When we launched North America’s first on-demand public transportation service in Ontario, Canada seven years ago, our mission was to make transit convenient to ride and cost effective to operate. Today, we are doubling down our efforts and are excited to announce our $20 million Series A funding to help us accelerate that impact on the next generation of transit. The funding was led by Eclipse Ventures, a Palo Alto-based venture capital firm that invests in deep-tech companies that are digitally transforming essential physical industries.

The motivation to start RideCo was simple: our family members were experiencing difficulties using transit to get to work with significant walks to their stops, long waits, and multiple transfers—all of which added up to a painfully time-consuming journey. We realized that people around the world struggle with the same experience daily, so we challenged ourselves to figure out how we could simplify transit by making it more responsive to riders, dynamically routed, and ultimately, reduce the journey times for our loved ones. Dynamic shared mobility in large format vehicles like buses and shuttles is an exceptionally difficult software engineering problem at scale—an NP-hard problem in mathematical terms. As engineers, the idea of founding a company that would build a transit software platform was intellectually riveting, but the potential societal impact was even more inspiring.

Since our industry-first launch in 2015, RideCo’s on-demand transit software has powered more than 60 services in cities worldwide and has leading market share among the largest cities in the United States and Canada, including San Antonio, Houston, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and Calgary. By moving more people in fewer but more productive vehicles, we are catalyzing a generational shift in how people get around cities and towns. The societal impact of this shift is threefold: riders spend less time in transit and more time doing what they enjoy; transit operators increase their ridership and cost efficiency; and together, the community solves traffic congestion and reduces its environmental impact.

As a solution that was purpose built for transit, RideCo’s platform solves multi-faceted transit challenges faced by both public agencies and private companies. From replacing underperforming fixed-route buses in metropolitan cities like San Antonio and small towns like Cobourg; modernizing dial-a-ride in Houston or paratransit in Guelph and Porter County; solving low-density area mobility in Cochrane; commingling conventional and paratransit services in Las Vegas using a shared fleet; enabling dynamic-route corporate shuttles for employees of Syncrude; bridging first/last mile access in Calgary; to supporting visionary transit network transformation in Okotoks and Los Angeles; RideCo’s technology delivers passenger convenience and guaranteed on-time service through industry-leading efficiency, vehicle productivity, and seamless integration into the transit network.

These successful use cases are just the beginning for RideCo. We will be using this round of funding to further ramp up our growth and innovation in product engineering and customer support to deliver mobility success stories in more communities, both large and small.    

“I am excited to partner with Eclipse Ventures and Seth Winterroth in our journey to make transit more convenient, cost-effective, and sustainable. The Eclipse team have been huge supporters of our mission and we are looking forward to having Seth on our Board,” said Prem Gururajan, Co-Founder and CEO of RideCo. “Thank you to the talented and dedicated team at RideCo, as well as our transit customers and fleet partners. Your pioneering efforts will ensure that today's transit and urban mobility challenges are solved so that we leave our communities in a better place for the next generation.”