Via’s Tiffany Chu on the importance of govtech for planning mobility ecosystems

Tiffany Chu, SVP of Via and co-founder and former CEO of Remix, had been working in user experience design at ZipCar when, in 2014, she decided to take a year off for a fellowship at Code for America. With her background in architecture and urban planning from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Chu had always been fascinated by the way transportation acts the lifeblood for built environments as a whole.

It was at this gathering of tech-minded individuals looking for ways to bring government into the digital age that Chu met her future Remix co-founders. Chu and her team built a simple grassroots transit planning prototype that helped suggest better routes to San Franciscans. An urban planning blog featured the project and it went as viral as a mapping and routing tool for public transit could.

Soon, Chu and her team were fielding requests from transit agencies that had ideas on how to make the tool even better, and unexpectedly, Remix was formed. The following year, Remix joined Y Combinator, raised a $2 million seed round and brought the Oregon Department of Transportation on board as its first customer. In the years that followed, Remix kept gaining momentum, and a total of $27 million in funding, until it garnered the attention of Via, an on-demand shuttle service and TransitTech provider.

Via acquired Remix in March for $100 million, which enabled the company to provide Remix’s suite of planning tools to city and transit agency partners and expand its role in the mobility ecosystem.

Today, the reach of the original Remix platform is extended even further as part of Via’s over 500 partnerships across five continents.

We sat down with Chu to discuss the proliferation of govtech, why cities need to be proactive about new forms of mobility, and how the private and public sectors can come together to create a comprehensive mobility system.

The following interview, part of an ongoing series with founders who are building transportation companies, has been edited for length and clarity.

TechCrunch: Remix started at a hackathon at Code for America, and then you went on to Y Combinator. How important were these institutions?

Tiffany Chu: Code for America was super important for us, because it brought together a bunch of like-minded, civic-oriented people who basically raised their hands and said they’d take a pay cut from their typical midcareer tech jobs to pursue public service for a year.

When we decided to do Y Combinator, that was really important to us, because none of us, with the exception of Dan Getelman, my CTO, had co-founded a company before. So we didn’t know the first thing about running a business, much less running an enterprise, government-focused, B2G business. YC really gave us the business fluency and literacy we needed and connected us to other founders in highly regulated industries like healthcare and edtech that had to go face similar hurdles. I think we may have been the first ever govtech or civic tech company that YC invested in.

Govtech and civic tech are not something you see a lot of in Silicon Valley. What do you wish the startup world knew about this kind of tech and the applications it can be used for?

What’s special about this space is that it’s the intersection of a customer base that will always be around. Governments rarely go out of business, so there’s a very direct, targeted customer base that makes it clear who your product needs to serve.

And then there’s kind of this other side of the Venn diagram that is not so prevalent in other lines of business, which is that if you serve a local government, chances are you’re doing something good for the public. So then you get to this intersection of being able to create a really strong business as well as being able to do something that has social impact, which I think is fairly rare.

What about the returns that venture capitalists want? Is there space for unicorns in the govtech world?

Definitely. If you look at the govtech industry over the last two years, you’ll see a flurry of M&A activity that we probably hadn’t seen before. I think it’s because all these younger companies that have started in the last decade are suddenly maturing, and some really amazing exits have happened.

I think what’s also really interesting is that government is this very legacy type of customer, and there are places that will always be ripe for innovation. The number of cities and agencies we’ve talked to that have just started figuring out what cloud-based services are is mind boggling.

Do you feel like a lot of your job is just helping governments with ancient tech make it into the 21st century?

100%. I have this slide that I’ve been using for seven and a half years now that just explains what software as a service is, and I have to bring it out at almost every customer meeting.

What are some of the main challenges that cities are coming to you with?

The resounding echo of city needs is how to do more with less, and this “less” is a combination of a variety of factors. For example, COVID decimating public transit ridership is one version of “less.” Another is people just buying more cars, and as a result, ridership isn’t as high, and then people are not thinking of transit as a viable option. Another one could be federal funding continuing to be a little bit unknown, and in the U.S., there are many states that don’t even have state funding for public transit. So just very underfunded systems.

Cities come to Remix and Via to find out how to hit transit goals they’ve set and deliver more with less resources. That might look like reallocating service to more high-ridership, high-capacity routes, and maybe cutting some lower-performing routes, which is always excruciatingly painful for the community.

Then the question becomes how do we fill in those gaps? Maybe we deploy a more flexible, on-demand system, or maybe we deploy micromobility for first- and last-mile connections. A lot of plugging in the gaps and using technology to help decide where resources go is probably the biggest reason why cities and agencies come to us.

What kinds of trends are you seeing in the autonomous vehicle space?

We have already started partnering with a lot of AV companies in our deployments. For example, we’ve partnered with May Mobility in Arlington, Texas, which was previously the biggest city in the U.S. without a public transit system. Now they have a legit transit system run by Via that includes a number of autonomous vehicles in partnership with May Mobility.

We’ve taken a fairly agnostic approach to AVs, which we believe is prudent, thinking about all the new technologies and our future. So I think AVs will play a role, but we have to be very careful that it doesn’t play the role of increasing single-occupancy vehicles and instead harnessing AV power to lower the cost for operating public transit and shared vehicles.

I guess that’s the risk associated with the Teslas and Xpengs of the world that are focused on reaching autonomy for private passenger vehicles. How can cities try to combat that?

I think it starts early. You have to start now to think about what kind of prioritization you want to give to what kind of vehicles, and we’re already seeing some strides made in transit priority. For example, 14th Street in New York near Union Square has transit lanes that prevent cars from driving down them, and San Francisco has a number of transit lanes that got accelerated during COVID. But that’s very much in the minority, fringe cities.

If cities are not careful about how they’re prioritizing their right of way, it will be very easy for hundreds of thousands of Teslas to have the same level of priority on the street compared to a bus or a shuttle carrying many more people. So I think that’s a level of prioritization that the government should be taking into their own hands and considering carefully.

Are they, in your experience?

I see it in very traditional ways, like, for example, the HOV lanes that a lot of highways have. But I think we need to take it up a notch and use that same mentality when it comes to streets in the middle of our city. If you want to take it to the extreme, congestion pricing is a very powerful tool that hopefully will come to the U.S. soon. New York first, maybe San Francisco second. I know Seattle and LA have some funding to study it. But I think ultimately, we should be pricing our roads based on the most value, as opposed to just anybody who has a private vehicle to take advantage of them.

My inbox is flooded with smart city startups delivering mobility tech that would require a city to make infrastructure updates. I get the feeling that no cities are doing this because they don’t really have the funding or the motivation.

I can’t say I disagree. There’s always been a lot of buzz around smart cities and Internet of Things for which I think people from a tech background get really excited about finding an application. But the question is, is there a problem to be solved that the city identifies as a problem before you can propose your solution as a solution to a problem that maybe they don’t think is a problem?

What about flying cars and urban air mobility? Are you helping cities with data to help them determine a good place for an eVTOL port? Are any cities proactively looking at this?

If I look at all the plans in progress from our customer cities in Remix, I have never seen an eVTOL port being designed or planned. I have seen much more boring things such as protected bike lanes, transit-only lanes, safer, fully protected intersections with protected bike lanes going through them in addition to pedestrian paths. I see that all the time. I have not yet seen an eVTOL port.

What’s it like to be the SVP of a subsidiary? How has your work life changed, if at all?

It’s been really fascinating to watch another leader lead their company — to watch Daniel Ramot be CEO and operate at a much larger scale than we had been at. We were about 70 people at Remix, and Via now has almost 900 people, so it’s just an order of magnitude larger with an order of magnitude larger projects and deployments and revenue and customer relationships that they’ve built.

It’s been really fascinating to merge our teams and combine forces in a way that helps both of our go-to-market strategies while still continuing to drive our business and our product. So a lot of my time has been spent thinking strategically about how Remix fits into Via and where we can dial up our collaboration. And one of those areas is actually the new on-demand planning product we launched that plans both on-demand and fixed route transit together.

Where do you think the Remix platform will be a year from now?

Now that we’re with Via, I can confidently say that we’ll be well on our way to being in over 1,000 cities. We’re in around 500 now, and I feel the momentum and the trajectory already happening just because now we’re a part of a bigger company with more resources and more global reach.

I would like us to be in more cities that have a range of potential. I think our tiniest contract is with the island of Saipan in the Northern Mariana Islands, and they have like two shuttles. Our largest customer right now is probably London or New York.

I also want us to be in even bigger cities in terms of transit ridership. I want us to be working in Mexico City, Jakarta, Hong Kong, Taipei, all these places that move millions of people per day. I think that’s the way we can have the most impact at a global scale.