Noting how critical public transport is to modern cities, the need to transform the sector to greener has become increasingly obvious even as residents go about their daily business. As a sector that is fundamental to how a city develops for the future has massive implications for the carbon footprint of a metropolitan hub. However, to ensure a greener approach, startup CitySwift on a mission in this space is poised to offer more resilience to transport operators.
Judging by the current economic climate, it should be borne in mind that the subject sector is one that is faced with a series of challenges – from energy hikes, driver shortages, and funding problems needed to meet the EU carbon goals and avoid congestion. With this, it’s evident, this is a sector that needs some tech to help build resilience in order to help operations run more efficiently. And this is what the subject startup aims to achieve. To lift this off the ground, the Irish startup has just raised $5 million to bring its Mobility-Intelligence-as-a-Service to global markets.
The fresh funding round of $5 million understood to be a Series A was led by Act Venture Capital in addition to the existing investors that include Mike McGearty, former CEO of CarTrawler, Enterprise Ireland, and the Western Development Commission, and Declan Ryan’s Irelandia Investments were involved. This brings the startup’s total funding to date to $8.5 million since its inception in 2016.
Going forward, the fresh fund will be used to fast-track the company’s expansion plans and fuel its goal to help the public transport industry build resilience against the aforementioned concerns such as energy hikes and so on. Having secured partnerships with the likes of Go Ahead Group and Transport for Wales in the UK, National Express, and the MTA in New York, now startup CitySwift is taking its tech global.
CitySwift co-founder and CEO ‘Brian O ‘Rourke’, commented: “This new era of CitySwift is one where we are focused on preparing our partners for a greener, cleaner future of mobility, by matching supply and demand across their networks now. CitySwift strongly believes the future is bright for public transport, and Mobility Intelligence is the key that will unlock attractive, efficient, and green public transport across cities globally”.
Mobility-Intelligence-as-a-Service Platform
The subject platform which was founded by ‘Brian O’Rourke’ and ‘Alan Farrelly’ is a big data startup poised to power bus networks across the globe by offering bus networks precise insights in order to enable each of the vehicles to quickly adapt and operate their networks for efficiency, profitability, and growth.
‘Brian O’Rourke’, explained: “Over the past decades, we have seen a significant shift in the way the world moves due to compounding crises such as climate change and the Covid-19 pandemic. Cities worldwide have become more congested, travel patterns have changed, the cost of living has increased and sustainability is now a key issue of the political agenda. These shifts have presented us with an exciting opportunity. The public transport industry must rethink its traditional ways of operating and shift its focus from supply to demand in order to optimize networks for the future – and data is what will unlock these efficient and optimized networks. Private operators and public authorities require data-enriched insights to inform them on how to best adapt and operate their networks to provide more efficient, reliable, and sustainable services”.
Meanwhile, CitySwift recently launched the Discover offering, which is a range of dashboards catered to different pain points across transport organizations. However, the new and upgraded product is already driving a massive spike in usage across CitySwift’s existing clients will help the company to realize its vision of reducing global emissions from the transport sector while supporting public transport networks to attract a good number of people to choose public transportation over private car use.
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