The past twelve months were great ones for Optibus: we enhanced our product with AI for on-time performance, added electric vehicle support and timetables, launched a re-designed roster (rota) capabilities and more. Our product also benefited from algorithmic improvements, to make our optimizations stronger, faster and better. We expanded our presence in North America and Europe and saw our sales grow by 400 percent; our product was chosen for more than 300 cities worldwide.
The $ 40 M Series B funding round we announced today was led by Insight Venture Partners with a strategic investment by Alibaba Group, with existing investors also participating in the round, including Verizon Ventures, Pitango Venture Capital, New Era Capital and Sir Ronald Cohen. Here’s a link (it’s a paywall) to the coverage of the story in the Financial Times.
With this investment we will continue to pursue our vision: driving the transition to effective, sustainable and efficient mobility. We do this by understanding the needs of our public transport agency and operator customers and striving to exceed their expectations through our offering, new features and exceptional professional support.
At a high level, here’s what we’re looking to do next:
Substantially improve our products
We’re in constant dialogue with our customers, their feature requests and how they want to use Optibus in their planning and operations. With this investment we’ll be able to realize more features and capabilities, broaden the scope of the Optibus platform to cover more needs around planning and scheduling, as well as provide additional algorithmic enhancements, which allow us to serve more use cases in more markets and geographies.
Use more AI and enable data-driven operations
We’re proud of the fact that our use of AI has been replacing old methods such as surveys and manual data collection. Our goal is to broaden the use of AI to make better planning and scheduling decisions, helping our customers become more agile and more data-driven.
As part of this vision, we’re also investing in offering deep analytics solutions to our customers, that will help them better understand their mass transit operations and give them the insights to improve them.
Investing in new products
We’re truly committed to enabling a better future for mass transportation, through consistent product innovation. This is our focus and a new mobility product we’re working on now is a great example of how public transportation can better adapt to passenger demand; we expect many operators to want to experiment with this future offering.
Thank you!
We truly appreciate our customers and prospects and what they’ve told us about their needs. Serving them has allowed us to create a product that has modernized mass transportation and the process and its outcomes are thrilling and deeply satisfying for us. With this investment round, we now have more resources than we’ve ever had to realize our vision and make mass transportation effective, efficient and sustainable.
