It’s actually a pretty great URL: Bus.com. It’s also a much better brand identity than Sharethebus, which is the old name of the company that just raised a $5 million Series A round from Jackson Square Ventures and BMW’s i Ventures investment arm. Bus.com is the destination you’d expect to head to for what the company does, which is organize charter bus trips for festivals, sporting events and shows by teaming up with bus companies with unused inventory.
The Bus.com model includes online rental, GPS tracking of buses so passengers know exactly when they’re arriving, and online ticketing. The founding team, which was a Y Combinator Winter 2016 class graduate, saw an opportunity to update the process of chartering buses for mass transit to one-off events and occasions, including festivals like the Way Home music festival north of Toronto, in Canada, and Sasquatch.
Perviously, charter bus services for this market, which accounts for around $4 billion in annual revenue according to Bus.com, has relied heavily on a network of small operators with around 10 or fewer buses each. These charter operators had no common standards or platform in terms of pricing, service or booking process, leading to a lot of confusion and complexity on the user end of the process, and…