Busbud raises $11 million Series C

Montreal-based Busbud announced an $11.2 million Series C round led by the Canadian Business Growth Fund (CBGF) and Investissement Québec (IQ). New investors also include Export Development Canada (EDC), BDC Capital and Singapore-based K3 Ventures, along with current investors Inovia, Plaza Ventures, and Claridge increasing their investment.

Founded in 2011, Busbud (a team of 58) offers an online destination for global travelers to shop for and book intercity bus tickets on over 2.3 million bus routes worldwide. It has raised a total of $32 million since its inception in 2011.

Earlier this year, Busbud recruited two seasoned executives to its leadership team: Andrew Boch as COO, who was previously COO at Hopper and Boston based LevelUp (acquired by GrubHub), and Richard Cohene as CMO, who was at Facebook and brings to Busbud 15 years of experience in digital marketing.

“We believe that Busbud’s leadership team possesses the skills and experience to execute on their vision to continue to grow the leading global bus travel aggregator and booking provider. We are proud to partner with LP, and have Busbud as our first investment in Quebec and hope to do more in the province.” – CBGF CEO George Rossolatos.

“This is a fantastic development for the company. This is obviously a challenging macro environment for the travel industry, but this fundraising shows the resilience of the leadership team and the continued high-growth potential of the business. Busbud’s engineering team has been heads down building an exciting pipeline of new product features in the past 5 months. We’ve backed the company since day one, and we are thrilled for this next chapter.” – Partner at Inovia, Magaly Charbonneau.

“We continue full speed ahead on our quest to make sense of this huge and fragmented intercity bus travel market, which boasts more passengers than air travel, while being widely overlooked by the travel industry. We’ve built deep expertise integrating with bus back-end systems around the world. Working together with our bus industry partners, we believe we can keep translating this expertise into a delightful experience for bus travelers worldwide.” – CEO & cofounder LP Maurice.