How this SaaS product uses data to improve employees’ daily commute

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This article is part of Tech in Asia’s partnership with The Jay Kim Show where we publish the revised transcripts from the show’s podcast interviews with top entrepreneurs. This is heavily revised from the original show transcripts. For the full interview, go here.

Rich Schmelzer is a serial entrepreneur and startup veteran. He’s based out of Boulder, Colorado and is currently the CEO of Commutifi.

Schmelzer’s company has created a mobility-as-a-service platform, which helps companies and large organizations optimize commuting for their employees. The platform captures real-time data and generates recommendations based on the most time-, cost-, and carbon-efficient ways to commute. The data can then be used to boost ride sharing, reduce traffic, parking, and emissions.

I spoke with Schmelzer to learn more about the technology.

How did you come up with the idea for Commutifi?

The basic idea is we want to help commuters get to and from work more easily and in a cost- and energy-efficient manner.

I came up with the idea because I was involved in a corporate wellness product—we were trying to get families to work out more. The concept of corporate wellness is the company carries your insurance policy, so the premiums are lower and you’ll be incentivized to stop smoking, walk more, or lose weight. And that model works really well. Today, it’s an US$8-billion-a-year business.

Commutifi is kind of the same thing. We do commuting wellness, so we analyze how you get in and out of work and whether you are doing it in the most time-, cost-, and energy-efficient way. And if you’re not, we give out incentives so you could try different things to improve your overall health score for your commute.

We attach real-time (or near real-time) data to your corporate wealth score and commuting modes. Whether you’re traveling on an Uber or a Lyft, driving your car and parking every day, or jumping on a bike, we aggregate those commuting modes and normalize the data so enterprises can understand their employees’ commute.

How did you pull your team together?

I met my lead tech guy, Esteban Sanchez, who I’ve been working with for about five years now, at a wellness company we were working on before. Tomas Jablonski has been my in-and-out CTO for 20 years now. I met my UI/UX guy, Brady Becker, through Techstars when I invested in two of his companies. He ended a thing when I was starting this, so we were able to actually work together on this.

Joel Christensen has a transportation and parking background because we need that expertise. We also have a bunch of programmers and designers.

How does the platform work?

We usually touch base with chief sustainability officers and corporate social responsibility officers. We go in and show them the tool. They then push out our tool for free to all their employees, and their employees answer a few quick questions. Then, we render a score for the enterprise and bring that score back to the company and say, “We see that you have a 53 out of 100. Here’s why, and here’s where we think you can save time, cost, and energy to improve this score.”

We then ask to sign a contract with them, so it’s a freemium model. It’s a SaaS model of a few bucks a head per month. Once they say yes, they push out a series of recommendations that are mostly automated through our system. And each employee gets their own dashboard, including the maps on how they get to and from work and all the plans that they could sign up for.

The dashboard has a separate page, so there’s no app to download. We don’t believe employees should ever have to download an app because they already have too many. I don’t know what it’s like in Asia, but there’s an app fatigue here in the US.

What are you particularly excited about for this year?

What’s one startup advice you could share with other entrepreneurs?