Two IIT students find routes to the remotest places in India, secure funding from Snapdeal founders

There’s a shrinking river island, with paddy fields and ponds, right in the middle of the mighty river Brahmaputra flowing through India’s northeastern state of Assam. One of my dearest friends grew up there, in Majuli (pictured above), and I recall stories of rare and endangered bird species flying across the river at dusk, people praying to the tempestuous Brahmaputra to spare its fury on the islet, and festivals that go on for days. I have always wanted to go there, and its the first place that comes to my mind whenever I think of traveling. But there’s a problem: there are no flights or trains from Bangalore to that part of India. I would have to hop from a plane to a train to a bus and maybe a rickshaw to get there. So, every time, I choose a more connected destination.

Last night, at the click of a button, I figured out how to get to Majuli from Bangalore. Routofy, a new travel portal, gave me not just one but 50 routes to get there. It combines flights, trains, buses, and cabs to provide end-to-end connectivity, all the way to the smallest towns and villages of India.

Now I know the best flight to take from Bangalore to Guwahati, which train to take from there to Dekargaon, and the cab service that will take me via a ferry to my friend’s ancestral home in the village. Routofy also gave me the point-to-point distance, how long the journey would take, and how much it would cost. In one search, it let me compare different routes and modes of travel. All of it instantly.

Routofy was built by Abhishek Aggarwal and Ronak Gupta, two engineering students of the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi. They are still doing their Master’s program at the college, but their startup has just bagged seed funding from the founders of Indian ecommerce major Snapdeal, Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal. Nikunj Jain, co-founder of Delhi-based video startup Frankly, has also invested an undisclosed amount in Routofy.

The roadblocks on the way to Routofy

Three years ago, Ronak Gupta spent a semester in France as part of a student exchange program. He was eager to backpack across Europe, but found it a “brain-wracking experience” to figure out the best way to reach his destinations as the options were far too many and confusing to a first-timer.

“I used to open multiple tabs for flight, train, bus schedules, and prices. A lot of the time, a good direct option wasn’t available. Sitting with Google Maps, I tried to find alternative and indirect connections to my destination,” Gupta recalls.

That was in 2012. Once back in India, Gupta realised that the problem assumes even more complex proportions here, given the transport infrastructure in far-flung places of the country.

That was when he, along with his friend Abhishek Aggarwal, decided to try and build a technology platform to solve the problem. From a hostel room at IIT Delhi in August 2013, Gupta and Aggarwal began their research. They named their venture Travlr. By December, they began working on the product, downing countless cups of coffee night after night after classes. In February 2014, they tested the product in closed beta, and in June, they launched Routofy.

“We built a multi-modal route planner that works like magic and returns the best hundred paths in a fraction of a second, after analyzing millions of possible paths/itineraries. The beauty of this technology is that everything happens in real-time on current prices and schedules,” Gupta tells Tech in Asia. Another friend, Preeti Rawat from IIT Rourkee, quit her job at Google Zurich to join them. She now leads the back-end technology at Routofy.

Routofy’s vision is to help users find the best way to travel from anywhere to anywhere in India, book the whole itinerary in one go, and do all of that in real time.