Announcing Coord’s Series A
When I was a kid, I was obsessed with cars. I drew pictures of cars, I dreamed of designing cars, I left cars all over the house for my parents to step on (sorry, mom and dad). My dream became a reality when I had the opportunity to work at BMW’s R&D center in Munich. I then went on to live in Boston, San Francisco and New York, and the more cities I lived in and the more I was exposed to the challenges of urban living, I realized that my childhood passion had expanded. It was no longer about cars themselves, but what cars enable: mobility. I developed a new obsession, which was trying to figure out a way to make living in and getting around cities easier. The question was how.
That’s why Jacob and I and the rest of the team have spent the last two years developing Coord; because we’re driven by the idea of an open platform combining information, analytics and transaction services to transform transportation in cities and make it easy to reach valued destinations and unlock a city’s possibilities.
Think of the potential for job opportunities, cultural experiences and social connections when we can help people and goods get from point A to point B, seamlessly.
So today, it’s with a lot of excitement that we’re announcing Coord’s $5 million Series A funding, led by Alliance Ventures, with additional funds coming from Trucks, Urban.Us and DB Digital Ventures. This is a group investors who, like me and Jacob, see the opportunity to transform the mobility market, and with their support, we’ll be able to accelerate the development of mobility solutions in cities throughout North America and beyond.
Over the past year, we’ve already created a robust suite of self-serve APIs that allow software developers to integrate up-to-date data about transportation infrastructure and services. From helping ride-hail drivers locate a legal curbside pick-up or drop-off zone, reducing tickets and accidents, to enabling commuters to identify the most efficient multi-modal routes, incorporating real-time transit information and bike-share availability, to helping a car-share service bill members for tolls in real-time, giving people a better sense of the true cost of their trip, we’ve been building a new digital layer to the mobility market that makes our travel experiences more efficient, seamless and enjoyable.
Now, we’re going to take the next step in our work. Not only will we continue to enhance our APIs and geographic coverage, but we are also going to build a bridge between the private and public sectors.
The disruption seen in today’s mobility market is unparalleled. As much as I’ve always loved cars, the single occupancy vehicle is no longer a sustainable model for city transportation. And if you’ve spent time in San Francisco, New York or Los Angeles in the past five years, you know many cities are at a breaking point. As a result, new players, technologies and transit options are appearing almost daily, vying to be the unicorn solution to our cities’ growing transit problems. But these companies, as innovative, impactful and important as they are, cannot do it alone. Instead, they must work together with the public agencies of the cities in which they operate to find sustainable solutions.
And that’s where Coord comes in. Our goal is to help the public and private sectors speak the same language when it comes to urban transportation. While many private companies are not well integrated into existing transportation systems of today, we believe that end users will ultimately demand interoperability across all of the systems in a city. To that end, we are driving standardization of transportation-related data across cities.
We’re passionate about making cities more livable, and as a technology company, we believe the best way we can do that is by building digital
infrastructure that helps mobility services integrate with cities. If we succeed, everyone who lives in or visits a city will have access to transportation that’s safe, efficient, and pollution-free, allowing them to maximize the benefits of that city. That’s our vision, and we’re very excited to have this new funding to help us realize it.
