Bus.com, formerly known as ShareTheBus, aims to eliminate the inefficiencies of renting a bus. This 4 billion dollar industry (according to company research) is highly fragmented, many operators manage ten buses or less, and thus offered a prime opportunity for a new player like Bus.com to step in and introduce a better mouse trap.
The potential of this concept was first recognized by co-founder Wolf Kohlberg in Germany, where he ran a successful bus booking business. Many of the small bus operators lacked any organizational tools to efficiently and profitably manage their busses. Many buses were sitting idle on parking lots throughout Germany. Once Kohlberg moved to Canada he teamed up with web designer and developer Kyle Boulay to start ShareTheBus. Together they created a software platform that connects all the different parties from bus operators to festival and event organizers who are looking to bring people from the cities to their events. They now offer instant online bus rental, GPS bus tracking, passenger management tools, online ticketing, and strive to more efficiently coordinate group transportation anywhere in the US and Canada
Recently ShareTheBus was a Y Combinator Winter 2016 class graduate, which attracted the interest of Jackson Square Ventures and BMW i Ventures. Together they have successfully led a $5 million Series A investment round. The future for Bus.com indeed looks bright. As to what BMW’s plans are exactly, well that remains to be seen, their commitment however to a cleaner and greener mode of transportation seems to be getting stronger every year.
Source: Techcrunch and BMWBlog
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