Provider of software, to power Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) including ride-sharing, car-sharing, fixed-route and dynamic transit services, RideCell, has raised $ 11.7 million in a series A investment round led by BMW i Ventures and Khosla Ventures along with other angel investors such as Mark Platshon and Michael Grandoff of Maniv Investments, Mehul Nariyawala, Navneet Dalal and Gokul Rajaram.
The round of funding is focused at solidifying the leadership of the company in the MaaS space and will be used to strengthen RideCell’s client portfolio that includes players like 3M, Santa Clara VTA and BMW. With the funding the company also claims to grow its core engineering capabilities, data-science, marketing and sales, and product teams.
“The convergence of transportation trends in cities is of key importance to BMW. RideCell’s technology platform provides agile tools to power services that span the entire mobility spectrum, including but not limited to car sharing; making them an ideal partner for BMW,” says Ulrich Quay, Head, BMW i Ventures.
As global population living in urban cities continues to expand faster than the available transportation infrastructure, technology is going to play a major role in solving the difference. RideCell claims that its technology will not only automate all operational tasks involved in running a transportation system, but its multi-modal offering across fixed-route, on-demand and car-sharing services in tens of cities will provide insightful data giving them a unique perspective on designing cities.
Aarjav Trivedi, CEO, RideCell, says, “Our vision is to build tools that allow our customers to run the world better. This is a unique moment in time when every player in the mobility and transportation space faces two back-to-back strategic inflection points. The first is the rise of on-demand services, which has significantly improved convenience and accessibility and has led to a proportional increase in customer demand. Ridesharing services in San Francisco, for example, earn four times more revenue today than the entire taxi market in San Francisco in 2012. Under the hood, this is driven by significant innovations in the models and technology that power transportation services and have so far been well understood only by the top consumer mobility services.”
Why RideCell is popular is because its ‘autonomous fleet operations’, a technology that automates end-to-end business operations from consumer apps to day-to-day fleet management, demand and supply analytics, marketing, CRM, and payments. The mobility software platform automates operational tasks in running a transportation system, enabling cities, campuses and multi-city mobility providers to launch on-demand, car-sharing and fixed-route services in weeks, and optimize and scale them without human intervention.
For cities, RideCell’s dynamic mobility analytics engine allows them to make data driven policy, infrastructure and technology decisions by providing a real-time, holistic view of the public and private transportation services that constitute the multi-modal transportation fabric of their city. RideCell can combine data from mobility apps, infrastructure operators, transit operators and sensors into a unified view.
“Until now, transportation software has required manual operation of dispatch, routing, scheduling and other operational functions, leading to an absurd world where a fleet of autonomous vehicles would have to be manually managed. By designing a platform that enables autonomous operation of transportation services, RideCell is building parity with this 2nd strategic inflection point – autonomous driving,” adds Trivedi.
