Montreal's Transit rebrands with app upgrade and $2.4 million in new funding

Montreal app developer Transit (formerly known as Transit App) has raised $2.4 million in new funding, led by new investors Accel Partners and Accomplice, with participation from previous investors Real Ventures and BDC.
Transit has also released version 4.0 of its app, which since 2012 has folded a wide variety of transit options into a simple “Point A to Point B” interface, including for rideshare car services, bike share stations, and public transit such as buses and subways.
The company’s app, which is available in more than 125 cities in 9 countries, was built with less than $1 million in seed funding, and currently sits in the Number 3 position for most popular public transportation apps in the United States, behind Google Maps and Waze, also owned by Google.
The new version of the Transit App, called Go, adds a lot of features above and beyond just outlining options for getting from place to place, including monitoring your walking speed to determine whether or not you’re going to make your bus, and changing your itinerary in real time if unexpected detours or delays crop up to make sure that you get to your destination on time.
“GO is the most advanced transit navigator out there,” writes the company in a blog post. “Our real-time trip planner makes it easier than ever to pick the fastest route. But these features are just the tip of our iceberg. (We’re Canadian. Our icebergs are large.)”
Transit is describing Go as “your new personal transit companion”, building in push notifications to alert you when the moment comes to leave your house and furthermore alert you when you’re about to reach your destination, meaning that not only won’t you be constantly scanning street signs to make sure you’re in the right place but you might also be able to grab a nap along the way, with the app promising to “wake you up with a luscious, robotic British accent.”
Transit has managed to achieve this level of real-time reliability by producing data themselves, which the company puts down to a healthy uptake by users, plus riding data, plus “math wizardry”.
They’ve also built their own computer-generated transit maps, which they claim are “markedly better than Apple’s and Google’s”, not to mention that the app works without bloat on your mobile device owing to the fact that Transit has developed a proprietary compression technology that shrinks transit data files by a factor of one hundred.
Transit remains the only multimodal transportation app that lets users buy bikeshare passes and unlock bikes through the app in five cities, a feature which they added in 2014.