 "YatraGenie.com to raise $25 mn for expansion")
YatraGenie.com, an online bus ticketing and cab booking platform run by Bengaluru-based Paxterra Software Solutions, is in the process of raising $25 million (approximately Rs 158 crore) in a Series-B round of funding to fuel its expansion plans, according to its president and chief executive officer Renil Komitla.
“We are in active negotiations with venture capital firms, eight of which are based out of Silicon Valley. We expect to seal a deal by August this year. We propose to use these funds to hire better talent, add new bouquet of services and expand our platform to multiple languages,” Komitla told Business Standard.
Founded in November 2013, online bus ticketing to start with, YatraGenie had earlier raised $5 million in a Series-A round of funding.
According to Komitla, YatraGenie.com is currently being offered in Telugu, Kannada, Hindi and English, and Paxterra is gearing up to add Marathi, Tamil and Malayalam languages in the next six months, besides launching a mobile app on the Android platform by the end of this month.
“We recently added cab booking services, and are poised to expand our services into hotels and logistics management within a fortnight, and airline ticket booking in three months from now,” he said.
Stating that YatraGenie.com, with a current revenue run rate of Rs 60 crore, is expecting to clock revenues of Rs 150 crore in the financial year 2015-16, Komitla said the company was expecting to operationally break even by March 2017, and become profitable in the following year.