Skedaddle, a Boston-based startup that lets people travel outside the city without a car by arranging bus-pools for folks going in the same direction, announced Tuesday it has raised $2.1 million. The funding was led by Arena Ventures, whose general partner Paige Craig was an early investor in Lyft, and included participation from Jason Finger, co-founder of Seamless (now GrubHub).
The funding comes several months after Skedaddle went national with its crowdsourced bus-sharing services. The venture now plans to transition into an app-only model come November. With the switch to mobile, Skedaddle hopes to boost repeat ridership and expand its user base, which will be the main use of the funding.
Adam Nestler, CEO of Skedaddle, told us, "We’ve already grown the team to 19. Last year when we met Paige, we were around seven or eight. So the funds will be used to scale. When we went national this spring, we opened it up on the supply side. We built the technology and the platform to be able to handle it. Now that we've figured out supply, our goal is to scale the demand."
Nestler said since the national expansion, it has quadrupled its user base and now plans to reach 400,000 riders by the end of the year. He told us they plan to continue growing its partnerships with events, like music festivals and sporting games. All of which is good news for its new investors.
Arena Venture's Craig said:
For me Skedaddle is about "Escape" - helping consumers escape the city and enjoy concerts, outdoor activities and events with new or old friends an hour or several hours outside the city. To do this they've built a platform that makes it dead simple for you to start or join a bus ride anywhere in the US. And on the other side, they're helping the fragmented bus industry make more money and operate more efficiently. Bus travel is the cheapest, cleanest and most efficient way for most consumers to travel a few hours out of town, but no one has successfully used technology to make it easy for the consumer or the bus operator. We're helping consumers and bus companies win, and I love these two sided marketplaces where everyone comes out better.
Prior to this round of funding, Skedaddle had raised $1 million in angel investments in February of this year.
This story has been updated. Image on file.
