Wyclife Omondi and Sonia Kabra were undergraduates at Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana when they came up with BuuPass. Wyclife was studying economics and Sonia biochemistry, but they shared a passion for entrepreneurship that led them to enter the 2016 Hult Prize Challenge, a global student competition for social entrepreneurship. The challenge that year was to better connect people to goods, services and resources. Both hailing from countries that struggled with public transportation, they proposed a platform to bring bus and rail tickets online. “Sonia coming from India and me coming from Kenya, public transportation was a challenge we faced and wanted to solve,” Wyclife says. 

They didn’t win in the competition’s campus round, but got a chance to pitch at the Hult Prize regionals in Boston. This time, they took first place, beating out fifty-four other teams. Then, they set out to work with both private and public sector organizations in Kenya to pilot the program. BuuPass allows bus, train, flight and courier companies to seamlessly move goods and commuters, and travelers to easily book tickets through a website or by USSD code. Now supported by a team of more than twenty people, Wyclife and Sonia are working on scaling their project in other markets in Africa. “The problem is huge and has an impact on everyday lives: education, jobs, healthcare,” Sonia says.

The Hult Prize Challenge awarded the team $1 million in prize money, which allowed them to launch BuuPass. Since then, the company has used sales revenue to grow.