BIG DATA FOR BIG CITIES
Moovit has created the Waze of public transit. Is this the app that can beat urban congestion?
Moovit has created the Waze of public transit. Is this the app that can beat urban congestion?
Like most suburbanites, Janice Monkowski, a piano teacher who lives in Danville, California, some 30 miles east of San Francisco, gets around mainly by car. For much of her life, public transit was not even an afterthought.
That changed recently when Monkowski, a self-described technophobe, discovered Moovit. When she goes to San Francisco to meet friends or catch the symphony with her husband, the smartphone app lets her plan bus and train trips down to the minute. “Moovit tells me where to walk and how long it might take to catch a bus to get to the train station,” Monkowski says. “It had probably been 10 or 15 years since I’d ridden a transit bus.”
In exchange for the free service, Monkowski lets Moovit track her trips. Much like the navigation app Waze, which follows its users on the road to determine optimal driving routes, Moo- vit aggregates Monkowski’s location data with that of other nearby users to predict the most efficient public-transit trip between two locations. “Transit users have an even bigger problem than drivers,” says Nir Erez, a 52-year-old Israeli serial entrepreneur who cofounded Moovit in 2012. Most commuters don’t know when a bus might arrive— let alone how it might connect with another transit service—or when walking or bicycling might be faster, Erez says, speaking from his home in Tel Aviv: “Information is usually bad.”
So bad that Moovit has become the world’s most downloaded transit app. In just five years it has racked up 100 million users— roughly the same number as Waze, which Google bought for $1.1 billion in 2013. Moovit is available in 44 languages and 78 countries, and commuters in 1,500 cities, from Lexington, Kentucky, to London, Moscow and Hanoi, rely on it to get to and from work. In Los Angeles, 40% of its users access it in Spanish. In 2016 Moovit became the official transit app for the Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, beating out Apple and Google, according to the company. When public transit doesn’t get a user all the way to her destination, Moovit may connect her to bike-share programs or services like Uber.
Moovit’s popularity has helped it attract a string of marquee investors. The company, which launched with $500,000 from Erez, has raised nearly $84 million from the likes of Sequoia Capital, Ashton Kutcher’s Sound Ventures and BMW i Ventures. Its valuation reached $450 million, according to PitchBook. The investors have been lured by the potential to monetize Moovit’s realtime transit information, which includes more than 500 million data points generated daily.
Now Moovit must prove it can convert that data into cash. The company says it is just now turning to monetization and won’t disclose reve-