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How technology enabled smarter usage of public transit
By Agencies -
April 2, 2018
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Raised in Pakistan and Kuwait, lived in Singapore, Wahsington, and New York, Azmat Yusuf had never owned a car. When he started working at Google in London, the transit system of the city absolutely perplexed him. The kaleidoscope of buses and trains, with their puzzling routes. To make things easier for himself, he decided to build an app.
To start off, he created an app called Busmapper, which calculated the most efficient routes across a specific geographical area. The app soon grew to include other mediums of transport such as taxis, trains, subways, and even bikes. Owing to great popularity and tremendous success, the app was renames to Citymapper in 2011.
Citymapper has about 20 million users across the world, and includes a total of 39 cities. A bike in Amserdam, bus in Glasgow, subway in Seoul, or a bus in Toronto, users can now go to their desired destinations with ease and efficiency.
“There’s a very strong emotional attachment between the user and the application,” says Bernard Liautaud, managing partner at Balderton Capital, which led Citymapper’s Series A funding in 2014. “There aren’t many products where the testimony from the users is amazing. They say things like, ‘I can’t live without Citymapper.’ ”
Citymapper, which has raised roughly $50 million so far. Yusuf is also open to licensing his software, but “cities are a bit slow to change,” he says. “We think it’s good for us to do this ourselves and actually make the whole thing work.”
By Agencies -
April 2, 2018
0
2
Share on Facebook
Tweet on Twitter
Raised in Pakistan and Kuwait, lived in Singapore, Wahsington, and New York, Azmat Yusuf had never owned a car. When he started working at Google in London, the transit system of the city absolutely perplexed him. The kaleidoscope of buses and trains, with their puzzling routes. To make things easier for himself, he decided to build an app.
To start off, he created an app called Busmapper, which calculated the most efficient routes across a specific geographical area. The app soon grew to include other mediums of transport such as taxis, trains, subways, and even bikes. Owing to great popularity and tremendous success, the app was renames to Citymapper in 2011.
Citymapper has about 20 million users across the world, and includes a total of 39 cities. A bike in Amserdam, bus in Glasgow, subway in Seoul, or a bus in Toronto, users can now go to their desired destinations with ease and efficiency.
“There’s a very strong emotional attachment between the user and the application,” says Bernard Liautaud, managing partner at Balderton Capital, which led Citymapper’s Series A funding in 2014. “There aren’t many products where the testimony from the users is amazing. They say things like, ‘I can’t live without Citymapper.’ ”
Citymapper, which has raised roughly $50 million so far. Yusuf is also open to licensing his software, but “cities are a bit slow to change,” he says. “We think it’s good for us to do this ourselves and actually make the whole thing work.”
