IntrCity SmartBus, an Indian-powered intercity bus platform, has raised $30 million in funding to expand its network in smaller cities and towns in the South Asian nation. The all-equity Series D round, led by A91 Partners, values the Noida-based startup at $140 million post-cash.
Intercity travel is accelerating in India as more people migrate from smaller towns to metropolitan cities in search of work and education.
To meet this demand, New Delhi has significantly expanded the country’s road infrastructure. The national road network has increased by more than 60% in the last decade, from 56,723 miles to 90,847 miles, according to Indian government data.
Railways, although extensive, remain limited in capacity and cannot keep pace with the growing demand for interstate travel. This makes long-distance road trips a crucial alternative. However, state intercity bus services are limited and often lack reliability and comfort – a gap IntrCity Smart Bus aims to fill.
Unlike traditional operators, IntrCity SmartBus operates 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 also centralizes ticket booking and route planning through its digital platform, helping determine service frequency, pickup points, boarding stations, and even seat configurations based on demand.
To ensure safety and consistency, IntrCity places trained personnel, called “captains,” aboard each bus, Raizada told TechCrunch. Most vehicles have bathrooms and the company has also installed air-conditioned and crewed departure lounges to enhance the pre-departure experience.
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“All of our buses are connected to the cloud,” he noted. “There is a bus operating system, which we have developed in-house, that monitors and manages many parameters, including CCTV, sound and temperature levels.”
Founded in 2019, IntrCity SmartBus started as an online train ticketing platform under the brand name RailYatri. That entry point gave the team early information about intercity travel behavior and unmet demand in road mobility, Raizada said.
Today, RailYatri contributes only around 10% of the startup’s total revenue, while the SmartBus business accounts for the remaining 90%, he added.
IntrCity SmartBus operates around 600 bus trips daily, transporting between 20,000 and 25,000 passengers each day, almost 700,000 per month. The platform works with more than 50 local bus operators and runs trips averaging more than 311 miles each. Approximately 95% of its services are overnight and primarily serve non-discretionary travel needs, such as work, education or essential appointments.
The startup’s typical riders are between 20 and 45 years old, including small business owners, trainers, government officials, sales professionals and students.
The startup follows a hub and spoke model and has identified 15 to 16 key economic hubs across India. It operates in 13 or 14 of these centers, spanning 15 states. The network covers all of northern India (from Jammu to Uttarakhand) and much of the south, including Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh.
“It requires a lot of data analysis to understand what the consumer needs,” said Manish Rathi, co-founder and CEO of IntrCity SmartBus. “This includes decisions like what type of layout a bus should have: should it be one with a full bed or a hybrid with bunk beds and seats?”
IntrCity SmartBus grew its revenue 67% year-on-year to Rs 5 billion (approximately $57 million) in the last fiscal year. The startup projects revenue to exceed Rs 7 billion (around $79 million) in the current 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 wider in the country and improve customer experience and safety, as well as upgrade its fleet management technology.
“One of the biggest challenges in bus mobility across the country is that people worry about buses. It’s considered a younger cousin to trains and flights,” Raizada told TechCrunch. “We want to make buses the preferred mode of transportation in India.”
More than 223 million intercity trips were made in India in fiscal year 2025, according to a recent report through the RedBus online bus ticket sales platform. The sector added more than 72,000 new intercity routes last year, along with approximately 6,400 new buses, expanding capacity by approximately 265,000 seats daily.
Apart from IntrCity SmartBus, India is seeing a wave of new-age intercity bus startups such as ZingBus, LeafyBus and FreshBus. The European giant FlixBus also entered the Indian market early last year, indicating growing traction in the space. Still, IntrCity views competition as secondary to execution.
“India is a very different beast when it comes to road trips. If something is going to go wrong, it will go wrong,” Rathi said. “We are not a network-first company. We are an operational excellence-first company.”
