Jaguar, Renault-Nissan Invest In Commuter Mobile App Transit

Transit, the startup that helps city dwellers navigate life and move about the city without a car, just raised $17.5 million in venture funding.

In a blog post, the transit startup company said the investment was led by Alliance Ventures, a joint investment arm of Renault-Nissan-Mitsubishi. Christian Noske of Alliance Ventures will join the board as part of the investment. Joining Alliance in investing in Transit are InMotion Ventures along with past investors Accel and Real Ventures, the company said in the blog post. Calling the $17.5 million “a lot of money,” Transit said it will use the proceeds to double down on all the projects it is working on including adding deeper integrations to make car-free transport more discoverable, expand the integrations to more services, push for more cooperation between modes of transportation and continue to be a rider platform for its transit agency partners.

While it may seem strange for the VC arm of a car maker to invest in a startup that encourages life without a vehicle, it does come in the era of car and scooter sharing.

“Over the last six years, Transit has built the best platform for getting from a-to-b without your own car. We started by tackling a simple problem: making it easier to check departure times for buses and trains. Since then, we’ve expanded to 175+ cities, added myriad features, and helped millions of daily users complete billions of trips,” the company wrote in the blog post. “We’ve also expanded Transit’s scope to tackle a much bigger problem: Can we make car ownership in cities obsolete? Bus schedules weren’t the answer. But they were a start. While better transit info is proven to boost ridership, it still doesn’t improve transit service on the ground. Which explains why you’ve seen Transit launching so many new partnerships with the people in charge of transit service. We’re now the endorsed app of some of North America’s leading agencies: from Boston to Silicon Valley, Montreal to Baltimore, and dozens of others worldwide.”