How UrbanThings is powering intelligent mobility

by Startacus Admin

London-based startup UrbanThings builds transit apps and smart-ticketing platforms that will make commuting that bit easier...

Everyone is online now. We have our faces firmly buried in phone screens for about 90% of our day, we get our news digitally, we communicate digitally, we book Star Wars tickets digitally. But despite this large-scale move from now-unnecessarily convoluted offline processes to online, a lot of things in our lives that could be made digital and online still haven’t been.

Only recently have we been able to do away with printed boarding passes for our flights and just hold out our phone to be scanned instead, but what about transport we use every day?

London-based startup UrbanThings builds transit apps and smart-ticketing platforms that will make commuting that bit easier.

Bus Checker is just what it sounds like: an app on which you can check instant, up-to-date arrival information for every bus. In London and many other towns and cities, this is real-time, live information, based on GPS receivers inside each bus. You can also see exactly where each bus goes with live, street-level route maps, and the app can plan your journey from A to B for you.

Ticketless is their government-backed smart-ticketing platform for public transport. It is an all-in-one solution for ticketing, journey planning, and real-time travel information, with m-Ticketing that works offline, real-time travel information and planning, and contactless boarding and check-in/be-out and be-in/be-out options. This means account-based ticketing, flexible fares and pricing, and support for pre-pay and post-pay models.

On the service provider’s end, the cloud-based backend gives an oversight of your entire operation as well as the ability to manage products, fleets, and customer relationships through deep insights. Because this uses customers’ own technology (their phones), it requires no costly hardware to be installed, nor printed tickets or travel cards, saving you money.

In October, UrbanThings announced that, over the summer, they raised £675,000 in funding. This round of funding will be used for customer growth and on-boarding additional customers for Ticketless.

The move to phone-based boarding passes has reduced hassle and stress for us at Startacus whenever we fly, and a similar move for public transport will make a lot of lives just that little bit easier.

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Published on: 27th October 2019