Announcing Our Investment in Zeelo
Changing the face of inter-city group travel and mass transit
Year end has been an exciting period for us at Dynamo and we’re happy to announce our investment in Zeelo as part of their £1.2M seed round. Zeelo marks our first investment into consumer mobility alongside global consumer mobility investor, InMotion Ventures (backed by Jaguar LandRover). Zeelo is founded by a best-in-class team focused on revolutionizing group travel and mass transit between cities.
We were first introduced to Sam Ryan (Sam), co-founder of Zeelo by our friend Sam Cropper at InMotion. Sam and his fellow co-founders Barney Williams, and Dani Ruiz are a “been there, done that” team who had founded, built, and sold a ride sharing business to Addison Lee just as Uber was entering the London market in 2014. The trio is battle-tested, has a deep understanding around consumer mobility, strong technology expertise, user acquisition skills and above-all, the ability to execute.
After a series of meetings, we loved the team but had to sharpen our understanding of the market and dynamics relevant to Zeelo’s strategy. This is where investors become disciples of their founders, coinvestors, and ecosystem stakeholders. The Zeelo team is focused on dominating the intra-city mass transportation market in the UK that’s estimated to be £45B opportunity that impacts 65.1M people. The team plans to expand service to the rest of Europe that we estimate to be £400B+ opportunity that impacts 633.8M citizens.
Zeelo operates a market place dynamic that serves people like you or I who are looking for a more timely and cost-efficient way of getting between cities and towns. Demand is then agregated and routes are stood but with the ultimate mode of transportation driven by a network of 20,000+ private passenger bus operators (6 seats and up). Private passenger lines traditionally operate at <65% utilization but are able to better match supply to demand and gain recurring routes on heavily trafficked but underserved corridors.
Speaking to the team’s thoughtful approach of building a valuable service for all parties, they have identified events (concerts, sports, et al) as their initial market to target innovators and early adopters. Since our the initial conversations with Sam and team, traction has been continually phenomenal. Feedback is extremely strong among passenger bus operators partners, event venues, and users. Operators are able to improve utilization and gain a more steady revenue stream from their assets, event venues are able to differentiate the fan experience while passengers enjoy a reliable, safe, and affordable journey. Passenger transport volumes are up 4–5x in Q4 alone, unit economics are improving, and increasingly, evidence points to users wanting to use Zeelo for routine transportation between cities and towns.
We’re extremely excited to support and partner with the Zeelo team to improve on the intercity transportation experience. This marks our first investment in consumer mobility in geographies where such solutions could have an order-of-magnitude impact on the citizens of cities and their neighboring suburban populations.
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