In May 2020, Intel announced the purchase of Moovit, a mobility solutions as a service (MaaS) company known for an app that combined GPS, traffic, weather, crime and other factors to help mass transit travelers reduce travel times, along with time and worries.
According to a release, Intel believes that the combination of Moovit's data repository with the autonomous vehicle solution stack for its subsidiary Mobileye will strengthen Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) and help create a total addressable market of $ 230. billions for data, MaaS and ADAS .
Prior to becoming a member of Niantic's executive team, private investor Omar Téllez was president of Moovit for the six years preceding its acquisition. In this guest post for Extra Crunch, he offers a look at Moovit's initial growth strategy, its efforts to achieve product market suitability, and explains how rapid growth in Latin America has triggered the company's rapid rise.
At the end of 2011, Uri Levine, a good friend from Silicon Valley and founder of Waze, asked me to visit Israel to meet Nir Erez and Roy Bick, two entrepreneurs who had launched an application they called "the Waze public transport. "
By that time, Waze was already in conversations to be sold (Google he would finally buy it for $ 1.1 billion) and Uri was thinking about his next step. He was on the board of directors of Moovit (then called Tranzmate) and thought they could use a lot of help to grow and expand internationally, following the path of Waze.
At the time I was part of Synchronoss Technologies' management team. After Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank made us public in 2006, AT&T and Apple presented us with an idea that would change the world. It was so innovative and secretive that we had to sign non-disclosure agreements and personal non-compete agreements to work with them. Apple was preparing to launch the first iPhone and needed a system where users could activate devices from the comfort of their homes. As such, Synchronoss shares have become very attractive to capital markets and ours has become the best public offering of 2006.
After six years with Synchronoss while also doing some forays into entrepreneurship, I was ready for another challenge. With this spirit in mind, I boarded the plane for Israel.
I will always remember landing at Ben Gurion Airport. After 12 hours of travel from JFK, I was called to the forefront of the immigration line:
"Hey! The kid in the Moovit T-shirt, step forward!"
For a second I thought I was in trouble, but then the immigration officer said: " Welcome to Israel! We are proud of our startups and we want the world to know that we are a high-tech powerhouse, "before he gave me back my passport and greeted me.
I was completely blown away by his attitude and wondered if I really knew what I was getting into.
The opportunity in front of Moovit
At first glance, the numbers looked very attractive. In 2012, there were around seven billion people in the world and only one billion vehicles. Thus, many more people used mass public transport than private individuals, and users faced not only uncertainty as to when a transport would arrive, but also what might happen to them while waiting (for example, personal safety issues, weather conditions, etc.). Adding more uncertainty: many people didn't know the fastest way to get from point A to point B. As expected, mass public transport was a real nightmare for users.
Uri advised us to "fall in love with the problem and not the solution", which is what we tried to do in Moovit. Although Waze had spawned a new transportation paradigm and helped reduce traffic in big cities, mass transportation was a much larger monster consuming an average of two hours a day for some people, which means 37 days a day. year *!
What would you do if someone told you that in addition to your vacation days, an app could help you find 18 more vacation days next year, cutting transport times in half?
* Assumes 261 working days per year, 14 productive hours per day.
