D.C.-based VC fund Revolution Ventures is co-leading a $9 million Series A investment in bringing online travel booking aggregation to the world of bus travel. It's pretty much standard to plan air travel with a website that will bring all of your options together in one spot, but the Montreal-based Busbud is the applies that kind of thinking to a platform for the more egalitarian bus travel, similar to how the Boston-based Wanderu provides scheduling and booking online for buses.
Don't let the bus aspect fool you, Busbud has big money and big names behind it. Along with Revolution, investors and advisers from Expedia, Facebook and other major tech companies are involved with the company. And Busbud has worked out arrangements to get booking and scheduling information on its site, and on its app, to cover nearly 10,500 cities across almost 90 countries.
"Busbud is one one of those big ideas in a big market ripe for disruption," said David Golden, a managing partner at Revolution Ventures who is also joining the board of Busbud. "It really uses technology as an agent of change from the usual labor intensive process."
For Washington D.C. travelers, Busbud offers a list of places to connect including the big cities like New York, Baltimore and Boston but also extending into Knoxville, Charlotte and even Toronto (for about $70). It's been a pretty busy time for the company this summer. People from more than 118 different countries have been using the site's Brazil bus schedule during the World Cup. Expansion into more and more places is on the agenda for Busbud in the near future. There's also plans for ticket revenue sharing, travel packages and possibly partnerships with hospitality and other industries as the company grows, Golden said.
"The investment will help us further fulfill our mission: to make bus travel easy around the world," wrote Busbud CEO and co-founder LP Maurice in a blog post. "When I visited South America in 2011, I realized the bus booking experience could be greatly simplified, especially for international travellers. We’ve been at hard work solving this challenge ever since. This new round will allow us to keep improving our product, grow the team and expand our coverage to new markets."
There's also an environmental aspect to the company that Golden said attracted him and the other Revolution partners to Busbud.
"There's a social good component to the company related to carbon footprints," Golden said.
Bus travelers have about a third of the carbon footprint compared to traveling by train and about a sixth of people traveling by air. That makes Busbud an easy way to be a bit greener, which Golden said was a positive when considering whether to invest.
The $9 million brings Busbud's total funding to $10 million after a $1 million seed fund round last year. Busbud sounds like one of those so simple and obvious companies that it's almost a surprise no one has done it yet. Which really just makes its future success seem almost inevitable, especially with the big backing it has to become as ubiquitous as Kayak, only even more widespread in a way. There's a lot more buses than airplanes after all.
"We aspire to be the marketplace for intercity bus travel," Golden said.
Check out a bit more about Busbud in its introductory video.
Busbud - Your Worldwide Bus Travel Companion from Busbud on Vimeo.
Image via Busbud
