Transit, a company that built a mobile app designed to help people in cities live without cars, has raised $17.5 million from two automakers in a Series B round.The round wasled by RenaultNissan-Mitsubishis joint investment arm Alliance Ventures.InMotion Ventures, Jaguar Land Rovers venture capital fund, also joined the round, as well as two past investors, Accel and Real Ventures.RenaultNissan-Mitsubishi and Jaguar Land Rovers investment would have seemed counterintuitive five years ago.
But this is 2018.
Its the year of the scooter wars and micro-mobility; its also a time of transition for automakers that are looking to diversify their traditional business of building and selling cars.Founded in 2012, Transit started as an app to help people check departure times for buses and trains.
Its grown into a mobile app platform that enables multi-modal transportation, integrating public transit, ride hailing, bike sharing and scooter sharing.
The mobile app, which providesreal-time datafrom transit agencies with user crowdsourcing, gives users notifications from their ride.
The appthen tracks the real-time location of the vehicle and notifies the user when to leave for their stop, when to disembark.
and sends adjusted ETAs.
Transit is nowused by transit agencies, including Bostons MBTA, Baltimores MDOT MTA, Silicon Valleys VTA, Tampa Bays PSTA and Montreals STM.The company wants to be transit and company agnostic, so, its a big proponent of open APIs.
Montreal, where the company is based, is a model of what Transit wants to be everywhere.
In Montreal, people can use the app for car sharing, bike sharing, to order an Uber or use public transit, COO Jake Sion explained.Transit, which operates in 175 cities globally, will use the injection of capital to scale operations and improve the platform by integrating various services and payment methods on the app.This investment, which will advance Transits efforts to make mobility seamless and accessible in cities, fits with the Alliance 2022 strategy to become a leader in robo-vehicle ride-hailing mobility services and a provider of vehicles for public transit use and car-sharing,Franois Dossa, Alliance Global vice president of ventures and open innovation, said in a statement.