Pombai Gives Thai Travelers a Bus Ticket to Ride

Next up at Startup Arena is Pombai, a Bangkok-based startup that provides transport companies with an online ticketing system. In Thailand, city-to-city bus tickets are mostly purchased at the station counter or from agents – all of which is inconvenient.

Pombai’s idea is to create an online ticketing system to manage and sell transport companies’ inventory of spare tickets. It’s similar to Redbus in India, which is apparently doing very well.

But as a startup, it is hard to convince transport companies to entrust their inventories to Pombai. To kickstart his business, founder Joseph Finkenbinder started by buying tickets from bus companies and selling them online. It didn’t make Pombai any profit but it did validate that there is real demand. Finkenbinder says that there are more than 1,200 bus companies in Thailand with five major players holding 47 percent market share. The entire Thai bus transportation industry is worth $1.03 billion right now. In addition to its consumer-side site, Pombai is also making a business out of putting any transport ticketing systems online.

Pombai took part in Startup Bootcamp in Dublin last year and got $60,000 seed funding. His team is made up of people from Lithuania, Nepal, China, and Thailand. The site is available in three languages – Thai, Chinese, and English. Finkenbinder says that the same transport ticketing problem can also be found in China and Vietnam and is hopeful that Pombai can one day expand there in the near future.

One of the judges, Andrew Collins, from Mailman Group, says to Joseph after his demo that he’s concerned that there aren’t enough Thai people working at this startup. In such a culturally diverse country from the US/west, Andrew feels that more local input is needed.

This is a part of our coverage of Startup Asia Singapore 2013, our event running on April 4 and 5. For the rest of our Startup Arena pitches, see here. You can follow along on Twitter at @techinasia, and on our Facebook page.