Meet the Israeli startup powering Uber's new public-transit option that's backed by BMW and Ashton Kutcher

• Uber Transit expanded in January to include Las Vegas and Denver, where users can book public transit tickets and plan trips that include public transportation.
• The routing and directions for Uber Transit are powered by Moovit, an Israeli startup that's made big business out of hyper-accurate transit data.
• Yovav Meydad, the company's head of growth, talked to Business Insider about how Moovit manages to supply data that's more accurate than what the disparate agencies themself provide.
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Public transportation around the world is a loose mesh of overlapping agencies running trains, buses, light rail, bikes, scooters, ferries, and more.

Even Uber - for all its billions in cash and thousands of engineers - seems to have recognized that building out the data feeds for schedules and routing in cities around the world, would be a massive task.

Instead, the ride-hailing giant turned to Moovit, an Israeli startup that's amassed more than 7,000 transit operators across 3,000 cities and 96 countries with one goal: directions from point A to point B. And in most cases, trip planning is more accurate than relying on official data alone.

"Public transportation is a very dynamic thing," Yovav Meydad, Moovit's head of growth and marketing, told Business Insider in a phone interview.

"Bus stops often get closed temporarily because of construction projects in the streets, and get moved a block or two away. We actually see that at any given time, about 10% stops are mispositioned in the database compared to reality."

Founded in 2012 in Israel, Moovit has racked up an impressive userbase and list of corporate clients, with a relatively small amount of venture capital. Backers include BMW iVentures, Intel's VC arm, Sequoia capital, and even actor Ashton Kutcher. As of its most recent 2018 round, the company was worth $418 million, according to PitchBook data, with $131 million raised from investors so far.

Meydad declined to share revenue figures or comment on Moovit's profitability, however he did say that sales revenue tripled in 2019 compared to the previous year. That growth has been fueled in part by signing on major customers in addition to Uber, including Microsoft, which includes Moovit's data in its Azure cloud stack for clients.

Most recently, it inked a deal with Cubic, which powers ticketing and fare collection systems in some of the world's largest metro systems, including London, New York, and San Francisco. That deal effectively puts Moovit in competition with Uber's other transit partner, Mosabi, which is powering the actual ticketing part of Uber Transit.

"If you don't, as a transportation application, have an accurate transit database, the trip plan you suggest to users and the step-by-step instructions will send them to places that aren't valid - to corners where the bus stops are closed," Meydad said. "If they're lucky, there might be a paper sign pointing to where the bus stop is located for the next to weeks."

To keep the Moovit database accurate, engineers "constantly refresh" public data feeds from transit operators, but verify and augment the sets data from its own users.

"That could be users actively indicating that a stop is closed or moved and they mark the correct location in the app," Meydad said. "Or it can be the data science techniques we use to identify, for example, if we have a critical mass of users on a street corner that they might be standing where the bus stop is actually located. We can automatically fix that."

Moovit's team, mostly based near Tel Aviv, Israel, is about 200 people, Meydad said. The company hopes to hit 300 total employees within a year with a hiring spree of engineers, salespeople, and data scientists. They'll all be working to accelerate the world's shift away from private car ownership.

"When we started, when I was brought in to build the product organization, we started with integrating public transportation," Meydad said. "Then ride-hailing started and we added Uber and Lyft, then bicycles and dockless bikes, scooters, carpooling with Waze, and so on. The goal is to shift private car users to public transportation and micro-mobility, which is good for everyone. "