Remix, one of the startup that developed umschlüsselung software used by cities in support of transportation planning and on-road design, was born out of your hackathon during a Code with regards to America fellowship. Nearly nine years later, the San Francisco-based startup is being accrued by Via for hundred buck million in cash associated with equity.
Remix will become a subsidiary involving Via, an arrangement of which will let the startup maintain its self-sufficient brand. Remix’s 65 candidates and two of its co-founders — CEO Tiffany Chu and CTO Dan Getelman — stay on.
The liberal education adds yet another service to Via’s ever-expanding business as well as customer base of more than 350 local health systems in 22 countries.
Remix’s strength is in planning, although Via brings expertise when it comes to software and operations, Chu said in a recent employment interview.
“By going through those two strengths get together, we can be much stronger such as an end-to-end solution — in the initial genesis of this option around transportation planning and as well as carrying that through to procedure — in a way that we, nonetheless, would not have been able to discover otherwise, ” Chu talked.
Image Credits: Remix
Via started as a on-demand shuttle operator in 2012. The company, which last year hit a $2.25 billion valuation after raising $400 million in a Series E round, has evolved from its initial consumer-facing focus.
Today, Via’s core business is its software and operations platform, which is used by cities and transportation authorities to plan, schedule and deploy their own on-demand and fixed route transit, paratransit and school buses. Via has 200 partners in 24 countries.
Via is backed by Exor, the Agnelli family holding company that owns stakes in PartnerRe, Ferrari and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles as well as Macquarie Capital, Mori Building, Shell 83North, Broadscale Group, Ervington Investments, Hearst Ventures, Planven Ventures, Pitango and RiverPark Ventures.
Accidental founders
Remix’s Silicon Valley-esque origin story was driven by some unlikely entrepreneurs.
Chu had been a user experience designer at Zipcar when she moved to San Francisco to complete a one-year fellowship with Code for America. In the middle of the fellowship, Chu along her eventual co-founders Getelman, Sam Hashemi and Danny Whalen were working on a hackathon project that to help citizens of San Francisco suggest better transit routes to the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency.
The transportation planning tool was shared on Twitter and it went viral. Within two weeks, 30,000 maps had been created.
“It became this funny, unexpected armchair transportation planning tool that people explored online,” Chu recalled. But it wasn’t just the local citizenry who took notice. About 200 urban planners reached out, asking the team to build extra features that could be used by agencies for their own transportation planning projects.
“It was kind of a mind blowing moment for us when we realized the project that was supposed to be a grassroots kind of civic project actually had implications around solving real needs and problems in transportation,” Chu said.
Remix was founded shortly after and the company’s founders applied and were accepted into Y Combinator. The company < that href="https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/07/remix-picks-up-15-million-to-help-cities-make-better-decisions-around-transit/"> went on to raise a total of $27 million in investments of Y Combinator, Sequoia and in addition Energy Impact Partners.
