Taking the bus can feel like a microcosm of the entire human experience. It can be a serene moment of introspection or a cramped, sweaty nightmare that makes you rethink leaving your house. Or, in the worst-case scenario, the bus simply never shows up.
Sam Vermette, Transit
“Our mission at Transit is to build a platform that transforms cities.”
The Transit app, with its signature green interface, is one of the few reliable places riders can go to hopefully avoid that scenario by tracking their bus in real time. The Montréal company, which launched 14 years ago, has since transformed its simple consumer app into a complex data layer that feeds back to local transit agencies and ultimately encourages ridership.
That evolution has paid off. In an era of falling public transit budgets in North America, Transit has emerged as a stalwart figure of the car-free economy, providing real-time transit information to nine million monthly active users. About 200 transportation agencies across North America, France, and New Zealand now sponsor Transit’s paid subscription, meaning they offer it for free to their ridership. And executives say the company is now profitable. Last week, it was named to Deloitte’s 2026 Technology Fast 50 list, having grown its revenue by 649 percent over the past three years. Transit did not share a specific annual revenue amount.
“Our mission at Transit is to build a platform that transforms cities,” Sam Vermette, Transit co-founder and CEO, told BetaKit recently at the company’s Montréal offices. To the Transit team—many of whom ride their bikes to work in Montréal’s Mile End neighbourhood—belief in a robust public transit system is ideological table stakes. “Cities are better with fewer cars—this is something that [we] truly believe in.”
But it’s been an uphill battle. Public transit funding rarely gets the same attention as road and car infrastructure in North America. And changing business models, from the early-2010s consumer app heyday to today’s enterprise AI explosion, have forced Transit to adapt and work out a business that serves transit agencies.
“Our hybrid model gives us much a higher chance of having an impact than if we were only working with riders” or agencies, Vermette said. “We’re still doing this after 14 years because it’s a never-ending quest.”
Lucky break
In 2010, Vermette was frustrated. He had moved out instead of buying a car for his studies at Université de Montréal, sometimes leaving him reliant on the bus, he told Canadian Business. With his developer skills, he decided to build an app to track its schedule, and soon met his co-founder and eventual CTO, Guillaume Campagna.
That summer, the developers hit a lucky break: Apple announced it was dropping Google Maps software from its iOS 6 system in favour of its own mapping app. But it wouldn’t include transit directions—creating demand for an app like Transit to fill. Apple reached out to third-party developers to promote its apps and told Transit to add a trip-planner function.
“Overnight, we went from having a couple hundred users to having thousands and thousands of users,” Vermette told BetaKit.
First set up as a “freemium” model with a paid tier, Transit went through FounderFuel—the Montréal startup accelerator co-run by Real Ventures, Inovia Capital, and Panache Ventures—and made the app completely free. Transit raised more than $25 million USD ($35 million CAD) over the next few years, up until Series B, from local investors like Real Ventures as well as Silicon Valley firm Accel Partners.
The focus for that period was to make the product as “amazing as possible,” COO Jake Sion said, by expanding into more cities, growing the user base, and building out features. It launched the popular GO feature, which tells users when and where to catch their bus or train, but crowdsources trip data at the same time.
The enterprise play
The tough part came around 2020; following multiple rounds of financing, the team had to think about a sustainable long-term revenue model. Finding a way to turn a profit without eschewing the company’s values was paramount, Vermette said.
“We could have done banner ads in the app a long time ago and probably made a good amount of money,” Vermette said. “But I think you end up [going] from trying to build a great app to optimizing for app clicks and app views. It’s less interesting, less motivating…it sort of drifts you slowly away from your original mission.”
Sam Vermette, Transit
“We’re still doing this after 14 years because it’s a never-ending quest.”
In 2021, Transit launched its Royale paid tier (at $25 CAD per year) to charge for access to unlimited line schedules and some of its gamified features, including a leaderboard for frequent riders and custom icons. At the same time, it looked to leverage its existing relationships.
“We had lots of transit agencies all around the world who said, ‘you guys make a better app than we think we ever can,’” Sion said.
The GO navigation helper ended up becoming an important part of the model. Since users were already engaging on the app during their commutes, Transit started asking them questions about how the trip itself was going: Was the bus full or were seats open? Was the bus shelter clean? Was it accessible?
The real product for transit agencies, which are often budget-crunched and looking for ways to optimize, became that data: how crowded the vehicle is, whether the bus arrived on time, if there’s clear signage about next stops. Transit says the data is anonymized, and that it only associates the data with vehicle and stop IDs, rather than users.
Agencies in Calgary, Ottawa, Toronto, Vancouver, and Edmonton now sponsor Transit Royale, giving riders free access to the in-app subscription. Transit also works with agencies in 35 US states and four cities in France—its biggest markets outside of Canada.
“We estimate that we cover about 15 percent of people around the world who get on public transit every month,” Sion said. “Our ambition over the next few years is getting to 50 percent.”
John Stokes, co-founder and managing partner at early Transit backer Real Ventures, told BetaKit in an email that the company’s hiring ethos has been key to its continued success.
“One of the smartest decisions Transit made was to consistently prioritize hiring people who were genuinely passionate about its mission, even when that meant choosing them over candidates with more experience,” Stokes said.
“Political courage”
The company’s original vision was to enable people to get around more easily without cars, and to make riding transit fun and social, according to Vermette and Sion. But another mission is to give riders a voice to reshape their city, they said. It’s good for business on both sides: the company said that after an agency sponsors Royale, it sees an average of 25 percent more trips taken by existing users.
Transit is trying to uplift public transit in an era where ridership is down from pre-pandemic levels, budgets are tight, and some polls have shown that a minority of riders have changed their ridership behaviour due to safety concerns. In Canada, the 2025 federal budget saw $5 billion in public transit funds redirected to a general infrastructure fund.
Still, survey data indicates most Canadians consider public transit an essential service. The app doesn’t hide this perspective or try to tamp it down; it knows its audience of “urbanists” and has leaned into this identity. In 2023, Transit co-launched a campaign to ask former Québec transport minister Geneviève Guilbault to increase public transit investment after she announced planned cuts to urban transit agencies.
“Everyone using our app, they are usually in favour of more buses, more bikes, more parks,” Vermette said. “How can we give them a voice to have a bigger impact on their city, and give their elected officials political courage? We cannot transform cities on our own.”
Feature image Madison McLauchlan for BetaKit.