French carpooling company BlaBlaCar has acquired Ukrainian tech firm Octobus that develops software for bus operators to manage their finances and ticket sales.
While the companies have not disclosed the price of the acquisition, the news about it came after BlaBlaCar had announced a new $115 million funding round led by Swedish investor VNV Global.
With Octobus, bus carriers could sell tickets online, analyze their sales and create mobile apps for drivers to keep track of passenger traffic. BlaBlaCar said that it acquired Octobus to make most of Ukraine’s obsolete bus services more digital.
Although BlaBlaCar is mostly known as a car-sharing service, it also allows to buy tickets for bus operators in Ukraine and abroad after it purchased and merged with French booking website Ouibus and Busfor, the largest aggregator of bus routes in post-Soviet countries, including Ukraine.
BlaBlaCar’s chief executive Nicolas Brusson said that the purchase of Ukrainian Octobus “consolidates the company’s tech stack in the region.”
“The Ukrainian bus market has a huge potential,” said Aleksey Lazorenko, BlaBlaCar country manager in Ukraine. “It has hundreds of bus operators.”
People in Ukraine usually book tickets by phone or buy them on the spot. Those who arrive at a bus station earlier get the best seats, others have to book them in advance for an additional fee. Octobus and BlaBlaCar want to automate these processes to make local bus operators more competitive and profitable.
Employees of the Ukrainian branch of car-sharing platform BlaBlaCar pose for a photo with the executives of Octobus, a Ukrainian tech firm that develops software for bus operators. On April 21, BlaBlaCar announced that it has acquired Octobus. The companies haven’t disclosed the price of the acquisition.
BlaBlaCar’s revenues took a hit during last year’s COVID-19 lockdowns. However, it wasn’t as bad for BlaBlaCar as for trains or buses that are less flexible, Brusson said.
Today BlaBlaCar has 90 million users in 22 countries, including seven million in Ukraine.
The French car-sharing service entered Ukraine in 2014 and the demand for it has been increasing steadily over the years. Ukrainians heavily rely on BlaBlaCar as an alternative to expensive train tickets or to owning a private car, Lazorenko said in the interview with the Kyiv Post on March 11.
