It’s Tuesday, and today we’re covering BuuPass, a Kenyan company digitizing intercity travel booking. It was founded by Sonia Kabra and Wyclife Omondi. The company’s recent investment round was led by Yango Ventures, with previous backers including FrontEnd Ventures, Google for Startups, 54 Collective, Ajim Capital, Five35 Ventures, Renew Capital, Nairobi Business Angel Network, and Fresco Capital.

Comparing many things between the developed and developing world is tricky for two reasons. First, things just work differently in the developing world. And second, it’s often hard to back that up with data.

That’s certainly true when it comes to Kenya and intercity transportation.

Great question — and one we don’t really have a clear answer to. What we do know is that, when it comes to traveling between cities, there aren’t many options to choose from.

It’s unlikely it’ll be a car. Car ownership in Kenya is tiny: just 62 vehicles per 1,000 people. For perspective, Bulgaria — one of Europe’s poorest countries — has 466.

It’s also unlikely that it’ll be a plane. Domestic air travel in Kenya totaled 5.32 million passengers last year. In Mexico, a country roughly twice Kenya’s size, the number was 118.8 million — or 23x higher. Yes, international passengers are included in both figures, but still.

Finally, it’s hard to get anywhere by train. Kenya has just 3,383 km of rail. Spain — a similarly sized country — has over 16,000 km. Even India, which also faces development challenges, has 135,207 km.

That pretty much leaves just one option: the bus.

There’s no official data on how many intercity bus trips happen in Kenya.

However.

BuuPass cites a study by Safaricom (parent company of M-PESA) estimating that Kenyans purchase around 300,000 long-distance bus tickets every day. That adds up to 109.5 million per year. For comparison, the U.S. sees 50 million intercity bus trips annually.

I won’t bore you with the math (you can see it here1), but based on a few assumptions, the real number likely falls somewhere between 40 and 110 million trips. Yes, that’s a huge range — but that’s not the point. The point is that even at the low end, Kenya’s intercity bus market is comparable to the U.S., a country six times larger by population, ~18 times larger by land area, and home to one of the world’s most advanced road networks.

While buses are the best option, they’re far from optimized — for anyone involved.

Let’s start with passengers.

The average traveler spends two hours just to buy a ticket in person. That’s time, and money — and in a country where average monthly earnings barely exceed $500, even small expenses add up. Especially since intercity buses are mostly used by less affluent travelers. Delays and general disorganization are also part of the experience. A TikTok video that went viral last year showed angry passengers waiting for hours with no information. In many cases, there's no set price — you have to haggle your way onto the bus. Then there are the touts. With multiple travel companies operating out of the same station, touts roam the crowd trying to steer passengers to one bus or another — for a commission, of course.

Bus operators are also in a tough spot.

Their first problem is just managing passengers. A typical operator runs 30 buses across 20 stops. Assuming each bus has 45 seats, that’s 27,000 potential seat-route combinations to manage. And for years, this was done using pen and paper.Fraud is another issue. Matatus (used for both intra- and intercity travel) lose about 30% of fares to theft — by conductors, drivers, police bribes2 and more. BuuPass claims that operators lose up to $3,000 a day to fraud — and the math more or less lines up with that 30% figure3.

How does BuuPass solve all that?

Let’s start with what BuuPass actually is. The company began by tackling Nairobi’s intracity bus chaos — but quickly realized that each route had its own set of problems, and the market as a whole was wildly fragmented:

So BuuPass pivoted to something more structured: intercity travel.

Today, the company operates three products

The marketplace works like any other ticket aggregator. You choose your destination and date, enter passenger info, pay, and you’re good to go.

But there are two key features that set BuuPass apart.

First, USSD booking. BuuPass lets passengers book tickets via USSD codes — and in the early days, that was the only option. I recently wrote about how clever USSD-based interfaces are in my piece on Winich Farms, so I won’t go on about it again here. But it’s a great fit for a country where smartphone penetration isn’t universal.

Second, it’s not just a bus marketplace. BuuPass actually runs three separate marketplaces: bus, train, and air travel.

They began selling train tickets in 2017 — just a year after launching — after a partnership with Safaricom that led to a collaboration with Kenya Railways. Today, 98% of all train tickets in Kenya are sold through BuuPass.

As for flights, BuuPass doesn’t compete on inventory — they aggregate the same flights you’d find on Expedia. What they do offer, though, is local payment options like M-PESA and Airtel Money — something other global platforms often don’t support4.

While the three marketplaces run on separate websites, they’re bundled into a single app — so you can book a bus, train, or plane ride through one interface.

The BMS helps operators streamline their operations and manage fleets more efficiently. Its core features include:

During the pandemic, when bus services came to a halt, BuuPass introduced a PMS to digitize the manual delivery services many bus operators relied on.

PMS is built as a module within BMS. It allows companies to automate parcel sorting — categorizing shipments by destination, priority, and type. Operators can also send SMS updates to customers, including when the parcel was sent and when it’s expected to arrive. And just like the rest of BMS, there’s real-time parcel tracking and performance analytics to help operators monitor efficiency and improve service.

There are two interesting aspects of BuuPass’s business: how it works on the supply side, and how it grows through expansion abroad.

BuuPass is more like OpenTable than a traditional travel aggregator. It blends a SaaS model with a marketplace model, creating value for operators from both angles.

The software side helps with scheduling, fleet management, and revenue tracking. It brings structure and efficiency to daily operations.

The marketplace side improves access to previously dispersed demand that often couldn’t be captured otherwise. It’s helps operators to make their business sustainable and grow it.

Another way to put it: the software lowers costs (better scheduling, less fraud, fewer intermediaries), while the marketplace increases revenue (more demand captured, better visibility).

On the user side, the marketplace works like any other aggregator. But it’s worth emphasizing that the pain being solved here is much greater than what travelers in the West are used to. Spending hours to buy a ticket — and maybe getting scammed in the process — isn’t exactly what you'd call a great customer experience.

So far, we’ve mostly talked about Kenya. But BuuPass is already operating in Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, and South Africa — with 30% of revenue coming from outside Kenya. Despite being lean (just 54 employees as of early 2025), they’re managing to run operations in five countries.

BuuPass’s expansion strategy is unusually deliberate. As co-founder Wyclife Omondi explains:

And scaling with your supply is a beautiful strategy because it means you don’t have to acquire supply in a new market — you only have to find demand. Moreover, half of the demand, i.e., those going from Kenya, has already been acquired.

BuuPass generates revenue through commissions on ticket sales and its B2B services, though the B2C side contributes more.

Beyond traditional competitors getting stronger, ticket booking is arguably one of the easiest purchasing experiences AI could automate. The big question, of course, is when those solutions will actually reach Kenya and other African countries. But it’s not hard to imagine a future where you just tell Gemini to book your next trip — and that’s it.

There’s also the question of growth limits. What share of the market simply refuses to digitize? In 2023, BuuPass held an 8–10% market share — and it would be interesting to see what the ceiling really is.

But to be honest, without having a deep look inside the business, my conviction in the bear case is pretty low. As long as the company keeps executing well, doesn’t overexpand, and doesn’t get blindsided by some totally new tech — it’s hard to imagine a full collapse.

The bull case is easy. First, continued expansion across Africa. Second, new products.

The company has already mentioned that the data it generates could be valuable to urban planners and others. So monetizing aggregated data is one possible path. Another is advertising — while Africa’s ad market isn’t huge, digital ads are still a great business pretty much anywhere.

There’s also room to expand into new travel modes, move beyond just transport, or offer multi-modal planning — all of which would build naturally on top of the existing platform.

Here’s a thought I had. When comparing different markets, you often come across three types of businesses:

BuuPass falls into that third bucket. It’s an aggregator — but the problems it solves, and the severity of those problems, are completely different from what you’d see in, say, France or Japan.

1: The assumption is based on: 1) In 2022, Kenya had 11,969 buses for long-distance travel (34+ seats; most buses on BuuPass have at least 45 seats), and assuming a 50% load for every trip, and each bus completing 150 round trips a year, with one-way trips taking a full day (so 65 days are idle due to repairs and other factors), that would put the total number of trips at 80.7 million; 2) In 2023, BuuPass mentioned that it sold 12,000 tickets a day, which includes both Kenya and Uganda, but we can safely assume Kenya was the dominant market (say, 90%). That year, their market share was 8–10%, hence the total market was in the 39–49 million range (although I must mention, the 8–10% figure is mentioned in the same piece as the 300,000 tickets sold daily, which is confusing, considering the company’s own sales data).

2: 55% of long-distance drivers report being asked for a bribe by the police.

3: Assuming an average operator has 30 buses with 45 seats, a $13 average fare (based on BuuPass’s pricing), a 50% load, and one trip per bus daily, they would make $8,775 a day — meaning a $3,000 loss amounts to 34%.

4: In the interest of full transparency, I should note that at the time of writing, I couldn’t find any flights available on BuuPass’s marketplace.