IntrCity SmartBus, a tech-enabled intercity bus platform in India, has raised $30 million in funding to expand its network to smaller cities and towns in the South Asian nation. The full Series D round, led by A91 Partners, values the Noida-based startup at $140 million post-money.
Long-distance travel is accelerating in India as more people migrate from smaller towns to metropolitan 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 over 60% in the past decade, from 56,723 miles to 90,847 miles, according to Indian government data.
Railroads, while extensive, remain limited in capacity and cannot keep up with the growing demand for interstate travel. This makes long-distance road trips a crucial alternative. However, state-run intercity bus services are limited and often lack reliability and comfort – a gap IntrCity SmartBus aims to fill.
Unlike traditional companies, IntrCity SmartBus operates on an asset-light model by partnering with local bus owners and equipping their vehicles with proprietary hardware for real-time monitoring, co-founder and president Kapil Raizada said in an interview.
The startup also centralizes ticket booking 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 each bus, Raizada told TechCrunch. Most vehicles have toilets and the company has also created air-conditioned boarding lounges with crew to enhance the pre-departure experience.
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“All our buses are connected to the cloud,” he noted. “There is a bus operating system, which we have built in-house, which 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 RailYatri brand. This entry point gave the team early insights into long-distance travel behavior and unmet demand in road mobility, Raizada said.
Today, RailYatri contributes just 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 routes, carrying between 20,000 and 25,000 passengers each day — nearly 700,000 per month. The platform works with more than 50 local bus operators and runs journeys averaging over 311 miles each. Around 95% of its services are overnight, mainly catering for non-discretionary travel needs such as work, education or essential appointments.
The startup’s typical passengers are between 20 and 45 years old, including small business owners, educators, government officials, sales professionals and students.
The startup follows a hub-and-spoke model and has identified 15 to 16 key financial hubs across India. It operates in 13 to 14 of these hubs, across 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 collision leads to understanding what the consumer needs,” said Manish Rathi, co-founder and CEO of IntrCity SmartBus. “That includes decisions like what kind of layout a bus should have — should it be a full bed or a hybrid with two beds and seats?”
IntrCity SmartBus grew its revenue by 67% year-on-year to ₹5 billion (about $57 million) in its last financial year. The startup projects revenue to exceed ₹7 billion (about $79 million) this year. It has been “EBITDA positive” for the past two years and aims to become fully profitable this year.
With the latest funding, the startup plans to go “deeper and deeper” into 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 are worried about buses. It’s seen as a smaller cousin to trains and flights,” Raizada told TechCrunch. “We want to make buses the preferred mode of travel in India.”
More than 223 million long-distance trips were made in India in the financial year 2025, according to recent report through the RedBus online bus ticketing platform. The sector added over 72,000 new long-distance routes last year, along with around 6,400 new buses — expanding capacity by around 265,000 daily seats.
Alongside IntrCity SmartBus, India is seeing a wave of intercity bus start-ups such as ZingBus, LeafyBus and FreshBus. European giant FlixBus as well entered the Indian market early last year, signaling the growing attraction to space. However, IntrCity sees competition as secondary to execution.
“India is a very different beast when it comes to road trips. If something goes wrong, it will go wrong,” Rathi said. “We’re not a network-first company. We’re an operational excellence-first company.”
