Portugal-based Ubirider has secured a USD 1.95 million Seed round to fuel the development and expansion of its End-to-End Mobility-as-a-Service platform. Ubirider, a mobility fintech company and creator of Ubirider Platform, a digital Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) platform for transport providers, riders and cities that helps move people, information, and payments seamlessly, announced it has closed a seed round of funding co-lead by Techtree Investments.

Existing investor Grupo Barraqueiro also participated, as well as two angel investors Jose Santos from the United States and Andrés Alcalá from Colombia. The USD 1.95 million raised will be used to grow the company internationally and expand the product development and marketing teams to bring open mobility and banking through innovative contactless payment solutions to transit riders and operators everywhere. Driving digital transformation in transportation With more than 11.4 million transactions on the Ubirider Platform, Ubirider has demonstrated the high demand for digital and open-loop ticketing (use of contactless bank cards or smartphone wallets) by transport providers and cities.

Open-loop and MaaS capabilities deliver added value to riders by offering a seamless travel experience, enabling contactless payment and travel with a smartphone or a bank card. Data Bridge Market Research forecasts that the global mobile payment technologies market will reach USD 2 trillion by 2030, and is expected to undergo a CAGR of 37% during the forecast period. Officials from Ubirider said that facing the COVID-19 pandemic was challenging to say the least for a company focused on the mobility market, but their team and their sole investor (at the time), Grupo Barraqueiro, believed in their mission and persevered to create a complete, flexible, and robust mobility platform.

The positive customer feedback they’ve received drives them to continue innovating to enable a convenient, seamless travel experience for riders, but also to offer agencies of any size an affordable and powerful digital platform that will maximise operational efficiency. Strategic partnerships with Mastercard, Deloitte, Payshop, Viva.com, and others fosters significant advancements in digital payment solutions for more efficient and sustainable transportation. Collaborative advancements in public transit technology With the help of Mastercard, Ubirider has been able to successfully deploy its innovative platform with contactless payments in various public transit agencies in the Portuguese cities of Lisbon, Evora, Faro, and Beja.

Those implementations, combined with the implementation of the Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) platform of the city of Cascais has resulted in nearly 300,000 registered users and 2.1 million tickets sold. Strategic partnerships with Mastercard, Deloitte, Payshop, European technology bank Viva.com, and others are enabling Ubirider to be one of the most innovative players and to continue growing its customer base, delivering a sophisticated MaaS platform to serve both riders and transit operators. The Ubirider Platform is augmenting open-loop ticketing and payment systems.

Ubirider is not only making the transportation experience better, more integrated, and simpler for people, but it is also enabling transit and mobility operators to gain meaningful real-time data and insights into travel trends that will enable them to be nimble enough to adjust their networks to satisfy citizens’ and business’ needs, all while being more sustainable. Ubirider has built the mobility-as-a-service app Pick for riders and the cloud and smartphones-based Ubirider Platform for agencies. The mobile app Pick allows users to plan door-to-door travel, pay, and ride to all destinations, everywhere, using a convenient transport combination.

It is available in the Apple App Store, Google Play, and Huawei AppGallery. Finally, the company debuted new branding with an updated company logo and new logo for the mobile app Pick. .