Pointz- “Waze” For Bikes

Safety-focused mapping app for micromobility vehicles that leverages crowdsourced info.

The Problem

It is extremely challenging to find safe routes for micromobility riders. In the US alone, there are over 500,000 emergency room visits every year related to bike and scooter accidents according to the CDC. This is a major concern as 70% of the world wants to bike or scoot more regularly, but there is a lack of safety and accessibility.

What The Company Does

Pointz is a safety-focused mapping app that leverages crowdsourcing for improved user experience. The app navigates bike and scooter riders through safe routes in cities. Roads are rated on a 1–5 bike friendliness scale based on the rider’s comfort level. In order to provide value upfront, their team built the “Pointz bot” to identify complex sets of attributes from available datasets to pre-rate roads. Riders can add ratings to unrated road segments and suggest edits for roads that have been rated by the “Pointz bot.” In order to incentivize users to rate roads, they run monthly contests, which award prizes like Patagonia and REI gift cards to people who contribute a high volume of quality ratings.

Business Model

Pointz uses a freemium subscription model and will monetize premium features with a subscription. Premium features include saving and sharing routes, customizing routes (ex. elevation gain, type of vehicle), and uploading/downloading GPX files. Their second revenue stream is licensing crowdsourced data to delivery services (ex. Amazon/Postmates), operators (ex. Lime/Bird), and municipalities. Finally, once they have a critical mass of users using Pointz, they plan to incorporate location-based advertisements in the free version of app.

Traction

Since the Pointz app launched on January 13th, 2022, over 2600 riders have downloaded and used the app. They’ve been averaging 32% week-over-week growth in signups. Additionally, riders have rated nearly 10,000 roads throughout the US. Pointz participated in MassChallenge 2021 and has been featured in the Boston Globe and Bloomberg. Pointz raised a small pre-seed round of funding from Rogue Venture Partners in September 2021. They are finalists in the 2022 Brown Venture Prize and TCU Venture Competition.

Founding Team Background

Maggie Bachenberg was an Analyst Fellow at Franklin Advisory where she was heavily exposed to the world of venture capital and early-stage startups. She critiqued detailed financial projections for portfolio startup, evaluated over 150 startups, and conducted in-depth due diligence for a VC client. Maggie is a senior concentrating in Environmental Studies at Brown University and is an experienced bicycle rider. Trisha Ballakur is also a Brown University senior and studies computer science. She has interned as a software engineer for Adobe and NASDAQ. She began riding e-scooters recreationally when she got to Brown and has constantly felt unsafe while riding through College Hill. Additionally, Trisha has extensive experience as a full-stack software engineer with a specialty in database management, computer systems, and AI/machine learning. Both Trisha and Maggie will be working on Pointz full-time after graduation in May 2022.

What They Need Help With

Pointz is in growth mode and is looking for introductions to investors who invest in the consumer app space, mobility tech, or data-enabled solutions.Connect with the Pointz team.

Subscribe To Storied To Get More Startups In Your Inbox