BuuPass started by selling bus tickets. Then it built the infrastructure.

In 2025, BuuPass sold more than 30 million travel tickets and processed over $100 million in transactions, a scale that would have been unimaginable for what began as a small Kenyan travel booking startup.

The transportation booking company now operates in five African countries, sells software to transport operators, distributes bus tickets through banks and telcos, and runs a corporate travel platform. None of that was in the original idea: put Wi-Fi on solar-powered buses.

Sonia Kabra, Wyclife Omondi, Iman Cooper, and Leslie Ossete were students at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, when they came up with it: a solar-powered bus with Wi-Fi that would double as an internet café when parked. They entered it in the campus qualifier for the Hult Prize, a global student competition that awards funding to businesses tackling social problems, in November 2015, but lost.

“One judge pointed out that even a million dollars would buy only a small fleet,” Kabra, co-CEO alongside Omondi, told TechCabal in an interview.

The team went back to the drawing board and returned with Magic Bus, a phone-based booking service for matatus, the privately operated minibuses that carry passengers along routes across Kenya. It used vehicles already on the road instead of adding new ones. Magic Bus won the Hult Prize in September 2016, earning the founders $1 million. BuuPass was incorporated the same year.

“The money from the Hult Prize went into finding and building the first repeatable business: product development, our early phone-based booking service, a small team, and the practical work of getting operators and passengers using it,” Kabra said.

The BuuPass team celebrates winning the $1 million Hult Prize in 2016 alongside former US President Bill Clinton. Image: BuuPass.

The Hult Prize gave BuuPass money and attention, but the pilot also exposed a problem with the matatu model. Passengers wanted to book seats in advance, while owners, drivers, and conductors weren’t working toward the same goal or using the same systems to manage bookings.

BuuPass expanded into intercity travel in early 2017, focusing on the Nairobi–Mombasa corridor and routes into western Kenya, where passengers had a clearer reason to reserve seats, and the company could work directly with established bus operators. Easy Coach, one of Kenya’s major long-distance bus companies, became its first operator client, Kabra said.

Working with Easy Coach showed BuuPass how bus companies actually ran. Much of the seat inventory it wanted to sell online was still recorded on paper, and operators sold through several booking offices with no clear view of how many tickets had gone or how much money had come in.

The problem was bigger than putting tickets online. BuuPass was trying to build a digital marketplace on top of a supply chain that was still managed by hand.

**Beyond ticketing **

BuuPass’s most consequential change came when it stopped treating operators as seat suppliers, but rather as customers.

In a January 2026 LinkedIn post, Kabra recalled one operator running 30 buses losing money between the stations and the office because cash was taken before it was recorded, errors were manual, and tracking was poor.

BuuPass initially pitched the company on selling more tickets, but the operator’s problem wasn’t a shortage of demand; it was money leaking through the business. The experience pushed the company to build the operator software that became central to its business.

“Growth slowed when our pitch was simply that we could bring operators more ticket sales,” Kabra said. “More demand did not solve cash leakage or poor records.”

BuuPass offices in Nairobi, Kenya. Image: TechCabal.

BuuPass began building software that covered digital ticketing, point-of-sale, inventory and reporting. The product addressed an operator problem while also solving one of BuuPass’s own problems: creating digital inventory that could reliably be sold online.

Once seats were digitised, BuuPass could sell the same inventory through its own marketplace and other distribution channels, giving operators access to more customers without managing each sales channel separately.

The software gave the company a closer relationship with the supply side while creating the digital inventory its marketplace needed. It also gave BuuPass another way to make money from the same operator relationship: software and service fees alongside marketplace commissions.

BuuPass’s software fits into the operator’s daily workflow rather than limiting the relationship to individual ticket sales. One integration could also support several sales channels, including BuuPass’s marketplace and distribution partnerships with companies such as M-PESA, Vodacom and MTN.

Building the operator software took a lot of time. BuuPass had to onboard operators, train their staff, and work around booking processes that were still largely manual, as it moved from selling tickets to becoming part of how transport companies managed their businesses.

“The attraction is that the investment can support years of transactions and additional products,” Kabra said.

The COVID-19 test

The COVID-19 pandemic hit just as BuuPass was preparing for another funding round. The company entered 2020 after a year of growth, expanding from about five people in its early days to 19 employees. Then Kenya’s movement restrictions brought passenger travel to a near standstill, abruptly cutting off the market BuuPass depended on.

Transport and storage output fell 5.2% to KES 1.97 trillion ($15.2 billion) in 2020, according to the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics (KNBS), while commercial air passenger traffic dropped 62.5% and passenger numbers on the metre-gauge railway fell by more than half.

BuuPass responded the way most companies did. It cut costs, moved the team fully remote, and reduced salaries, starting with its founders, Kabra said. The company did not disclose how many employees it temporarily laid off, though most later returned as restrictions eased.

The pandemic also forced BuuPass to find another use for its network of bus operators. Passenger travel had stalled, but goods still had to move. The company built a parcel management product that let its existing operator partners handle deliveries, giving BuuPass a second revenue stream without building its own new supply network.

“We followed our operators into parcels,” Kabra recalled. “It gave us another source of revenue and became a lasting part of the business.”

BuuPass reached break-even around 2021, meaning revenue covered operating costs. The company then raised $100,000 in a pre-seed round from undisclosed investors in August 2022, followed by $100,000 in non-equity investment from Google for Startups in September 2022.

“The lesson was to understand what made the economics work and what happened to them when we chose to invest more. That knowledge is essential to making growth decisions with discipline,” Kabra said.

**The cost of survival **

BuuPass has built everything with modest capital. Crunchbase puts its total disclosed funding at $2.5 million across seven rounds. The $1 million Hult Prize and a KES 162.8 million ($1.2 million) pre-seed round in 2023 account for most of it, leaving roughly $300,000 in conventional venture money across the other five.

The company’s funding history shows why headline totals need some context. Its largest disclosed early award came before it found its current business model, while later capital came as the company expanded its operator software and marketplace model.

Kabra said customer revenue played an important role between major funding rounds. Commercial relationships with Easy Coach, Kenya Railways and Safaricom helped sustain the business, while angels and venture investors later provided capital for expansion.

In BuuPass’s early years, one of its four co-founders misappropriated more than a few hundred thousand dollars in company funds. BuuPass did not disclose the co-founder’s name or when the incident occurred. The co-founder later left the company, while another co-founder left on good terms.

Wycliffe Omondi and Sonia Kabra, BuuPass co-founders in a press photo. Image: BuuPass.

Kabra and Omondi paused operations, involved legal and civil authorities, and tightened financial controls as they worked to rebuild investor trust. Kabra said the experience changed how she would approach an early-stage company, establishing financial accountability from the start and tying larger spending more closely to evidence that a particular investment was working.

“It was a difficult lesson in putting oversight in place early,” she said.

The experience also changed how Kabra approached spending at BuuPass, with stronger financial controls, more testing of customer needs before committing capital, and tying larger investments to evidence that they were working.

The controls became more important as BuuPass grew into a transaction business. The company was handling more money on behalf of operators and suppliers, making it critical to distinguish the value of tickets sold from the revenue BuuPass actually earned. It also had to track what it retained after costs and what it owed to operators and other suppliers.

The big pivot and next test

The biggest change in BuuPass’s decade is not the number of products it has added, but where the company now sits in the transport chain.

The original idea was consumer-facing, as the company wanted to help people connect to buses and matatus. The current business reaches deeper into the operator side, where BuuPass provides software, manages inventory, and uses those relationships to distribute travel products through different channels.

In 2024, BuuPass acquired QuickBus, a bus ticketing platform operating in Nigeria and South Africa, in an undisclosed cash-and-stock deal. The deal also gave the company a foothold in another market as it moved beyond ticketing into the wider business of running travel transactions. By April 2026, it said it had sold more than 30 million tickets and processed more than $100 million in travel transactions in 2025.

In April, BuuPass launched Gavanpass, a corporate travel platform targeting companies that still manage business trips through calls, emails and messaging apps. It brings bookings, approvals, travel policies and spending into one system. The company told TechCabal at the time that more than 20 Kenyan enterprises were already using the platform at launch.

BuuPass kept finding new problems as it expanded deeper into the transport business. It started by trying to sell seats, then built tools for operators when it became clear that better ticketing depended on better records and inventory.

Kabra said the decision to build for operators came closest to determining whether BuuPass would still exist in 2026.

“I would choose the decision to solve the operator’s back-office problem,” she said. “Building for operators took us deeper into the industry and addressed the constraint that was holding the marketplace back.”

BuuPass now plans to add AI to parts of its travel infrastructure, including demand forecasting, conversational booking, operator insights and rules-based pricing.

The more interesting part of the strategy is not the AI itself, but the infrastructure underneath it. A system can recommend a journey, but someone still needs to have a seat available, collect the payment and complete the booking.

BuuPass has spent years building relationships with operators, digitising inventory and connecting travel supply to different distribution channels. The company now wants to make those connections available regardless of where the transaction starts, whether through its own marketplace, a bank, a corporate travel platform or an AI assistant.

BuuPass’s story does not offer a simple formula for surviving 10 years. Kabra rejects the idea that surviving startups necessarily made better decisions than those that closed, pointing to the roles employees, customers, investors, and circumstances outside a founder’s control played.

“What helped us was staying close enough to customers to change when their needs or the evidence changed. We kept learning how to turn that customer value into revenue, and how to reach more people through partnerships. Those habits have supported both resilience and growth,” she said.

The decision to build for operators came closest to determining whether BuuPass would still exist in 2026.

“I would choose the decision to solve the operator’s back-office problem,” Kabra said. “Building for operators took us deeper into the industry and addressed the constraint that was holding the marketplace back.”