Diversified conglomerate Essel Group has agreed to provide Rs 3bn ($43.7m) of series B funding for India-based bus service operator ZipGo, VCCircle has reported.
Founded in 2015, ZipGo runs an online platform where individual customers and corporate clients can book seats on shuttle buses for short urban trips in the cities of Bengaluru, Mumbai, Delhi-NCR, Hyderabad and Jaipur, as well as longer intercity journeys.
The investment is being made by Essel Green Mobility, a unit overseen by Essel Infraprojects, Essel’s infrastructure services division. It has already put up the first Rs 2bn and the remainder will be supplied in the upcoming months.
ZipGo is spending the first tranche of the round on expanding the number of bus routes on its app and converting to an all-electric fleet, while the rest has been earmarked for the addition of electric rickshaws to the company’s offering.
Pritesh Gupta, co-founder and chief operating officer of ZipGo, said: “With this investment, we will also be able to go beyond tier one and tier two cities and start operations in smaller cities such as Udaipur, Indore, Bhubaneswar, Mangalore, Tirupati and Visakhapatnam among others.”
Orios Venture Partners led a $3m seed round for ZipGo in 2015, before the company secured $5.2m in an April 2017 series A co-led by Omidyar Network and VenturEast Advisors that included various unnamed existing backers.