Venture capital firm Eclipse Ventures led the new funding round for the Ontario-based company, which launched in 2015 and bills itself as “North America’s first on-demand transit service,” according to a RideCo statement.
“We built RideCo because our own family members were struggling to use transit to get to work, and we realized that this is an unnecessary challenge millions of people around the world struggle with daily,” Prem Gururajan, co-founder and CEO of RideCo, said in that statement.
According to RideCo, its goal is working with public transit agencies and related operations to design on-demand services that “alleviate travel pain points for riders such as long travel times, lengthy walking distances and low service frequency.” In general, the idea is to bring Uber-like efficiencies to public transit.
RideCo said that more than 60 travel services use its software. Los Angeles provides an example of how that all works in practice.
In late 2021, Los Angeles Metro launched a service called Metro Micro. Residents in certain neighborhoods can use the service to access door-to-door transit options via shared rides.
More specifically, the service — the fruit of that public-private partnership involving RideCo — depends on a network of “virtual bus stops” set up by the company. Those stops can be moved depending on such factors as rider demand or traffic.
Within specific zones, the Metro Micro service offers shared rides for $1 in such vehicles as Ford Transit 150s and Dodge Grand Caravans.
As for the new funding, RideCo said it will use the capital to keep building and scaling its transit platform, along with product engineering and customer support.
The company said its revenue and customer base have “grown by more than 2x in the past year,” according to the statement.
