The ride was supposed to be the easy part. In the summer of 2011, Polina Raygorodskaya and a group of friends were crossing the country by shared rides to draw attention to national parks and forests. Then a driver canceled in rural Virginia. They needed a bus or a train. What they found was a second problem: working out which services existed, where they went and how to compare them.
Raygorodskaya already knew this particular irritation. She ran a public relations business and regularly traveled between New York, Boston, Philadelphia and Washington. Buses were inexpensive, and their Wi-Fi and power outlets made the journey usable working time. Buying the ticket, however, meant checking carrier websites individually. A trip began with a clerical assignment.
In Virginia, the annoyance acquired consequences. Raygorodskaya and her future business partner, Igor Bratnikov, became determined to build one place to compare ground travel. Plenty of startup stories begin with a founder imagining a new desire. This one began with a passenger trying to satisfy an existing one: getting somewhere.
A family practiced in starting again
Raygorodskaya came to the United States from Russia at four, with her family arriving on a refugee visa and settling in the Boston area. In her account of that move, opportunity has a practical meaning: the ability to build a life through work, even when the starting conditions are difficult. Her father’s career supplied an example long before she had a company of her own.
He delivered pizzas while learning skills that would allow him to become an engineer. The family’s adjustment involved unfamiliar language, unfamiliar work and the need to begin again. Raygorodskaya has described her parents’ effort as a reference point for her own challenges. It is easier to understand her willingness to change careers when changing circumstances was already part of the family story.
That background gives her entrepreneurship a specific cast. Making decisions for herself mattered. Work could be a means of choosing a direction, with all the responsibility that followed. Independence offered no promise of a quiet afternoon.
Fashion paid for the bus ticket
Her early career put her in front of cameras. As a teenager she worked as a model, appearing on runways and in advertisements. She later moved into the business around the clothes: publicity, events and helping designers attract attention. She started Polina Fashion while studying at Babson College, graduating in 2008 with a business administration degree.
She could use relationships made in modeling to find clients for the PR firm. There was continuity beneath the career change. She knew something about the people and the work before she tried selling a service to them. Her event experience grew substantial: an early professional biography credited her with producing more than a hundred events across the United States.
The appeal of modeling itself had worn off. The work left too little room to decide what happened. Her preference was plain: I like to be in control of my own fate.
Running a business offered decisions in abundance, including some she would surely have preferred to avoid.
Her preferences could be refreshingly specific. At a South Boston dinner in 2016, she asked for the sweetest wine available by the glass. A first sample failed the test; Moscato d’Asti eventually passed. Choosing a drink received the same unembarrassed attention as choosing anything else she wanted. A celebratory glass, apparently, still had to meet the specification.
There was also an old connection waiting outside fashion. She and Bratnikov had known each other since middle school, meeting through an after-school math program in the Russian community around Newton. Years before they would negotiate with transportation companies, they had shared a rather different kind of problem set. Their friendship gave the new venture a history that preceded its business plan.
A ticket is a small database
Wanderu was founded in 2012, and its service launched publicly in 2013. The proposition was easy to explain. A traveler should be able to search across operators, compare trips and find a suitable ticket without first becoming an amateur authority on the bus industry.
The engineering was harder. Airlines had standardized ways to share information. Bus companies operated disconnected systems, with different technology and different levels of digital development. Some lacked online booking altogether. Before a journey could look simple on a screen, information from those businesses had to become comparable.
Raygorodskaya described the task as collecting data from disconnected systems and standardizing it internally. The detail matters because it changes what kind of company she was building. A list of links could send passengers back to their browser tabs. A usable search required a more coherent view of the services themselves.
Connections added another possibility. A carrier naturally knows its own network. A search service can help travelers see combinations across operators. The customer thinks about an arrival; the underlying businesses think about their individual routes. Bringing those perspectives together takes both software and cooperation.
Different ticket systems
and organizes the options
Find a suitable ticket
The interview before the pitch
The founders first immersed themselves in the industry. They bootstrapped for more than a year, learning how carriers worked and what a useful product would require. Raygorodskaya’s advice from that period was grounded in proof: prospective investors needed evidence of demand, willing partners and a business that could grow.
One important relationship was with Craig Lentzsch, a former Greyhound CEO. He was skeptical when Raygorodskaya approached him. Meetings followed, and he became an adviser and investor. That gave the young company an ally who understood the operators it needed to persuade. With Eddy Wong leading the technology work, the team spent roughly a year and a half developing its initial product.
Opening the other doors required some ingenuity. Transportation executives were difficult to reach through ordinary business approaches. Raygorodskaya tried a method familiar from her PR career: inviting them to be interviewed for her blog. A conversation about their own work was a more attractive appointment than an unfamiliar company’s pitch.
The second you say you want to interview them, they’ll talk.
The conversations helped lead to regional carrier agreements. Her earlier profession had supplied a way into her new one. The useful skill was getting a conversation started; everything that happened afterward still had to earn the partner’s confidence.
Wanderu’s August 2013 financing announcement described twelve initial carrier partners, including BoltBus and Concord Coach Lines, and $2.45 million in funding. Greyhound followed as a partner in 2014. In 2015, an Amtrak agreement brought train ticket booking for more than sixty cities across fourteen states. Each agreement made the original promise more practical.
A business that could keep going
Recognition arrived early. Wanderu won the Innovative Web Technologies category at the 2013 SXSW Accelerator. Raygorodskaya appeared in Inc.’s 30 Under 30 in 2015 and Forbes’ Consumer Tech list in 2016. There was a certain pleasure in seeing a business about buses receive attention in rooms devoted to new technology.
A different milestone came in 2017, when Wanderu became profitable. That year it also expanded into Europe. These developments asked different things of the company: finding more travelers and building an organization able to sustain the service. An expanding map is encouraging; being able to keep the lights on has its own appeal.
“We are profitable.”
Polina Raygorodskaya, announcing the milestone to her team in 2017
Her definition of success included the people doing the work. She credited the team behind the engineering, marketing, public relations and business operations. The passenger encountered a single service. Delivering it involved people with distinct skills, each responsible for a part of the experience that might otherwise become somebody else’s frustration.
In 2019, Babson awarded her an honorary Doctor of Laws. She had remained involved with the college through events and mentoring, returning to the community where she had started her first company as a student. The relationship offered a useful circle: learn from other entrepreneurs, build something, then spend time with people beginning their own attempts.
The same year, her public remarks about Wanderu kept returning to the customer’s task. There would always be another interface to improve or another route to add. The guiding question concerned whether the company could keep solving the problem. That is a demanding standard precisely because it remains ordinary. The passenger still has somewhere to go.
She also made the case for her chosen mode of travel in her own writing. A 2015 essay argued that buses received too little attention beside the endless advice about flying. The publicist had become an advocate for the passenger experience she knew. Her subject was transportation, but the communications task was familiar: persuade people to take another look at something they might have overlooked.
The next seat
On June 26, 2024, Wanderu announced Andrew Savikas as its new CEO. After twelve years leading the company, Raygorodskaya became executive chairwoman. Savikas brought experience from businesses including Safari Books Online and getAbstract. She welcomed his outside perspective and expressed confidence that Wanderu could become more useful to travelers in North America and Europe.
The change placed a new executive in charge of daily leadership while keeping a founder at the board table. It also marked another turn in a career already accustomed to them: modeling, public relations, travel technology, then a different responsibility within the business she had helped create.
There is a smaller detail worth keeping beside the titles. Raygorodskaya enjoys a window seat on scenic trains in the UK, watching the landscape pass. After all the systems, meetings and negotiations, the pleasure is reassuringly recognizable. Find the ticket. Take your seat. Let somebody else do the driving.