next couple of months.”
Wanderu enables people to simply search by location to find bus and train schedules in the U.S., ultimately offering the best-fit travel options for bus and train lines. The startup’s tech is also able to route multiple carriers together, meaning that users can find the most economic and convenient deal on two buses that connect, whether it be in Philadelphia or Washington D.C., regardless of brand. What’s more, the platform provides point-to-point directions to make the process of bussing all the more easy for the user.
Up until now, the startup has only ever provided its platform on the web. However, the company plans to roll out its very own native app for iOS and Android in early summer, according to Raygorodskaya. Added to CEO, “We get around a third of our traffic from mobile, and many of our partners book through mobile … we really want to bring mobile booking into the bus world.”
A Wanderu app means that as you’re running to South Station to catch a Bolt Bus to New York City, you’ll can quickly check your smartphone to see schedules updated in real-time and for traffic, buy a ticket and go.
Powering Wanderu’s expansion is an all-star team of sixteen. The company is actively hiring and growing, said Raygorodskaya, and has a “hefty tech team” in place. From the very beginning, the company’s CTO and co-founder Eddy Wong built the company’s platform to be scalable.
“Doing what we do, it can’t be launched overnight,” shared Raygorodskaya. When updates are made, however, they’re significant. The startup rolled out a more sophisticated version of its hallmark routing system last week. “It’s smart enough to understand travel and traffic so you don’t miss your connections, and we keep making that smarter and smarter,” explained Raygorodskaya.
Wanderu’s also getting smarter in harnessing the power of its user data – information that has implications beyond the company’s jurisdiction. By aggregating users’ citysearch info, “We can capture all the data where people are looking for bus stops, but don’t have any, like in college towns,” said Raygorodskaya. Various carriers have even used the data to expand their own service lines. At the moment, however, Wanderu isn’t looking to turn a profit off their wealth of information. Rather, the company is focusing on helping the industry grow overall.
The best part of the process, according to Raygorodskaya, though, is seeing how Wanderu’s user experience has helped create more bus users. Said the CEO:
The most exciting part is when we get people to take a bus who have never taken a bus before. Taking a car is easy. You start at your house, hop in the car, and go to wherever you want to go, straight to your destination … But because we let people search point to point, [taking a bus] is easier for them. We’re focused on having a product that’s really easy to use, and better than all alternatives that the user would be doing.
And now that the one million trip mark is passed, perhaps Game of Thrones’ Arya Stark will be using Wanderu to catch a ride in the coming months.
Image via Pulsosocial
