For almost a year, three men in Munich could not decide whether to buy a bus.
Daniel Krauss later called that deliberation the most important early decision FlixBus made. Should the company rent, lease, buy or partner with the family bus firms that already ran Germany's roads? The founders spent a year touring the country to meet operators before they chose to keep the vehicles out of the business entirely.
What almost nobody outside the industry saw was how close it came to damage.
It was not their first attempt at being founders. Krauss and André Schwämmlein were school friends from Franconia. In 2005 they started a company together and sold it two years later. Both then studied in China; Krauss worked at an automotive supplier in the United States and later at Microsoft in Munich while finishing a master's degree in Erlangen. Jochen Engert, a football teammate of Schwämmlein's, joined the venture. They collected thousands of ideas, Krauss has said, from knitted socks to online portals.
The trigger was a law. Germany's plans to loosen its long-distance passenger transport rules, discussed from 2009, meant a closed market was about to open. In 2011 they formed a partnership in Munich, later turned into a limited company. The first angel investor was Heinz Raufer, founder of hotel.de, whom they met through a business-plan contest; Harald Baumann of Baumann Bus brought money and industry knowledge. By the end of 2012 the team numbered 30. In February 2013 the first buses rolled, on three routes in Bavaria.
What almost nobody outside the industry saw was how close it came to damage. MeinFernbus, a Berlin rival, had more bus partners and about nine months of head start. FlixBus had stronger technology and more aggressive marketing. They fought for about a year until both saw that the war threatened them. In January 2015 they merged and kept the more international name, with MeinFernbus's green colour. Postbus followed in 2016, and by 2015 the buses had carried 20 million passengers.
The price has been public scrutiny: crashes, an American investigation into wheelchair access in 2025 and a German fine over green claims. Still, the business carried a total revenue of about EUR2bn in 2023, with adjusted EBITDA of EUR104m, and in 2024 EQT and Kuehne + Nagel took a 35% stake for EUR1bn.
The lesson is in the year of indecision. Krauss now says the right investor and the right partners matter as much as cash.