The public transport sector in Kenya is largely traditional and most operators, especially those traveling by road, still require their customers to book tickets physically at their offices, even when making travel plans in advance. Others have no provisions for seat reservations.
Seeking to bridge the gap, reserve platforms in space are emerging, including BuuPasswhich actively seeks to promote order in the highly fragmented sector by helping operators to digitize their operations.
The company, which was founded in Kenya seven years ago, plans to scale first in Kenya and Uganda, before exploring other markets backed by initial seed funding of $1.3 million it raised from Founders Factory Africa, FrontEnd Ventures, Adaverse, Gullit, Five35 , Renew Capital, Changecom, XA Network, Ajim Capital, Artha Ventures, Daba Finance, Google Black Founders Fund and various angel investors.
“The financing will allow 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 at scale because our plan is to become a pan-African infrastructure for long-haul transportation,” said Co-CEO, sonia cabrawho co-founded BuuPass with Wycliffe Omondi in 2016.
BuuPass, a complete B2B2C marketplace, provides operators with a bus management system (BMS) to manage their operations, inventory and sales. It then connects them with its marketplace, where passengers search, compare, and book their tickets using different channels, including websites, apps, and USSD codes.
The BMS includes a point of sale solution to capture transactions and provide access to a package management module.
BuuPass says that operators using its BMS can better manage their fleets and businesses, gain access to data they can use for insights, and reduce cash leaks, while increasing their online booking sales.
The company says it processes around 12,000 transactions a day through its booking channels and has recorded more than 9 million tickets sold so far. Its gross merchandise value slightly exceeded $30 million in 2022.
It supports a total fleet of 1,200 vehicles from more than 25 bus companies, including one of the oldest, Easy Coach. Travelers can also book air and train tickets, especially providing convenience for travelers using the country’s rail network for intercity travel.
In Kenya, BuuPass, in partnership with Safaricom, the parent company of the mobile money service M-Pesa, signed the contract to facilitate train reservations in 2017.
“Partnering with Safaricom allowed us to close the deal with Kenya Railways (operators of the national rail network) and validated our solution and ability to create solutions for high value transactions. It also allowed us to build trust in the marketplace and helped us think at scale in such a way that we have developed solutions capable of handling millions of transactions and providing a seamless end-user experience. It has been a great validation for us to demonstrate our credibility in the market,” said Kabra.
Sonia and Omondi met in 2013 at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, USA, and their interest in entrepreneurship and finding solutions for the transportation sector in emerging markets led them to found the first club of university entrepreneurship and BuuPass. In 2016, they won the $1 million Hult Prize, a Bill Clinton-backed grant that helped them launch BuuPass (known then as Magic Bus Ticketing) in Kenya as a B2C platform.
However, they quickly realized that the idea was not feasible as the operations of most bus companies were mostly manual, hence the need to prioritize digitization.
“We delved into the market and saw that there was a bigger problem with the bus operators; they mostly used pencil and paper for ticketing, they had no transparency on their sales. There were a lot of cash leaks and they couldn’t digitize and access the users who go online every day. And so, we built a bus management system for them,” Kabra said.
