Transit tech and services company RideCo has secured a $20 million Series A funding round.
Led by Eclipse Ventures, the financing marks RideCo’s first financing round since it was founded in 2015.
Headquartered in Waterloo, RideCo aims to make transit convenient to ride, and cost effective to operate. The firm partners with public transportation agencies, municipalities, and local fleet operators to curate and operate on-demand transit services.
RideCo’s software is designed to alleviate travel pain points for riders and agencies. For riders, these include long travel times and lengthy walking distances. As for agencies, this could look like high costs per ride and challenges in attracting net new riders to transit systems.
Transit agencies and organizations that have used RideCo’s services include Pacific Western, Calgary Transit, Singapore’s Changi, and Los Angeles’ LAX.
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Prem Gurujan, co-founder and CEO of RideCo, said the idea of creating RideCo came from seeing his family struggling to use transit to get to work. “We realized that this is an unnecessary challenge millions of people around the world struggle with daily,” he said.
Community ridership inherently decreased as more people worked from home during the COVID-19 pandemic. Statistics Canada reported last February that 45.8 million passenger trips were taken on Canada’s urban transit networks, a drop of 71.5 percent from February 2020.
In response, transit companies are adopting technology to revamp their systems. RideCo, for example, has replaced “underperforming” fixed-route buses in places like San Antonio and Coubourg, Ontario. It also claims to have modernized dial-a-ride in Houston and paratransit in Guelph.
The company has also helped Las Vegas combine conventional and paratransit services using a shared fleet, and bridged first and last-mile access in Calgary.
RideCo, which said its revenue and customer base has grown more than double in the past year, intends to use its new capital to drive up its product engineering and customer support.
Feature image from Ant Rozetsky via Unsplash