Ride-sharing service Zimride announced today $6 million of series A funding through the Mayfield Fund, and are boasting their "innovative social transportation" model will revolutionize transportation systems. The service allows drivers to "sell" space in empty seats in their cars, making it an organized casual carpooling system.
Car-pooling has grown and changed over the years. It's no longer just for co-workers sharing a ride to work, and several forms of casual carpooling have developed such as the sluglines system in Washington DC. Unlike a completely casual system like sluglines (where people wait at designated locations to catch a ride with the next passing car), Zimride participants connect through Zimride to either locate passengers or rides. The rider pays a fee through Zimride, which lets drivers earn some money from the otherwise empty seats in their car.
The company aims to transform the transportation infrastructure through integrating ride sharing and social networks.
For example one could imagine this undermine the use of mass transit systems by giving drivers and riders an option to connect through the Zimride network.
The effect of ride sharing is to increase the proportion of people per car on the road. This reduces fuel usage, reduces the land area required for roads, reduces parking lot space required for cars, and more. In short it has the potential to dramatically reduce the negative environmental impact of our current single-person-to-a-car orientated system.
Zimride got its start with universities, and it is a key resource on over 120 university and corporate campuses across 30 states.
“Since launching, we’ve made significant strides towards meeting our original vision—to create a low-cost, community-powered transportation system for road trips and regular commutes,” says Logan Green, co-founder and CEO of Zimride. “We plan to use this new round of funding to significantly scale our networks, build out new markets and expand product functionality.”
Casual carpooling carries some risk to driver and passenger, in that not everybody out there is trustworthy. Zimride attempts to solve this concern by requiring each participant to have a facebook account. Riders and drivers connect to Zimride using their facebook account, and secondly verify they are employed with participating corporations or universities. This gives several level of identification that both riders and drivers can use in evaluating whether to offer or take a ride.
Zimride "is addressing a multi-billion dollar market opportunity by building new transportation infrastructure in a country where 75% of the seats on our highways remain empty,” says Raj Kapoor, Managing Director Mayfield Fund. “We are proud to ‘share the ride’ with Zimride’s founders as they not only have the passion to create a massive successful enterprise but also a strong desire to make the world a better place through collaborative consumption.”
See:
Zimride Funding Will Change Transportation One Seat at a Time
Passenger Density: Shared Transport, Carpooling, Mass Transit
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