Crowd sourced train travel info service RailYatri has raised an undisclosed amount of funding led by Helion Venture Partners, along with Omidyar Network and existing investors Blume Ventures and Ujama Ventures. The company said that the funds will be used “to reach out to every train traveler in India and consolidate its product leadership in the domain. Following this deal, Helion Venture Partners’ Rahul Chandra will join the RailYatri board.
The company had earlier raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding from the early stage investor Blume Ventures and an unnamed existing US-based investor, in February last year. RailYatri currently claims to have over 1 million users, of which about 70% or 700,000 are monthly active users.
Last month, it launched a new trip sharing feature on its app that allows train travellers to share their location live with friends, while on the train. Additionally, users can access the progress of train in real-time as well as use the app to find the train status. The app also calculates the expected arrival time, distance left or delays to the destination.
RailYatri Insights: In March this year, the company had introduced a new feature called RailYatri Insights, which allows travelers to find out state of mobile network coverage on the route they’re traveling, delay patterns of a train at the station they’re boarding from, top 5 stations most passengers are likely to off-board on a train, most frequently visited cities from a particular station and city railway network coverage. The company claimed that this tool provides insights based on train traveler data collected from more than 50 million travelers over the past few years, across 8000 train stations and over 2000 train routes. This tool is also available on RailYatri’s Android app.
RaiYatri had also introduced a new fog alerts feature on its application that allows passengers to check probability of train delays due to fog. The app also added a GPS locator, which tells the travelers their exact location, along with the estimated time of arrival at upcoming stations. The platform had previously relaunched its Rail Radar application in 2013.
