RailYatri, the train traveling consumer app startup, has raised fresh funding with participation from all its existing investors – Nandan Nilekani, Helion Ventures, Omidyar Partners and Blume Ventures. This round comes on the back of the round which the company had raised in March this year. With this fresh funding, RailYatri is looking at aggressively pushing towards growth and new services to enrich the traveling experience of travellers.
“We have witnessed an unprecedented organic growth over the last several months and are quickly moving in the direction of becoming the largest travel app in the country.” says Manish Rathi, CEO & Co-founder RailYatri. “In many ways, such an enthusiastic participation from our investors revalidates our strong value proposition to the largest travel segment in India. Over the next 12 months we plan to establish RailYatri as a household name across the country”, he added.
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RailYatri uses deep-analytics technology to make intelligent predictions that help travelers make smart decisions for their upcoming travel. The app uses a traveler’s mobile GPS to predict a train’s delay, in addition to platform number, coach position, on-time history of a train and wait list confirmations. “My ongoing interactions with the extended RailYatri team has made me all the more excited about the impact which RailYatri can bring in using smart combination of mobile, data, payments and analytics to the common man in India. Their prediction algorithms are already delivering time & money savings for the travelers.” added Nandan Nilekani, former Chairman of UIDAI.
RailYatri’s recently forayed into becoming a train-travel oriented marketplace. It is now enabling travellers to book essential services such as high-quality onboard meals, bus tickets, budget rooms, etc..“RailYatri’s strength lies in their ability to drive huge organic acquisitions at near zero costs. This positions them strongly to scale positive unit-economics transactions, and is one of the reasons they have been able to stand apart from the rest,” says Rahul Chandra of Helion Ventures.
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“We’re inspired by RailYatri’s innovative technology-led solution catering to a massive population of long distance rail passengers through a content, commerce and community strategy. We believe the company is well poised to generate impact at scale while achieving financial success,” says Siddharth Nautiyal, investment partner at Omidyar Network.
The brainchild of seasoned experts from IITs and IIM – Kapil Raizada, Sachin Saxena and Manish Rathi with over 20 years of engineering experience – RailYatri is changing the ecosystem of train travel in India. The travel app provides the most comprehensive information on trains, passenger amenities at stations, platform information, speed of the train, personalized alerts, and much more via the mobile apps, mobile web and SMS.
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