Formerly known as Magic Bus, BuuPass has quickly grown into a startup making major strides, partly thanks to a $1 million cash prize they won from Hult Prize but mostly, the success can be attributed to the kind of partnerships they have been able to form the two years the startup has been in existence.

So far, the Nairobi-based startup offers ticket booking services for Easy Coach and something that I learnt when I met up with the founding team, Sonia Kabra and Wyclife Omondi, BuuPass is also behind Kenya’s SGR online ticketing platform.

Oh yes, we did ask why the SGR online booking platform sucks and BuuPass says that they have been working on a number of improvements, including changing ticket details, refunds and removing the requirement to print tickets, however, they say that since it is a government project, changes take time, so we should expect new developements early next year.

“We are a transportation solutions provider and right now, tech is the means to provide that,” explains Sonia as she introduces BuuPass to me. Back in the day when BuuPass was known as Magic Bus, their pitch was based on taming the matatu industry through the introduction of a ticketing system that would allow commuters to pre-book seats and travel times, however, the team had to change tact after they realized that the current chaos in the matatu industry, run deeper than they were willing to swim.

“We put that project on pause and decided to focus on the low hanging fruit, which is more organized, that is the long-distance booking,” says Sonia. Through that transformation, the company became BuuPass with the vision to provide a seamless service to commuters. “We envision BuuPass to be a marketplace for booking tickets, for now, we have the long-distance buses, we have the SGR and we are also exploring airlines, said Wyclife. “Our vision is to provide seamless movement for people… In terms of booking, we have the online platform and USSD platform,” he added.

As part of their growth strategy, BuuPass has already partnered with Waterbus, a ferry moving people across Lake Victoria, to allow commuters pay for tickets through their phones, but this does not beat the fact that the startup is behind the biggest convenience of this year, booking SGR tickets online. BuuPass provides the online ticketing platform for SGR in partnership with Safaricom. Safaricom provides the hosting and security for the platform as well as a payments platform through M-Pesa….

Content retrieved from: https://techweez.com/2018/10/22/buupass-api-partnerships/#:~:text=Taking%20Advantage%20of%20APIs&text=BuuPass%20have%20integrated%20a%20number,our%20platform%2C%E2%80%9D%20add%20Wyclife..