Transit software startup Via confidentially files for an IPO
Via has been batting around plans for an IPO for years. The company filed confidentially for an IPO in 2021, but never took the next official and regulatory steps to enter the public markets. Now, the company says it's ready. Its status as a confidential filing, however, leaves lots of missing details, including the number of shares to be offered and the price range for the proposed offering have not yet been determined.
When Via launched in 2012, there was little interest from cities in the software platform, co-founder and CEO Daniel Ramot told TechCrunch in an interview several years ago. The company initially used consumer-facing Via branded shuttles that users could hail. Over time, and using the massive amounts of data it collected through these services, Via improved its dynamic, on-demand routing algorithm, which uses real-time data to route shuttles to where they're needed most.
Today, Via provides the on-demand transit software for more than 650 cities in 30 countries, including San Francisco, Seattle, New York, Miami, and London. It also serves numerous small and medium-sized cities like Arlington, Texas and Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
Via last raised funds from private markets in 2023 with a $110 million funding round that pushed its valuation up to $3.5 billion. Via has raised a total of $1 billion to date from a long list of investors that includes BlackRock, Exor, Janus Henderson, Macquarie Capital, Mori Building, Shell, and 83North.
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2 hours ago
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Preston Thorpe is a software engineer at a San Francisco startup — he's also serving his 11th year in prison
If you omit some key details, all Preston Thorpe has to do to become a senior software engineer at a promising tech company is walk through the door. For about six months, Thorpe was a prolific volunteer contributor to an open source project led by database company Turso. His work was impressive enough that Turso's CEO, Glauber Costa, quickly offered him a job. That was also when Costa realized that Thorpe is anything but an ordinary programmer. 'I checked his GitHub profile, and he mentions the fact that he is incarcerated,' Costa told TechCrunch. 'It's a story I've never seen before.'It's true: Thorpe is serving his 11th year in prison for drug-related crimes. Still, he has worked full-time from his cell at a venture-funded, San Francisco-based startup since May. 'I reached out to him in January, just to understand and get to know him,' Costa said. 'Since then, I've had deep conversations with him about his change of heart that led him to be in the position where he is today …Knowing his story increased our respect for him personally.' Thorpe is part of an experimental program in the Maine state prison system that allows incarcerated people to work remote jobs from custody. Though unconventional, these opportunities have proven immensely rehabilitative. Kicked out of his home as a teenager, Thorpe resorted to selling drugs that he bought from the dark web and ended up in prison by the time he was 20. He got out a few years later, but with no money to his name and nowhere safe to live, he was arrested again 14 months later. 'I was a complete idiot,' Thorpe told TechCrunch over a video call from prison. 'I had given up on my life, completely written it off, and just accepted that this was my life and just had no hope.' Second chances Thorpe had given up, but chance had different plans. He was transferred from a prison in New Hampshire to the Mountain View Correctional Facility in Maine just before the pandemic struck, allowing him to rekindle hope anew. 'When I came to Maine, it was completely different,' he reminisced. 'COVID happened right after I came up here, and it just gave me a chance — there was no one around that I felt like I had to act or prove myself to. It was just me. I actually felt like maybe it's not over; maybe I could actually end up having a normal life. I had this kind of epiphany: 'I'm going to make something of myself.'' At the Mountain View prison, Thorpe enrolled remotely at the University of Maine at Augusta. Around the same time, Colby College wanted to hire one of its incarcerated graduate students to be an adjunct professor. It was an unconventional proposal, but the Maine Department of Corrections commissioner, Randall Liberty, felt like taking a risk. 'After consideration, I allowed that to happen, and over time, it's been very successful,' Commissioner Liberty told TechCrunch. 'His students are able to come visit him at the prison, and he can tour them around. It provides for a real diversity of opinions, thoughts, and backgrounds. It makes for a rich environment to learn.' Now, about 30 inmates, counting Thorpe, are employed while living in the Earned Living Unit, a less restrictive prison facility for inmates who have exhibited a long track record of good behavior. All inmates with remote jobs surrender 10% of their pay to the state, plus any other payments that may be required for restitution, legal fees, or child support. 'Maine has been a real groundbreaker in this area,' Haley Shoaf, co-executive director of Unlocked Labs, told TechCrunch. Unlocked Labs, where Thorpe worked prior to Turso, hires incarcerated and formerly incarcerated engineers to make educational software for use in prisons. '[Maine] put all this infrastructure in place during COVID to allow for remote education, and then once that infrastructure was in place, all of a sudden, it expanded the amount of opportunities people could take advantage of,' Shoaf said. Rehabilitation done right Commissioner Liberty has worked in law enforcement for 43 years, but it was only after he served in Iraq that his approach to rehabilitation began to shift. 'When I came back, it gave me a heightened sense of understanding post-traumatic stress and trauma, and all of that plays into corrections,' Commissioner Liberty told TechCrunch. 'I began to see the detrimental effects of just the trauma of incarceration, of segregation.' While he was the warden of the Maine State Prison — the same prison where he visited his father when he was a child — Commissioner Liberty began implementing programs that address the root causes of crime: substance use disorders, untreated mental health issues, educational deficits, and the like. 'I have to be able to explain this to people on the right and the left,' Commissioner Liberty said. 'When they hear that Preston is making the kind of money he makes, their jaw drops. And I say to them, 'If you truly care about making the community safer, if you care about being fiscally responsible, if you care about victims and survivors in the community, this is the way to make them whole.'' The United States criminal justice system is plagued by recidivism, or former prisoners' return to custody after they have been released. Repeat offending creates a financial burden on the state and its taxpayers. But Commissioner Liberty has the data to show it's well worth the effort and investment to expand access to education and addiction treatment. 'It's very short-sighted, ridiculous to lock them up and release them more traumatized than when they arrived, right?' Commissioner Liberty said. 'Many states have 60% return to custody rates. In Maine, we hover between 21% to 23% for males; women return at a rate of 9%. And if you attend college classes in Maine, you come back at a rate of 0.05% — you don't come back at all.' Commissioner Liberty has also found that under his purview, Maine prisons have become less violent. Last year, a maximum-security prison in Maine saw only seven assaults on prison staff, a dramatic improvement from 87 assaults in 2017. 'When you treat people like people, they become the best version of themselves,' Shoaf said. Thorpe himself is evidence that Commissioner Liberty's toils are proving successful. The software engineer takes full responsibility for his criminal history, but he feels like a changed man. 'It's like waking up from a dream, me from five years ago,' Thorpe said. 'All the memories I have of the streets and why I came to prison, it doesn't even feel like it happened to me. It feels like it happened to someone else.' Over the last three years, Thorpe says he has spent most of his waking hours online, learning everything he can about programming. 'He was doing this partially because he likes it, but also because he saw in this an opportunity to be seen. And he was right,' Costa said. In the open source community, where developers often can't put a face to a Discord or GitHub profile, Thorpe was treated like any other contributor. It was the first time in over a decade that he was able to strike a first impression as himself — a Linux-obsessed engineer who's interested in relational databases — and not as a criminal. 'The worst part about prison is that you assume this identity [of a criminal],' Thorpe said. 'Letting someone have a career gives you purpose.' Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
The Hill
3 hours ago
- The Hill
U.S. drops to lowest ranking yet on index of most powerful passports
The U.S. has dropped to its lowest ranking yet on the index that tracks the most powerful passports among countries, according to a new quarterly report released this week. The Henley Passport Index, which was formed by London-based consulting firm Henley & Partners, revealed in a Tuesday update that the U.S. has gone down by one spot in the world rankings, and now has the 10th most powerful passport worldwide. The report is compiled using data from the International Air Transport Association. The U.S. was first on the list in 2014. The U.S. passport allows Americans to enter 182 countries without a visa. Tied with the U.S. are Lithuania and Iceland. 'The consolidation we're seeing at the top underscores that access is earned — and must be maintained — through active and strategic diplomacy. Nations that proactively negotiate visa waivers and nurture reciprocal agreements continue to rise, while the opposite applies to those that are less engaged in such efforts,' said Christian H. Kaelinm, the inventor of the passport index concept. Singapore is still in first place, allowing its citizens visa-free access to 193 destination spots. South Korea and Japan share second place, granting 190 visa-free destinations to their citizens. Seven European Union (EU) countries — Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, and Spain — are in the third spot. Seven other EU nations — Austria, Belgium, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal and Sweden — are in fourth place, while Greece, Switzerland and New Zealand are tied in fifth place, according to the report. Afghanistan is at the bottom of the list with allowing visa-free access to 25 destinations. 'While international passport rankings may vary based on methodology, our focus remains on facilitating secure, efficient, and reciprocal travel for American citizens and foreign nationals alike,' a State Department spokesperson said in a statement to CBS News.
Yahoo
4 hours ago
- Yahoo
How a Y Combinator food delivery app used TikTok to soar in the App Store
The internet trend is simple: A friend or family member looks into the camera and tells viewers, in a slightly aggressive tone, that they are about to witness a presentation and that they had better be nice. That's what Kendall, the sister of Lucious McDaniel IV, did, and after she stepped aside, her brother pitched his company, BiteSight, a food delivery app that lets users watch videos of food before ordering. It also lets customers see what their friends have ordered and bookmark places to try out. The app plays on how young people engage with content — through short-form videos and recommendations from friends. McDaniel posted the video and went back to work. Fifteen minutes later, his sister texted him that their post was going viral. 'We were at 20,000 views in 15 minutes,' McDaniel told TechCrunch. Excitement came, but then chaos ensued as 'parts of our app started to break as we got more users.' The engineering team worked around the clock to keep BiteSight functional, while McDaniel took to making TikToks about the chaos, which ended up going viral, too. He said people loved the 'authenticity' behind seeing what happens when 'your app explodes overnight.' The video of McDaniel presenting this idea has since amassed almost four million likes on TikTok and a quarter of a million on Instagram, joining a trend of young entrepreneurs using TikTok and Instagram Reels to gain traction and deal flow. McDaniel told TechCrunch that the idea to make this video came after watching a friend partake in the same internet trend for his dating app. 'It got over a million views, and he suggested I try it for BiteSight.' McDaniel, who is 24, said he, like many young people, realized he was eating too much takeout, ordering from the same three places because he couldn't discover new restaurants on delivery apps. 'I'd hit this wall of identical-looking restaurants with stock photos, and somehow every place had 4.6 stars.' He started keeping a spreadsheet of restaurants he'd found on Instagram and TikTok, tracking actual reviews, and seeing what his friends thought about said places. 'When I realized other people were doing the exact same thing, my co-founder Zac and I decided to build something better: an app that actually reflects how we discover food today,' he said, referring to Zac Schulwolf, the company's CTO. McDaniel is no stranger to the tech industry. He previously worked at General Atlantic, where one of his main focus areas was restaurant technology. He previously founded a payments company called Phly, led product for a recruitment software, and has even angel invested in a few companies, including the fintech Mercury. McDaniel and Schulwolf, 25, spent over a year building BiteSight, including participation in the Winter 2024 cohort of YCombinator. They then did a limited beta around New York University in April. In mid-May, the company launched an early version and did a bit of social media marketing. In June, they made their viral video. 'What made our video stand out was that what we are building resonates,' said McDaniel, who is BiteSight's CEO (also known as chief eating officer). He added that 'it's clear that consumers, and especially Gen-Z, are ready for something that feels fresh and built for the way they engage.' After the video, BiteSight briefly became #2 in the App Store's Food and Beverage category, bypassing Uber Eats, Starbucks, and even McDonald's. McDaniel said the app also gained more than 100,000 new users and, though the app is only available in New York at the moment, people in other cities started messaging for a nationwide release. On the restaurant side, McDaniel said everyone from small family-owned spots to chain restaurants has reached out to partner and, of course, 'we've had a surge of investor interest from folks who see that this is where food delivery is going.' He declined to comment on the size of any upcoming funding deals, except to say he expects to have news to share soon. Of course, BiteSight has a lot of big, well-funded competition like DoorDash and UberEats. McDaniel believes, however, that being a startup in the age of AI will be his advantage. For example, while most of its competitors needed hundreds of engineers in their early days, BiteSight can work with AI tools that perform 10x the work of a human for much less of the cost. 'By using AI to avoid massive overhead and infrastructure costs, we can do much more with much less and pass on the savings to the small business owners and customers who need it most while still maintaining healthy margins,' he said. What also differentiates BiteSight is its focus on food and video, rather than other categories at the moment. 'We're trying to be the go-to app for the generation that discovers everything through social recommendations and short-form video.' Sign in to access your portfolio
