Meet Swoop

Founders: Amir Ghorbani, Peter Evenson and Ruben Schultz

Location: Los Angeles, CA

#WhoWhatWhy

Who they are:

Swoop is a group transportation and experience company designed to connect people with a variety of transportation options and curated experiences. Whether you need group transportation for business or pleasure Swoop has the tools and resources to make it a seamless experience.

What they are fixing:

As most of us know group transportation services are outdated. Finding the correct vehicle, a reliable driver, and getting questions answered is near impossible with the transportation services that are available today. Swoop is building technology that helps both the vehicle operators and user experience. They are bringing technology to an industry that has barely used or relied on technology in the past.

Why we invested:

Our team loved that the founders have deep family ties in the transportation industry. They know first hand the problems the industry is facing with the lack of technology and are ready to make it better for everyone in the industry including their own families. We were also very impressed that Swoop brings efficiency to both consumers and enterprise. Signia is excited to support Swoop’s journey in transforming the group transportation industry.

Meet the Founders:

A few thoughts from Amir, Peter and Ruben

What’s the Swoop story?

Amir Ghorbani, Co-founder & CEO at Swoop, grew up in the transportation business — his parents own a small transportation company in Los Angeles. In 2016, when Amir was consulting at Deloitte, he began helping out his parents on the side. Amir noticed that everything at their business was being managed through pen and paper — their rides, dispatching, order intake, the management of their customers. He wanted to see if this was common across all operators so he attended the largest private transportation conference in Las Vegas. Amir soon validated his assumption; the industry was fragmented and the use of technology was limited or non-existent.

Soon after, Amir left his job at Deloitte, built the first version of the app and recruited his friends Peter from Microsoft and Ruben from Facebook. The team quickly realized that existing vehicles were heavily underutilized (at a staggering average usage of only 4.9%). They realized the future for Swoop wasn’t in actually owning vehicles but in building a platform to maximize the usage rate of affiliate vehicles.

Now Swoop is tackling the $40B industry head-on. Swoop focuses on building tech for the vehicle operators that allows them to run their business, e.g., process bookings, dispatch their rides as well as enhanced driver and vehicle technology. As a lead acquisition channel for their supply side, Swoop has also built one of the largest group transportation marketplaces that operates internationally. Here they work directly with businesses (e.g. Google, AirBnB, PwC), event planners along with some high-end customers that are looking to book any type of group travel, whether it’s a party bus, coach or charter bus.

What Amir, Peter and Ruben are most excited about?

As founders who have been so close to the industry, we are most excited about making the entire group transportation experience accessible to everyone, transparent and affordable. We feel that customers have been drastically underserved in the past and the industry has been stagnant. Try booking a charter bus yourself — it really sucks. Tackling this opportunity with first principle thinking, and starting from the technology the industry uses to manage rides, is incredibly powerful.

We are also excited about making the SMBs lives easier, Amir’s parents included. It’s incredibly rewarding to provide these SMBs with improved technology while increasing their vehicle utilization. Seeing so many vehicles sitting around 95% of the time is an inefficiency you can’t excuse. All of us at Swoop are working passionately to solve this problem.

Book your next group transportation with Swoop.