Endeavor Welcomes LP Maurice of Busbud as Canada’s newest Endeavor Entrepreneur

Endeavor Canada is welcoming our newest entrepreneur to the network, LP Maurice, CEO & Co-Founder of Busbud. Busbud becomes the fifth Canadian company to join the Endeavor community since 2022 alongside Symend, Certn, SRTX, and KOHO Financial. 

Founded in 2011 in Montreal, Canada, Busbud is a leading global mobility group offering an online marketplace that specializes in booking intercity bus tickets. Busbud aims to disrupt the fragmented and analog bus industry, which currently serves over 10 billion passengers per year worldwide. Through Busbud’s aggregated marketplace, which offers bus routes and tickets from 4,000 bus operators in 80 countries, the company provides bus travelers a more affordable and efficient way to book intercity and cross-country travel. Today, Busbud is one of Canada’s fastest-growing companies and has established a global presence allowing customers to book ground transportation to and from over 20,000 cities and in 15 languages and currencies around the world.

LP’s vision for the company was inspired from the personal hurdles he faced during a post-graduation backpacking trip across South America. On this trip he came to appreciate the centrality of bus travel in the region but also the challenge faced by customers looking to identify the best transportation options for their needs given the high fragmentation of the bus operator landscape. Upon his return to Canada, LP recruited two friends, Michael Gradek and Frédéric Thouin, to co-found a company that would address these problems and bring the same level of convenience that existed in booking flights, taxis, and hotel rooms online to bus tickets.

While the company was not immune to the challenges imposed on the travel industry in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, Busbud emerged from this reset stronger than ever by using the period to sharpen its approach towards becoming a global leader in ground transportation including via expansion to multimodal travel, and by launching B2B products to digitize the businesses of local bus operators. Today, the company successfully leads one of the world’s largest B2B2C ground transportation marketplaces, which attracted more than 100 million travellers in 2023, and is helping bus operators around the world shift from analog to fully digital operations.

“LP displays a very unique and healthy way to think about the ecosystems he operates within. He’s always looking to foster the good that can be extracted from an ecosystem. This is evidenced by the way he treats the companies he acquires and their founders. He applies this same approach to how he thinks about splitting revenues with bus operators.” Doug Storf (Endeavor Entrepreneur from Brazil, CEO of Swap).

Throughout LP’s selection journey, which is designed to add value and evaluate entrepreneurs for selection, he received feedback and input from Endeavor’s Canadian and international network including from: Susan Anderson of Cannonball Capital, Jim Estill of Danby Appliances, Mike Mannix of Band Venture Partners, Dennis Bennie of XDL Capital Group, Rodrigo Cobo of Talaria International Travel Marketing, Linda Rottenberg, Endeavor’s Co-Founder and CEO, and most recently, Michele Levy of Ilhabela Holdings. LP’s meeting with long-serving Endeavor mentor Michele Levy highlights the value of the selection process, given Michele’s expertise in expanding businesses in Brazil and internationally. They had the opportunity to discuss significant growth opportunities in Brazil—where Busbud recently acquired the leading Brazilian bus ticketing marketplace, Buson—as well as in LATAM more broadly.

LP’s ISP panelists included Endeavor Entrepreneurs Doug Storf of Swap, Emre Tas of Alictus, and Mona Ataya of Mumzworld; and Endeavor Mentors, Hristo Hristov of Darik (Endeavor Bulgaria Co-Chair), Nicolas Berman of Kaszek Ventures, and Ettore Leale of Xplorer Capital. We are grateful to all of these mentors, and panelists who shared their candid input, and have opened up their networks to LP and his team, embodying Endeavor’s “Pay it Forward” mentality.

Reflecting on his international selection panel experience, LP remarked “The kind of feedback I received, while it honestly felt very challenging at times, was outstanding. They were really sharp questions that went to the core of our business. I tend to think that feedback is a gift, … and what a gift to have all these top-notch entrepreneurs from literally around the world just dig into your business and share their comments and analysis. I really enjoyed it. After 10 years growing our business, it’s always great to get fresh perspectives that lead to new ideas that can move the business forward.. I think I got that today. I feel very grateful to have had this opportunity to be challenged in this way..”

Endeavor Canada is immensely proud to add LP to its growing community of growth-stage founders in Canada. We are eager to continue supporting what is already one of the country’s most international venture-backed businesses as it embarks on a new chapter of growth and global expansion. We are also excited to provide him a platform to share his knowledge and experience with the next generation of scaling businesses within Canada and throughout the global Endeavor network.