This Indian train travel app helps you travel smart, raises funding to go places

In the 2013-14 period, Indian Railways carried 8.397 billion passengers generating 1,159 billion passenger kilometers (A passenger-kilometer is generated when a passenger is carried one kilometer). The Indian Railways, as of March 31 2014, has tracks covering an astounding route of 65,808 km. In such a vast network, getting the right information at the right time is crucial for the passengers, in order to use this network and get places.

Indian Railways has been trying its best to make all its service information readily accessible to the people. There’s still a long way to go, but things have certainly improved. At a dinner table, a man nostalgically remarked about his days, years ago, when hours were spent on the railway platform without any clue about when the train was going to arrive, yet no one seemed to complain. That is when his son, Manish Rathi, came up with the idea for his startup RailYatri.

RailYatri, a multipurpose train travel mobile app, provides a wide range of crowdsourced decision-making information related to train travel in India, including inter-city, local, and metro trains. It offers key information on various travel aspects like live train status, seat availability, and arrival/departure. Another key feature on the app is the RailRadar HotSpots. It is a live tracker of spots where significant events and incidents are occurring/have occurred across the country, which might impact a passenger’s journey. The live tracker’s information is depicted on an interactive map, allowing users to locate such incidents and decide how to adjust their itinerary accordingly.

“The current focus is to reach out to every train traveler in India. However, we offer travel-related services in the app too, such as meals purchases restaurant booking and taxi booking for 300 locations and 20 cities,” says Rathi, talking about RailYatri’s revenue generation model.

The Funding Express

RailYatry announced yesterday that it has raised an undisclosed sum in a pre-series A funding round led by Helion Venture Partners along with Omidyar Network and existing investors Blume Ventures and Ujama. With this funding, Rahul Chandra, the managing partner of Helion, will join the company’s board.

“We are pleased that our existing and new investors understand and are equally excited about building a new experience for train commuters in India. With the investments, we believe we can now move faster toward creating a quality consumer offering for the Indian travelers,” Rathi tells Tech in Asia.

Talking about RailYatri’s expansion plans, Rathi states, “We will continue with our mission of simplifying train travel in India by launching newer capabilities to engage travelers and allow them to plan their trips on their own. We have aggressive growth targets and plan to raise further capital soon.”

It’s a crowded platform

RailYatri has a prominent competitor in Indian Railways’ own app called IRCTC (Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Corporation) Connect, which offers various features like booking tickets, checking reservation status, train schedules, and routes. But they are not the only players in this space.

Trainman is one such competitor. Founded by Mohammad Amir, Trainman predicts the probability of a waiting list ticket getting confirmed. Users can log into the site and enter their itinerary. Trainman shows them a list of trains running on that route. Upon selecting a particular train, users are advised whether or not to book a ticket on it. The prediction is done by using machine learning.

Confirmtkt is another ticketing prediction startup with a model very similar to Trainman. It was founded by Sripad Vaidya and Dinesh Kumar Kotha.

In terms of the number of features offered and being a multipurpose app, RailYatri seems to be ahead of its competitors. “We don’t see any competition at all. The usage of GPS-enabled mobile phones to track trains, and proprietary prediction algorithms coupled with historical data spread over years, is what sets us apart,” claims Rathi.