I am thrilled to announce Eclipse’s partnership with RideCo to accelerate its mission to make transit convenient to ride and cost effective to operate. We are excited to lead the company’s $20M Series A round.

RideCo, the on-demand transit platform powering the next generation of transit, is solving multi-faceted challenges faced by both agencies and private companies. Transit infrastructure is very fixed and usually expensive projects go towards building more trains or establishing additional bus routes. RideCo enables a municipality to extend more services at a higher quality by integrating this new modality of on-demand dynamic service with the existing highly-utilized fixed-route lines, thus offering services to a broader population, and meeting dynamic consumer requirements at a fraction of the cost. It’s like bringing world-class transportation offerings to the masses and doing so in a way that enables commuters to spend less time in transit and more time doing what they enjoy, while agencies increase their ridership and cost efficiency. Both of these outcomes also contribute to helping the community reduce greenhouse gas emissions — win/win!

I first met Prem Gururajan, Co-Founder and CEO of RideCo, via his Waterloo classmate — and Founder and CEO of Clearpath Robotics — Matt Rendall. Prem decided to take on the challenge of creating dynamic transit solutions after hearing about his younger sister’s nightmare experience attempting to use public transit to commute to her first job out of college. At the time I was introduced to Prem, RideCo was a seed stage company and was closing six-figure deals with several of the largest transit agencies in the country — all without raising a cent of institutional capital. Prem is an experienced entrepreneur — he founded Tangam Systems, the global leader in recommendations driven gaming optimization software — and it showed. I was impressed with his steady hand at the helm of the business, as well as the opportunity the RideCo team was going after, both technically and in terms of societal impact.

Since launching North America’s first on-demand public transit service in 2015, RideCo’s on-demand transit software has powered more than 60 services in cities worldwide, including Los Angeles, Houston, San Antonio, Calgary, and Las Vegas, and has leading market share among the largest cities in the United States and Canada. The impact of RideCo’s platform in these cities has been massive. For example, RideCo helped modernize dial-a-ride in Houston, gave the city of Las Vegas the ability to commingle conventional and paratransit services using a shared fleet, and helped replace underperforming fixed-route buses in San Antonio. Small towns and communities are also experiencing transportation transformation thanks to RideCo, such as solving low density area mobility in Cochrane or modernizing paratransit in Guelph. By delivering industry leading efficiency and productivity, RideCo is providing passenger convenience and guaranteed on-time service around the world.

Transportation is vital for all people and is a critical lever for creating a better quality of life. The first wave of shared transit services was leveraged by the upper end of the socioeconomic spectrum and left behind the rest of the population. I dream of a world where transportation just works, no matter what your economic standing is and/or where you live. Prem, and his team, share this dream and are working tirelessly to bring it to fruition with RideCo. They have a product that promises to improve the quality of life for all people and will catalyze a generational shift in how we get around our cities and towns. And, they’re just getting started.

Congratulations to Prem and the entire RideCo team!

Read more about RideCo’s Series A news from TechCrunch

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