IntrCity SmartBus, a technology-enabled intercity bus platform in India, has raised $30 million in funding to expand its network across smaller towns and cities in the South Asian nation. The all-equity Series D round, led by A91 Partners, values the Noida-based startup at $140 million post-money.
Intercity travel is accelerating in India as more people migrate from smaller towns to big cities for work and education.
To meet this demand, New Delhi has significantly expanded the country’s highway infrastructure. The national highway network has increased by over 60% in the past decade, from 56,723 miles to 90,847 miles, according to Indian government data.
Although extensive, the railways remain capacity-constrained and cannot keep pace with increasing interstate travel demand. This makes long-distance driving a crucial alternative. Yet state-run intercity bus services are limited and often fall short in terms of reliability and comfort – a gap that IntrCity SmartBus aims to fill.
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 also centralizes ticketing and route planning through its digital platform, which helps determine service frequency, pick-up points, boarding stations and even seat configurations based on demand.
To ensure safety and consistency, IntrCity places trained staff — called “captains” — on board each bus, Raizada told TechCrunch. Most vehicles have toilets and the company has also set up air-conditioned boarding lounges manned by crew to enhance the pre-departure experience.
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“All our buses are cloud-connected,” he noted. “There’s a bus operating system that we’ve built in-house that monitors and controls a lot of parameters, including CCTV, sound and temperature levels.”
Founded in 2019, IntrCity SmartBus began as an online train ticketing platform under the RailYatri brand. This entry point gave the team early insight into intercity travel behavior and unmet demand in road-based mobility, Raizada said.
Today, RailYatri contributes only about 10% of the startup’s total revenue, while the SmartBus business accounts for the remaining 90%, he added.
IntrCity SmartBus operates around 600 daily bus trips and transports between 20,000 and 25,000 passengers every day – almost 700,000 a month. The platform works with more than 50 local bus operators and runs trips averaging over 311 miles each. Around 95% of its services are overnight, primarily catering to non-discretionary travel needs such as work, education or important appointments.
The startup’s typical passengers are between the ages of 20 and 45, including small business owners, educators, government officials, salespeople 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 to 14 of these hubs 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.
“A lot of data crunching goes into understanding what the consumer needs,” said Manish Rathi, co-founder and CEO of IntrCity SmartBus. “This includes decisions such as what kind of layout a bus should have – should it be a full sleeper or a hybrid with both sleepers and seats?”
IntrCity SmartBus grew its revenue by 67% year-on-year to 5 billion INR (approx. $57 million) in the last financial year. The startup expects revenue to exceed INR 7 billion (around $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 wider” across the country and improve customer experience and safety, as well as upgrade its fleet management technology.
“One of the bigger challenges in bus mobility across the country is that people have concerns about buses. It’s seen as a smaller cousin to trains and planes,” Raizada told TechCrunch. “We want to make buses the preferred mode of travel in India.”
More than 223 million intercity journeys were made in India in fiscal year 2025, according to a recent report by online bus ticketing platform RedBus. The sector added over 72,000 new intercity routes last year, along with approximately 6,400 new buses – expanding capacity by an estimated 265,000 daily seats.
Alongside IntrCity SmartBus, India is seeing a wave of new-age intercity bus startups like ZingBus, LeafyBus and FreshBus. European giant FlixBus also entered the Indian market early last year, signaling growing traction in the space. Yet IntrCity sees competition as secondary to execution.
“India is a very different beast when it comes to road driving. If something is going to go wrong, it will go wrong,” Rathi said. “We are not a company that is first in the network. We are a company that comes into operation first.”