Via acquires Citymapper 🚐 📍 🗺️ 💫
A genuinely exciting merger of two great transit companies
Transit software provider Via is acquiring beloved UK transit-planning app Citymapper, big news in urban mobility. I’ve covered a lot of mergers in my years reporting on startups and the gig economy, and this is the first I’ve been genuinely excited about. Via and Citymapper are both great companies doing important work on transit access and the future of urban mobility. It’s exciting to see them joining forces, especially after the future of Citymapper looked uncertain during the pandemic.
Via was founded in 2012 by a group of Israeli entrepreneurs as a driver-friendly competitor to Uber and Lyft. It operated on-demand ride-hail service in New York, Washington DC, and Chicago, with an emphasis on shared trips and carpooling at a time when other ride-hail players were focused on private rides. Unlike Uber and Lyft, which hired drivers as independent contractors and paid them an ever-changing commission on each trip, Via contracted drivers and paid them a more stable hourly rate. When New York City first argued for a pay floor for ride-hail drivers in 2018, Via was the only company that was already paying over the $17.22 minimum the city proposed.
Ride-hail, as longtime Oversharing readers know, is a tough business. It has thin margins and high operating costs, and has historically been subsidized by tremendous amounts of venture capital. For a long time those VC subsidies funded both sides of the market—the cushy app-enabled millennial lifestyle of the 2010s ($5 Ubers, fee-free restaurant delivery, impossibly cheap laundry service) and the decent rates being earned by ride-hail drivers. But as time went on the VC pipeline started to dry up, especially for companies that weren’t Uber. Driver pay dropped. Gig firms felt more pressure to turn a profit, or at least to convince investors they were trying.
Via was never a big ride-hail company by any metric and it lacked the ready access to VC funding of its larger competitors. So it wasn’t terribly surprising when Via suspended and then pulled ride-hail service during the pandemic, first from Chicago, then New York and DC. The first few years of covid were a difficult time for even the biggest ride-hail firms, with Uber leaning heavily on its food-delivery arm to get through a somewhat passenger-less period. Via shifted its focus to software partnerships with local transit agencies. A month before shuttering its consumer service, Via raised $130 million from investors at a $3.3 billion valuation, and you have to imagine ending the burn on ride-hail might have been a condition of that deal. Transit agencies also struggled after covid, but because those contracts tend to be long-term, they offered more stable and predictable revenue, as Via co-founder and CEO Daniel Ramot told Bloomberg in December 2021.
This is partly what makes the Citymapper acquisition fun: Via is getting back into the consumer game. London-based Citymapper is a cheerful green urban transport planning app with a cult following. There aren’t that many apps that people have passionate loyalty for, but people LOVE Citymapper. When I first moved to the UK, no less than a dozen people instructed me to switch to Citymapper, which they said was faster, better, more accurate, and more intuitive than Google Maps. As a London-residing Citymapper convert, I can confirm that it’s a better way of life. It’s not that Google Maps or any of the other journey-planners are bad, but that Citymapper does a whole lot of little things right.
For starters, Citymapper doesn’t just give you the various public transit options, it also tells you how much those trips are going to cost. This is particularly helpful when traveling in new cities or figuring out longer trips like to the airport, which can vary greatly in cost depending on what mode you take there. Another thing you might notice from the sample trip I’ve filled in above is that Citymapper gives notably longer time estimates for its trips than Google Maps. In my experience, Google tends to underestimate how long a trip will take, while Citymapper either overestimates or is spot on. The latter is preferable if you want to avoid the panic of realizing you’re going to be late because the journey took longer than you expected.
Citymapper also does a lot of nice things once you start a journey. These include telling you what section of the train to board (front, middle, or back) to be in position for the next step, and the best exit to take at a station. As any New Yorker could tell you, pre-walking your train and knowing which exit to take can shave valuable minutes off a commute, especially in a busy station at rush hour. Citymapper’s tips and straightforward interface help you commute like a local, even if it’s your first time on a transit system. It all adds up to a great user experience.
Despite its beloved status, Citymapper is also a startup and has faced your standard startup problems, namely losing too much money. In January 2020, Citymapper reportedly put itself up for sale after attracting takeover interest from several big technology firms and burning through millions of pounds of VC funding. The following year it raised £6.7 million in cash from, of all things, a crowdfunding campaign. Citymapper has tried various ways to make money: a mini-bus service, a ride-hail feature, an integrated multi-modal transit pass, ads, a paid premium tier with fancier routing options and no ads, and an enterprise software business. For the year ended Dec. 31, 2021, the latest for which financial statements are available, Citymapper reported a loss of £7.4 million on £5.1 million in revenue. That was a 17% bigger loss than it booked in 2020 on 6% less revenue, not the direction you like to see these things go.
Mid-last month, Via closed a $110 million funding round at a $3.5 billion valuation, about the same as its previous valuation (incidentally, this is also Lyft’s current market cap, thanks to an ongoing collapse in the company’s stock price). Shortly after that, reports emerged that Via was in advanced talks to buy Citymapper at a fraction of its £220 million valuation ($320 million) from 2016. Via hasn’t said the price of the deal, and declined to share details when I spoke with company reps today.
Alex Lavoie, co-COO at Via, said the acquisition will help Via bring Citymapper’s “best-in-class consumer-facing technology” to the cities and transit agencies it works with, but emphasized that Via will also continue investing in the consumer app. “We really think that to enable transit agencies and cities to have the best journey-planning technology, they need to be able to build apps that have loyal, large consumer followings,” he said. “Citymapper consumer is definitely staying around.”
Simply the best…in London and New York!