IntrCity SmartBus lands $30M at $140M valuation to deepen its grip on India’s intercity travel market

IntrCity SmartBus, a technology-enabled intercity bus platform in India, has raised $30 million in funding to expand its network to smaller towns and cities in the South Asian country. An all-equity Series D round led by A91 Partners values ​​the Noida-based startup at $140 million post-money.

Inter-city travel is accelerating in India as more people move from small towns to metropolitan cities for work and education.

New Delhi has significantly expanded the country’s highway infrastructure to meet this demand. There is a network of national highways increased by more than 60% In the last decade, according to Indian government data, from 56,723 miles to 90,847 miles.

Railways, though extensive, remain capacity-constrained and cannot keep pace with growing interstate travel demand. This makes long distance road trips an important option. Yet, state-run intercity bus services are limited and often lacking in reliability and comfort – a gap Intercity Smartbus goals to meet.

Unlike traditional operators, IntrCity SmartBus runs on an asset-light model by partnering with local bus owners and equipping their vehicles with proprietary hardware for real-time tracking, co-founder and president Kapil Raizada said in an interview.

The startup centralizes ticket booking and route planning through its digital platform, which helps determine service frequency, pickup points, boarding stations and even seat configurations on demand.

To ensure safety and consistency, IntrCity puts trained personnel — called “captains” — on each bus, Rayzada told TechCrunch. Most of the vehicles have washrooms and the company has also installed air-conditioned boarding lounges with the crew to enhance the pre-departure experience.

“All of our buses are cloud-connected,” he noted. “There is a bus operating system, which we developed in-house, which monitors and manages many parameters including CCTV, noise and temperature levels.”

Founded in 2019, IntrCity SmartBus started as an online train ticketing platform under the RailYatri brand. Raizada said this entry point gave the team early insights into intercity travel behavior and unmet demand for road-based mobility.

Today, Railyatri contributes about 10% of the startup’s total revenue, while Smartbus accounts for the remaining 90% of the business, he added.

IntrCity SmartBus operates about 600 bus trips per day, transporting 20,000 to 25,000 passengers per day — about 700,000 per month. The platform works with over 50 local bus operators and travels an average of over 311 miles each. About 95% of its services are overnight, primarily serving non-discretionary travel needs such as work, education, or essential appointments.

Typical passengers at startups range in age from 20 to 45, including small business owners, coaches, government officials, sales professionals and students.

The startup follows a hub-and-spoke model and has identified 15 to 16 key economic centers across India. It operates from 13 to 14 of these hubs spread across 15 states. The network covers the entire north of India – from Jammu to Uttarakhand – and most of the south, including Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh.

“A lot of data crunching is done to understand what the consumer needs,” says Manish Rathi, co-founder and CEO of IntrCity SmartBus. “This includes decisions such as what the layout of a bus should be — should it be a full sleeper, or a hybrid with both sleepers and seats?”

IntrCity SmartBus grew its revenue by 67% last fiscal year to ₹5 billion (about $57 million) year-on-year. The startup project’s revenue will exceed ₹7 billion (about $79 million) this year. It has been “EBITDA-positive” for the past few years and aims to be fully profitable this year.

With the latest funding, the startup plans to go “deeper and broader” across the country and upgrade its fleet management technology while enhancing customer experience and security.

Raizada told TechCrunch, “One of the biggest challenges in bus movement across the country is the anxiety people have about buses. It’s seen as a lesser cousin to trains and flights.” “We want to make buses the preferred mode of travel in India.”

Over 223 million intercity trips were made in India in the financial year 2025, according to a Recent reports By online bus ticketing platform RedBus. The sector added more than 72,000 new intercity routes last year, along with approximately 6,400 new buses – expanding capacity by an estimated 265,000 daily seats.

In addition to IntrCity SmartBus, India is seeing a wave of new-age intercity bus startups such as ZingBus, LeafyBus, and FreshBus. Also the European giant FlixBus Entered the Indian market Early last year, the space signaled increasing traction. Still, InterCity sees competition as secondary to execution.

“India is a very different beast when it comes to road travel,” Rathi said. “We are not a network-first company. We are an operational-excellence-first company.”