(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- Azmat Yusuf grew up in Pakistan and Kuwait and has lived in New York, Singapore, and Washington without ever owning a car. But when he moved to London eight years ago to work at Google, he was flummoxed by the transit system, the maze of buses in particular. “I just thought, Why is it so hard to figure out?” he says. He decided to build an app to help himself out.
Yusuf started with Busmapper, which calculated the most efficient routes across town, and soon expanded it to include trains, subways, taxis, and bikes in its itineraries. Today, about 20 million commuters in 39 cities around the world use the app, renamed Citymapper in 2011. Whether you take a subway in Brussels, a streetcar in Toronto, a minibus in Moscow, a ferry in Amsterdam, or a bike in Seoul, Citymapper will efficiently get you to where you’re going.
“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 has so far routed about a billion trips, giving it an invaluable cache of data on how people ride public transportation. Yusuf is starting to use that to improve transit itself, starting with—what else?—buses. “Right now they’re kind of stupid,” he says. “They’re not really tied to demand. This is not the future.” Last summer, Citymapper began beta testing its own fleet of minibuses in London that respond to demand in real time, with trackable arrival times, tap-to-pay consoles, comfortable seats, and USB outlets. This was followed by CM2, a nighttime hop-on, hop-off service, and Black Bus, which isn’t a bus at all, but rather a partnership with the ride-hailing service Gett to operate shared cabs running on underserved routes during rush hour. In March the company introduced SmartRide, a carpool service it’s offering for a fraction of the price of Uber.
Any of these strategies could evolve into a way to monetize 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.”
To contact the author of this story: Arianne Cohen in New York at arianne@gmail.com.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Jillian Goodman at jgoodman74@bloomberg.net, James Gaddy
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