Capitaine Train announced today on their blog that they are officially leaving their invite-only beta mode into a publicly available service. The beta mode, which allowed travelers to purchase tickets from French companies SNCF & iDTGV as well as Germany company Deutsche Bahn, had over 22,000 signups. In their blog post, the company also announced that next week, SNCF’s Christmas tickets would be available for purchase.
Capitaine Train announced a fundraising round of €1.4 Million just a few weeks ago, declaring a war on the outdated train ticket purchasing interfaces of the major train operators. Jean-Daniel Guyot, who created the company in March 2009, announced recently on JDN[FR] that the startup is on track to sell over 400,000 tickets by the end of the year. The value-added, Guyot claims, is that users can now purchase tickets in under 30 seconds – a vast improvement from SNCF’s interface, at least. Having integrated deeply with the operators, Capitaine Train sees the entry level for competitors as more difficult than one might think.
Au revoir, version bêta.
— Trainline France (@trainline_fr) October 8, 2012
Capitaine Train recently co-hosted Rejoignez Une Startup(“Join a Startup”) with VoitureLib, who also recently raised a large round of funding. The startup recruitment event brought 500+ developers in front of 45 startups who were offered 140 developer & web designer jobs. The event was quite successful, with startups declaring that they would definitely sign up for a second event, despite the bumpy road of the first event.