Founded in 2012, Transit built a mobile app platform that enables multimodal transportation by integrating public transit, ride-hailing, bike sharing and scooter sharing. The app provides real-time data from transit agencies combined with user crowdsourcing, tracks vehicle locations, sends adjusted ETAs and notifies users when to leave and disembark. Transit operates in 175 cities globally and is used by transit agencies including Boston’s MBTA, Baltimore’s MDOT MTA, Silicon Valley’s VTA, Tampa Bay’s PSTA and Montreal’s STM. The company is transit- and company-agnostic and promotes open APIs to enable integrations across services. Transit plans to scale operations and improve the platform by integrating various services and payment methods on the app. Financially, the company raised $17.5 million in a Series B to support this expansion. Transit began as a streamlined public-transit app and has expanded into a multimodal mobility hub that pulls data and crowdsourced info to show nearby buses, subways, and other options. The company now integrates complementary modes such as bike-sharing, ridesharing, and carsharing, and is building tooling to enable sign-up, payment, and booking without app updates. Management says Transit has “millions” of users and is investing to capitalize on that footprint. The product roadmap emphasizes quick technical integrations so new transport services can be added at a product level. Transit is positioning itself to help people live in cities without cars, though leadership acknowledges the challenge of growing beyond dense urban areas. The company faces competition from well-funded peers like Moovit and Citymapper as it pursues broader adoption. Transit is a commuter-focused mobile app that cleanly shows upcoming arrival times and routes by aggregating data from municipal sources and Nextbus. The app received a redesigned look and introduced a Go feature that monitors walking speed, adjusts connections for delays or detours, and can wake users before their final stop. Transit is available in around 125 cities in more than nine countries and was launched in 2012. The company faces an unstructured-data challenge in normalizing diverse transit feeds and is prioritizing accuracy improvements. A large portion of the new financing is earmarked for hiring additional engineers to improve speed and prediction quality. The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority has effectively endorsed Transit as an app for Boston, and management sees improved accuracy and engagement as paths to additional revenue and product development.

Total raised

$25M

Funding rounds

3

Latest round

Series B

Latest activity

Nov 2018