Zūm Grows With $40 Million in New Funding and Expands Into New Markets

When I founded Zūm four years ago, I saw the need for a child transportation service that brings more freedom, choice and career opportunity to working mothers and parents—many of whom have long been disadvantaged due to an outdated school transportation and childcare system that requires them to step out of their jobs for the 3 p.m. school dismissal pickup line. Parents should never have to make the choice between advancing their careers or taking care of their children.

Zūm’s mission is to become the world’s safest, largest child transportation provider for school districts and working families. Since its inception, Zūm has seen exponential growth: we’ve signed over 150 school districts and expanded service into Los Angeles in 2018 alone. Zūm offers more freedom to parents and school districts while driving funds back into critical areas like classroom materials and extracurriculars.

Today we are excited to announce our $40 million in Series C funding from new global investors BMW i Ventures (lead), NGP Capital, Volvo Cars Tech Fund, Draper Nexus, and Clearvision along with our existing investors Spark Capital and Sequoia Capital. I am excited to welcome Dr. Ulrich Quay of BMW i Ventures to Zūm as our board observer.

In the early days, my brother and co-founder, Vivek would be on the road to hire the drivers, he would manage the rides from his diary and take all customer support calls from parents and drivers. I would get parents to sign up for the service and work late nights on the design of our website, app, and technology.

In 2017, our journey got accelerated when Bryan Schreier from Sequoia Capital led our Series A (first on the right in the picture below). Bryan was hyper focused on numbers, business model, and unit economics. But what he cared most was about people and culture. He has drilled these values in how we make every decision at Zūm.

In early 2018, we were joined by Nabeel Hyatt from Spark Capital for our Series B round. From the get-go, we could see Nabeel is an entrepreneur at heart and was drawn to our mission and the scale of the hard problem we are solving. Since then, our team has tripled in size, the number of schools we are serving has quadrupled, and our revenue from those schools has quintupled. We added amazing leaders to our team from Google, Amazon, Uber, and Alibaba and built a strong foundation to scale our culture while preserving our values of - being customer focused, doing things the right way, thinking big and executing meticulously, and building better communities!

Today Zūm is serving 80 percent of California’s student population, and we plan to expand even further into outside markets to increase our presence throughout the country. With the support of such knowledgeable investors who understand the space and see the unique value Zūm provides to parents and school districts, our team is taking an exciting next step towards changing communities for the better.

Zūm will be using this new funding to better provide value, flexibility and structure to school districts’ outdated and expensive transportation systems. As part of these efforts, we are growing our team with even more mission-driven forward thinkers who are passionate about our company and the change it is bringing to today’s schools and families. Right now, we are hiring for over 40 positions including launch managers, account executives, engineers, product managers, designers, operations managers and city success managers, and expect to double the size of our team by the end of 2019. These funds will also help us to enter our first non-California markets this year, with a plan to double our footprint by 2020.

Additional investment dollars will be put toward the advancement of Zūm’s technology and user-facing products to bring delightful, safe, reliable, and efficient rides to schools and students. With the amount of money school districts can save on student transportation with Zūm, well-placed funds create a positive ripple effect for students, parents and faculty. 

Our company is ultimately rooted in a dream for societal progress. When students get a ride to school that is personalized for them, it can improve their entire day from start to finish, so they feel more relaxed and ready to learn upon entering the classroom. We are committed to opening up possibilities for parents especially women. I am honored to have the support of incredible investors and team members who believe in what Zūm does and the future of the company. We invite you to join in our journey!