Moovit Dominates Canadian Transit App Market
Tel Aviv-based Moovit is Canada’s foremost public transit app, having grown from covering 25 cities to over 50 in the past four months alone.
The app, which provides users with a simple platform for planning routes and tracking live traffic reports, is leading both Transit App and City Mapper in the number of cities covered within the country. Moovit is also the most used transit app internationally, with over 28 million users across 800 cities.
Lindsay Cumming, PR Communications Manager for the approximately five-year-old company, says the major contributor to Moovit’s global success has been its volunteer community.
“With the help of our Community editors, we’ve been able to launch in over 100 cities that we otherwise would not have had access to data for,” says Cumming.
The most recent example of this was Moovit’s launch in Durham, Ontario, where community editors Jordan Hollingsworth and Brandon Côté mapped the Durham Region Transit (DRT) system, making it the first community-mapped city to launch in Canada.
“When I tell my bus-riding friends about the app and they report back on how easy it was for them to use, and how it makes riding the DRT effortless, I find it all incredibly rewarding,” Côté remarked in the recent announcement of the new map.
“It also makes me hopeful that many more of the 650,000 residents in Durham will consider using the DRT, now that we’ve taken the guesswork out of it for them.”
The pair used the startup’s proprietary editor platform to map the system, helped remotely by a Moovit Community team member.
The community program, which was launched in February 2014 and has since produced 100 new locations with volunteers numbering over 30,000, has allowed the company to scale to a large size extremely fast. Cumming notes that continued expansion in Canada and North America is a goal for 2016.
“Some of our community members in Ontario are working diligently to map even more cities in the region,” she adds.
Another of Moovit’s goals is to monetize their exceedingly popular platform.
Says Cumming, “It’s something we’re looking to experiment with more as we continue to grow.”
Cumming cannot disclose any exact details on what those experiments might look like, but with such a large and growing user base the platform has high revenue potential, a fact which was not overlooked by investors during the company’s Series C round of funding. Led by Nokia Growth Partners, the round brought in $50M for the company in January 2015.
