Google Has Acquired India’s Train-tracking App, ‘Where Is My Train’

India owns a vast market regarding public transport, particularly Indian railways. Google realizes this potential. After its efforts in providing internet access for passengers at India’s railway stations, this new step of Google would help Indian people book their trains and track their journey better. According to a report from The Economic Times, Google has made an acquisition of Sigmoid Labs, a company based in Bengaluru. Sigmoid Labs is the company behind the Android app “Where is My Train”. On the Google Play Store, this app is quite popular among users. It has a total download of 10 million. With Google’s acquisition, the app is likely to become even more popular.

An essential feature of the app is that it offers eight languages. Therefore, users speaking different languages can easily use the app. Another interesting characteristic of the app is that it can still operate with limited or even no internet connectivity.

If GPS signal is weak, the app will utilize information from cell towers to track the train’s location more accurately. In the app, with the origin and destination, users can also look for trains even when the names are not entirely correct.

While the information on the deal’s value or past fund-raisers of the company remains undisclosed, the deal is predicted to have been about $30 to $40 million (approximately Rs 217 to Rs 299 crore). Google is reported to have confirmed this but rejected to share any specific financial information. The Sigmoid Labs acquisition belongs to a Google’s program called “Next Billion Users”.

Among ten members belong to the app’s core team, five used to work as former executives at Tivo Corporation, an Us-based entertainment company. Google informed Techcrunch that the app will continue to be developed on current offering. Moreover, the company has no intention of shutting other competitor apps.

The team announced this acquisition by posting a message on its website:

At the moment, “Where Is My Train” is only available for download on Android. For its iOS version, there isn’t any information about it yet.