Most of us reading this, me included, would have spent a considerable portion of our teenage years bus-hopping... be it for school, college or even to work. Ola and Uber was a true technological marvel because you knew exactly when your cab was going to show up at your doorstep. Privileged urban Indians were the first beneficiaries of ride-share apps, which have now made their way to Tier 2/3 cities and towns as well. Soon, the ease of booking travel tickets and charting out an itinerary was made very easy for air travel, intercity bus travel and even train journeys. 

But the buses that ferried folks like you and me to and fro college and school, still amble along everyday aided by antiquated systems. Bus drivers may have routes memorised to the tee, but even that doesn't spare them or passengers from traffic snarls during rush hour. Ticket conductors still jostle through passengers, dispensing small white or pink ticket stubs that have rows of unintelligible numbers and figures scrawled on them as they haggle passengers for spare change. Bus stops are always crowded and its anybody's guess when a bus will actually show up. Yet, buses remain one of the most widely used modes of public transport in India - Indians spend $83bn annually on shared daily commute – of these buses (before COVID) were 48% of rides, accounting for 43% of revenue or $35.5bn.

Vinayak Bhavnani, Mohit Dubey, Priya Singh Dubey and Dhruv Chopra wanted to change all of this, and make the intercity bus experience digitised, comfortable and easy for Indians. They started Chalo (previously known as Zophop), a public transport management startup in Mumbai in 2014. Bhavnani says, "There's been a lot of activity in the mobility space in the past decade, but if you really want to address urban mobility, selling cars isn't the answer. Less than 5% of Indians have access and means to buy cars, so I don't see the point of over-servicing this space. Instead, I wanted to focus on improving existing public transport with technologies. One of our earliest ideas was building a multi-modal trip planner that can provide suggestions to users on the best mode of public transport. This is when we realised bus transport in India could use a rejig."

One of the first tech stacks the Chalo team developed was on live tracking - a monumentally challenging aspect of bus transport in India. This helps passengers plan their trips efficiently. The ETA algorithms provide passengers information on the bus route and time of arrival. Soon after, the team went on to introduce digital payments through the Chalo app, and more recently introduced the NFC-based touch-to-pay Chalo Card that works as an integrated solution for passengers to buy tickets, make payments or use a QR code to travel. For conductors, they provided PoS machines that had a long battery life, high transaction volume ability and structurally sound to withstand tough environments. The team essentially works with transport operators to integrate all elements - GPS tracking on the bus to software solutions on the cloud and mobile applications for the users, end-to-end. 

There was a certain novelty to these applications in bus transport, especially since there was no concrete data available even with govt-backed operators like BEST in Maharashtra and BMTC in Karnataka. The availability of any hard data was even lesser in other cities, which were dominated by a clutch of private transport operators. "We were aggregating and cultivating data as we built our solutions. This allowed to understand the actual challenges that exist in the sector, and how technology can specifically address them." Through their interactions with transport operators, Bhavnani and his team learnt that poor user experience, pilferage and complex, unpredictable schedules were some of the reasons bus transport wasn't as profitable as it could be. "In a city like Bangalore, single bus collection is around Rs. 6500 when it can be around Rs. 15,000. Towns like Coimbatore, Mangalore and Kochi have the potential to make Rs. 18,000 a day per bus but are nowhere close. This is where we could bring about a tangible increase in revenue for transport operators by using our technology solutions." In addition to developing ETA algorithms, live tracking and extensive data-driven prediction engines, Chalo also introduced a Seat Availability Feature last year that would indicate how many seats the bus had during a trip. This was done after installing cameras onboard buses that helped provide data on seat availability and also enabled easier and accurate audits of bus journeys. Bhavnani added that they're working on people counting during rush hour and non-rush hour, improving the accuracy of the ETA algorithms (which is already at an industry-best of 30 seconds or less) and improving scheduling - using AI and related technologies more effectively. Moreover, AI also helps the team understand the baseline of every city, and detect specific challenges faced in varying areas, allowing the team to provide targeted interventions. 

Unlike urbane Indians for whom mobile phones are an extension of their daily lives, Chalo was primarily dealing with that strata of society that was inherently skeptical of technology and certainly wasn't in favour of excessive use of technology on the job. It was imperative to get the buy-in of transport operators, who ended up becoming their advocates once they saw the value proposition Chalo was offering - ease of the daily grind on the bus complemented with substantial revenue markup. A 10-15 day pilot on a bus route, followed with an increase in earnings and ease of the job, lead to long-term contracts. Chalo is already present in 23 cities and works with many state transportation divisions such as WBTC Kolkata, DTC Delhi, KSRTC Kerela, TNSTC Tamil Nadu, ASTC Assam, AMTS Ahmedabad, KMRL Kochi, AICTSL Indore, BCLL Bhopal, JCTSL Jabalpur, SMC Surat, LCTSL Lucknow, NMC Nagpur, BSRTC Patna, KCTSL Kanpur, ACTSL Prayagraj, JCTSL Jaipur, APSRTC Vijayawada, UCTSL Ujjain and AMCTSL Agra-Mathura.

In January, the startup raised $7 million from existing investors Raine Ventures, WhatsApp’s Neeraj Arora, and former Google Search executive Amit Singhal. Family offices of Dabur’s Saket Burman and Triveni Group's Tarun Sawhney also participated in the round. This brings their total funding to $30 million, which the team is planning to use to expand their presence into other Indian cities and enhance their digital ticketing offerings to existing users.