Nandan Nilekani invests in RailYatri

Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani has invested an undisclosed amount in train travel app, RailYatri.in.

In addition to the former UIDAI chairman, RailYatri's existing investors Helion Ventures, Omidyar Networks and Blume Ventures have participated in this round, RailYatri said in a statement.

In June last year, it had raised funds led by Helion Venture Partners along with Omidyar Network and existing investors Blume Ventures and Ujama. It did not disclose the sum it had raised. Till date, it has raised about USD 3 million.

"What excites me about RailYatri is the fact that this is a new-age product made by Indians for Indians. The RailYatri app, which intelligently harnesses the power of smartphones, data and mobile payments, has a huge opportunity of impacting the lives of millions of travellers," Nilekani reasoned.

RailYatri.in uses deep-analytics technology to make intelligent predictions that help travelers make decisions for their upcoming travel. The app uses a traveller's mobile GPS to predict a train's delay, in addition to platform number, coach position, on-time history of a train and if the waitlisted ticket will get confirmed.

"We are honoured to have Nandan Nilekani as our investor.

His passion and success in using technology to transform lives for the common man be it in Aadhar project which recently crossed a billion registrations or the recent Unified Payment Interface (UPI) has been truly inspirational," RailYatri.in co-founder Kapil Raizada said.

The Helion Venture Partners-backed app currently serves nearly two million users per month. The feature covers about 4,000 stations and is set to be expanded to 6,000 soon.

Co-founded by Raizada, Manish Rathi and Sachin Saxena in 2014, the app provides information through crowd-sourcing.