Bus-share startup DaDaBus announced it raised an angel investment of RMB5 million (approx: US$807, 467) as well as RMB37million (approx: US$6 million) in its Series A financing. The company operates 200 commuter routes in Shenzhen, carrying some 40,000 white-collar workers to and from work.
In answer to white-collar urban commuters’ demand for punctual, uncrowded and inexpensive rides in this big data era, DaDaBus operates a beta model shuttle service leveraging a huge pool of big data of customers’ needs and smart-matching users with routes. It also uses a dynamic scheduling method to satisfy user location and time requirements and deploy buses accordingly, according to DaDaBus’s CEO Ruijin Zhou.
In practice, users make booking to reserve a seat and DaDaBus charges each passenger RMB0.4 per kilometer on average, which is comparable to the subway fare. Its services manage to shorten travel time by approximately two-thirds of regular buses thanks to optimization of routes and pickup/drop-off points, and utilization of bus lanes.
It took only 10 days for DadaBus to complete and upload its passenger interface, driver app and wechat platform. Since March, it has been adding 30 routes to its network per week.
DaDaBus also set up the DaDaBus Institute and has trained more than 100 bus drivers so far. After securing its position in the Shenzhen market, Mr. Zhou intends to expand his company to the six major cities of Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Hangzhou, Chengdu and Chongqing.
Mr. Zhou is a “serial” entrepreneur known for recruiting 40 million users in a zero-cost marketing campaign for the woman’s cosmetics and fashion online community when he was CMO of Meilapp. His partner and cofounder Ziquan Wang is the youngest transportation expert in China and president of the long-distance bus line service New Express Group. Operations director Jinling Jiang was former assistant director and chief accountant at Zhongnan Group and has rich experience in the consolidation of offline resources. (Translation by David)
