Well-run transit networks depend on tight timing and careful coordination. In a similar way, young companies often survive or fail based on how well they manage moving parts that rarely line up neatly. That was especially true for one early-stage software venture focused on tools for transportation systems, where the product itself centered on making schedules, routes, and vehicle movement easier to understand.
In the beginning, the founding team wasn’t even in the same country, let alone the same office. They were separated across a dozen time zones, juggling calls wherever they could fit them in. One founder was stationed in Africa for consulting work, regularly dialing into conversations that had to happen around the hours of an investment-banking job back in the United States. Another founder spent that same period in California, away on a summer internship at a major technology company, contributing from a distance while balancing a demanding role.
The company’s origin story traces back to a campus setting and an effort to improve a university bus system. While involved in student government, two of the founders pushed for better transportation options and brought proposals to administrators. An early pitch aimed at creating a new route for football game traffic did not get approved, in part because it overreached what a student-led initiative could realistically deliver at the time.
Still, those conversations opened the door to a more practical solution. Instead of changing routes, the focus shifted to visibility: showing where buses were and helping riders understand arrival timing. In 2009, the campus bus service authorized the students to build a system that could track vehicles and display their locations. The project was funded with $15,000 allocated through student government, giving the team just enough runway to build something real and deployable.
Looking back, the founders acknowledged that the first idea had been too ambitious for their experience level. A manager within the campus transit operation, who had heard the original pitch, agreed that the students were initially outmatched by the scope of what they proposed. At the same time, he observed that the lead proposer learned quickly and adapted, closing the gap between enthusiasm and execution far faster than most people would expect.
Turning Contracts into a Self-Funded Launchpad
About a year later, the trio released the software. At first, it felt like a lasting contribution to campus life, something students could keep using after graduation. What they didn’t anticipate was how quickly the system would become essential enough that people would continue calling them for support even once they had moved on to full-time jobs.
Those requests changed the way the founders thought about what they had built. If a transit operation depended on the software to function smoothly, then maintaining it wasn’t a side project anymore. For the lead founder, each new call reinforced a possibility that had not been obvious at the start: this could be a full-time business rather than a campus experiment.
Even so, leaving a stable job required proof that paying customers existed beyond the original environment. Before taking the leap, the founder wanted to secure additional contracts to confirm demand. That validation arrived through two early deals, first with a university in Indianapolis and then with a state university in New York. With those commitments in place, the founders regrouped in Indianapolis and transitioned into working full time on the company together.
Their move was eased by a key trait of the industry they were serving. Transit organizations often buy through multi-year agreements and, crucially, pay up front. The founders realized those terms could function like seed money, as long as they delivered more than what customers expected. That structure made it possible to fund growth without outside investment, using contract revenue as the engine instead of venture capital.
That path came with pressure. Up-front commitments meant the company had to deliver consistently with a tiny team, essentially building and supporting serious infrastructure-level software with only a handful of people. The workload was intense, and the expectations were not forgiving. Yet the founders described that period as one where motivation and endurance were high enough that they felt capable of building nearly anything, provided they stayed focused and kept pushing through long hours.
Competing by Expanding What Transit Software Can Do
Over time, the company added a wide base of customers and reached more than ninety clients. Its list included organizations spanning universities, municipalities, hospitals, airports, and corporations, reflecting how many environments depend on moving people efficiently from place to place. According to one founder, many of the contracts the company pursued were substantial, commonly landing in the range of $500,000, $500,000 to $1,000,000, $1,000,000, which raised the stakes of each competitive bid.
As the offering matured, the product grew beyond simple tracking visuals. The company provided analytics tools for system administrators, supporting operational decisions with data rather than guesswork. On the rider side, it also delivered a mobile application that let passengers see vehicle locations in real time and check when the next ride would reach a given stop. The work stayed rooted in the same core promise: reducing uncertainty for both the people running transit and the people relying on it.
The business also faced a direct competitor that had been operating since the mid-1990s. Despite the incumbent’s long head start, the founders believed their company’s growth had moved faster, even as the older firm maintained a larger customer count. In that competitive landscape, differentiation mattered, and the founders argued that they won deals by providing capabilities the incumbent did not offer.
One example of that strategy was the acquisition of an on-demand, ride-hailing style service. The intent was not to change the company’s identity, but to broaden what it could offer transit operators, especially in environments like college campuses. The founders framed the service’s central purpose around student safety, noting that it had been rolled out in the campus contexts where that need is particularly visible.
The broader storyline, though, remains a familiar one: friends connected to a university transportation problem who turned a practical solution into a business. Similar campus-rooted efforts have appeared in other mobility companies, including an earlier ride-sharing concept that originated around improving transportation near a university and carried a different name at the time.
In this case, the connection ran deeper than parallel inspiration. The lead founder had previously worked with that ride-sharing team during an implementation at the university. Afterward, one of that company’s co-founders extended an offer for him to join their team as an early employee. He declined, choosing instead to keep building the new venture with his own co-founders, guided more by commitment to what they had started than by the safety of joining a growing organization.
Years later, the ride-sharing company’s valuation became a popular talking point, and the declined offer turned into an easy target for jokes about missed opportunity. Yet the founder maintained that he didn’t view the decision as a mistake. For him, the value of building something independently, and seeing it grow from a student-funded campus tool into a multi-client business, outweighed the hypothetical upside of a different path.