More than 22 million passengers use the Indian Railways. Having a 67,956 km route network, it’s the fourth largest railway network in the world, it is also probably one of the most awkward to use. From booking a ticket to finding a good meal was difficult back then. This was when the emergence of startups gave rise. Startups are targeting these 22 million passengers by using technology to meet up their needs and make train journeys enjoyable.
A striking number of startups and IT engineers, began taking interest in finding solutions for the challenges faced by Indian Railways. There had been many problems that were unable to be solved for decades. Years back, the Indian startup ecosystem began noticing the common limitations and the possible business opportunities the Railways can produce. Later, there have been a lot of startups which have come and gone. But some had hit the board.
Some of the successful startups are listed below
Railyatri
Railyatri was founded by Manish Rathi, Sachin Saxena and Kapil Raizada in 2011. It is a crowdsourced platform for train travel associated services. It provides essential information on reservation status, train status, seat availability, disruptions, amenities, etc. In addition, it delivers services like book meals on the go and taxi bookings. Recently, it claims to help almost 2 Million users per month and covers about 4,000 stations.
Funding: Railyatri raised $486K from Blume Ventures in November 2014. After that it had raised pre series A funding from Omidyar Networks and Helion Venture Partners, in June 2015. And again, in April 2016, it raised an undisclosed amount of funding from Helion Venture Partners, Nandan Nilekani, Omidyar Networks, and Blume Ventures.
Confirmtkt
Confirmtkt was founded in 2014 by Dinesh Kumar and Sripad Vaidya. It is a PNR predictor that uses a proprietary algorithm to predict your possibility of confirming a ticket. It also serves in finding trains and alternative travel options. It serves nearly 50K daily users, with over 8 lakh app downloads.
Funding: in 2016, it had raised $250K in seed round of funding from Venture Catalysts and others. In July 2015, it had raised angel funding from Pravin Agarwala and other notable investors.
Trainman
Trainman was developed by Mohammad Amir in 2010, a similar startup working in this space. It serves as a search engine for the regular train and stations.in addition to that, it also has a PNR prediction feature.
Ticket Jugaad
Ticket Jugaad is developed by IIT Kharagpur student Runal Jaju and his cousin Subham Baldava (NIT Jamshedpur alumnus). It is an app that helps travelers who are waitlisted to find tickets on trains using IRCTC’s shortcoming of not showing station-based ticket quota. This app has around 2 lakh downloads within a few months of launch.
Keeping aside these startups, travel search engines like MakeMyTrip, Ixigo, etc. also serve the regular train search and ticket booking services.
Some of the local transport app
M-Indicator
m-Indicator was developed in 2010 by Sachin Teke, an engineer from VJTI. ‘m’ stands for Mumbai. The app, functioned under the company Mobond, delivers vast information on Mumbai local transport that covers Metro Railway, local trains and Monorail. The app is found to be used by more than 1 crore people, which is remarkable.
Transitpedia
Transitpedia was founded in 2013 by Mehul Sutariya and Vaibhav Vasa. It is operating in Mumbai, Delhi, Pune, Hyderabad and Bangalore, the app provides time tables and real-time information on local trains (apart from other local transport systems).
Ridlr
In 2009, Brijraj Vaghani and Ravi Khemani founded Birds Eye Systems. It started Ridlr to provide live information about local train, bus, metro and monorail schedules. It details diversions, blocks, delays and cancellations when suggesting any mode of transport to you. It also provides ticketing service on the app. Three rounds of funding were raised by the company, once from Indian Angel Network and CIIE, second time from Matrix Partners India and then from Qualcomm Ventures.
Social Networking App
OMitra
OMitra was founded in 2014 by Vikas Jagetiya. It is incubated at IIIT Hyderabad. This is a social app for railway passengers. With this app, fellow co-passengers can connect and socialise and even ask for seat exchanges with each other. In addition to that passengers can set alarms and reminders during their journey, order food, track trains, register complaints, etc.
The government-backed apps
UTS on Mobile
UTS on mobile is an official Indian Railways Android app to book unreserved train tickets. It also serves passengers to travel paperless.
NTES
The National Train Enquiry System Android app serves multiple supports like live stations, spotting trains, schedules, cancelled trains, etc.