When Fareed Zein, CEO of Houston-based Unytag, first watched "King Richard," the 2021 biopic of tennis coach Richard Williams and his daughters Venus and Serena Williams, he and his wife cried. The film mirrored his own life — he and his wife raising four tennis-playing daughters that required them to take trips across the United States.
But he noticed one thing absent in the movie: The literal toll traveling on the road took. As-in having to navigate the more than 5,000 miles of disparate toll systems across the U.S.
“We spent literally about 12 years traveling across the country from California to Florida. Just about every weekend, we were on a road somewhere,” Zein said.
That's when Zein, a former Shell employee and immigrant from Sudan who retired to spend more time with his daughters, decided to put his time toward streamlining motorists’ experience through his app. Unytag, which is currently raising a $500,000 pre-seed round, will use those funds to do a pilot launch in December.
Once the pilot is complete, Zein said the company plans to begin rolling out its app in the second quarter of 2023 in Texas, followed by Oklahoma, Kansas and Colorado in following years.
Unytag uses a radio-frequency identification sticker attached to a customer’s mobile device, intended to make the process of going through toll tags more portable. The company's app will set up an account where customers can deposit funds that can be used to pay tolls for partner tolling agencies. Zein cited changes in the way people use transportation, such as through ride-shares, as well as changing the mechanism of toll payments in general.
“You're changing the paradigm that, instead of having the vehicle basically become the payer, then you the driver, now have a tag with you that you take on the road,” Zein said. “We manage payments for you with all the toll agencies nationwide, so you just basically drive and you may even be aware that you're on a toll road”
Zein said an added value proposition came from toll agencies themselves, and Unytag is working with Harris County Toll Road Authority to launch the company’s pilot. His team learned from toll agencies across the country that about 20% of toll agency transactions are from drivers that do not have tags, which are then labeled as “image transactions.”
Agencies then have to spend additional funding to identify the untagged vehicle and bill the driver separately, leading to revenue loss. Zein said Unytag’s planned partnerships with agencies would enable drivers to pay tolls no matter the agency, avoiding mailing bills to the customer and bridging the agency’s revenue gap.
On Nov. 16, the startup won $10,000 from The Ion’s Houston Startup Showcase competition. Zein, who brought Unytag to the Ion in September 2021, described the competition as a good way to learn pitching skills for investors.
Asked whether he believes Unytag will lead to a re-evaluation of tolling as a service, Zein said it was a matter of simplifying tolling interactions.
“The industry is moving into this new concept of mobility as a service, where you're able to move across different modes of transportation, and use the same app to, to pay for it,” Zein said. “Integrating with the overall mobility industry, that is the goal and making tolling easier to interact with.”
