Via Co-founder and CEO Daniel Ramot recently joined the NYSE Inside the Ice House podcast to talk about how Via got started, what we've learned building transit systems in 40 countries, and where we're headed next. Here are the highlights.
When Daniel started Via with co-founder Oren Shoval, the idea was simple enough to sketch on a napkin: replace rigid bus routes with smaller, smarter vehicles whose routes change in real time. The execution required cracking some of the hardest problems in computer science, urban planning, and human psychology — not to mention convincing city governments that anything needed to change at all.
To understand why Via exists, you first have to understand what's broken about traditional transit. As Daniel explains it:
"Public transit historically really depends on buses and trains — large vehicles that run on fixed routes. They really depend for their success on very large numbers of users all traveling in the same direction at the same time."
That works brilliantly in dense urban cores. But most of America doesn't look like Midtown Manhattan.
"Most parts of the United States look very different from a major city. There's not as much density. If you try to run a bus through those neighborhoods, you end up with what we have in a lot of parts of the United States today — very inefficient buses. Nobody's riding them. And then as a result, you can't afford to run them very frequently. So you run them even less frequently, once an hour perhaps, and then even fewer people want to use them."
Via's founding bet was that data and software could break this cycle. The insight: smaller vehicles with dynamically generated routes — what the industry now calls microtransit — could serve the same demand more efficiently than fixed-route buses.
Before writing a single line of algorithm, Daniel and Oren needed data. They found it in an unlikely place: New York City's taxi GPS records.
"New York City had installed these credit card readers in yellow cabs in order to make sure people weren't cheating on the fare. They tracked GPS location so they could compare the fare at the pickup and the drop-off. So they collected, at the time, about half a million trips every day. Over years they'd collected tens of millions of trips where they had the data of the pickup and the drop-off."
Via filed a Freedom of Information Act request. On day 30 — the last possible day — the city responded.
"We got a bunch of DVDs in the mail, which is pretty cool, with all this data."
The team analyzed millions of pickup and drop-off pairs and ran simulations to ask: if instead of taxis, we built a dynamically routed mass transit system, would it work? The answer surprised them.
"We discovered that we could serve that demand with a lot fewer vehicles than taxis that were available, and that you would get a very large amount of sharing — people in the same vehicle at the same time going in the same direction."
Armed with compelling simulations, Daniel and Oren tried to share what they'd found with the transit agencies that needed it most.
"We started to try to get in touch with these transit agencies and cities and say, 'Listen, we think we have something really interesting here. Would you like to pilot it?' We literally could not get a meeting. When people understood that what we wanted to talk about was dynamically routed transit, they either cancelled the meeting or hung up the phone. People thought this was the dumbest idea they'd ever heard."
The pushback was pointed: agencies told them their routes would end up looking just like existing bus routes, because operators already knew where people wanted to travel. But the data said otherwise.
"We were seeing people who were traveling along routes that don't look anything like the bus system. And those routes could be very efficient — there are lots of people trying to travel along them."
So Via did what the agencies wouldn't: we launched our own service in New York City to prove the concept, eventually running a fleet of Suburbans repurposed as dynamic shuttles.
One of the most unexpected things we discovered while building Via was how much human psychology shapes what makes a good transit experience — often more than speed or efficiency alone.
"People are very funny in the sense that we could take you up the Westside Highway, wherever you're going, even if it's not the fastest route, and you might be very happy with that because you feel like you're going in the right direction. If we start to take a different route that may be faster but goes in the wrong direction at the beginning, people really don't like going in the wrong direction. They immediately think we're doing it because we're trying to pick somebody else up."
Timing matters too. Early in a trip, riders are forgiving about detours to pick up additional passengers. But as they approach their destination, that patience evaporates.
"As you get closer to your destination, you get increasingly irritable about these detours. The anticipation of arriving, I think, happens when you get closer to your destination."
Over years of operation, we tracked a key metric: for every trip taken, what was the probability a rider would request another? That question drove the team to study how people perceive their travel in ways that most transit planners simply never had.
Beyond the algorithms, Daniel is driven by a larger argument about why public transit matters — one that goes well beyond convenience.
"Today the average car buyer is 50 years old. Younger people just cannot afford to buy. For a used car, the average repair is close to $1,000. If your car breaks down, you need to really ask yourself, 'Will I be able to pay rent if I have to spend $1,000 on this repair?' And if that car is the only way you can get around, you might lose your job if you don't have a car."
The stakes aren't abstract. Research has found that for every dollar invested in public transit in Chicago, $11 in economic activity is generated. But the real transformation happens when transit is good enough to attract choice riders — people who could drive but choose not to.
"That's what we have here in New York. If you look at the subway, there are lots of people who could probably afford to drive or take a taxi, but they choose to take the subway or the bus. And that's when I think we create great cities. One thing that's common to the greatest cities in the world is they all have great public transportation."
Via's ambition goes far beyond adding microtransit vans to a city's fleet. Our goal is to put every mode of transit — fixed-route buses, paratransit for people with disabilities, and microtransit — onto a single unified platform.
"You as a rider can open up your app and say — you don't really care. Is it a bus? Is it a microtransit vehicle? You just want to go from point A to point B in the best way possible. You don't need to worry about 'How do I pay for this? And then when I get on the bus, how do I pay for that? Do I have change? Do I have a MetroCard?' All these silly things we'd have to deal with in the past. You just want to do it all in one seamless way."
For cities and transit agencies, the unified platform offers something equally powerful: the ability to analyze an entire network and reallocate resources rationally.
"You've been running the same bus routes for decades, but maybe the population has shifted. The places of employment have changed. People are working from home post-COVID. The whole dynamic may have evolved in a way that these bus routes may not necessarily be the most efficient. Let's remove those bus routes, replace them with the microtransit solution, run buses only where you really need them and try to run them as frequently as humanly possible given your budget — and then we'll bring people to them with the microtransit system."
When it comes to autonomous vehicles, Daniel is measured but optimistic. The technology has matured meaningfully, but cost remains a real barrier to public transit deployment at scale.
"Realistically, unless you are a company that is developing one of these systems and willing to invest in it, actually utilizing it in the public transit context is probably still, for the very near term, at an experimental or pilot stage. Our expectation is that over time the cost curve will come down very significantly, to the point where maybe in certain circumstances — maybe in all circumstances — it's much cheaper to use an autonomous vehicle."
Via's approach is to stay vehicle-agnostic. We provide the orchestration layer regardless of whether the driver is human or not.
"The driver can be a human or a robot. From our perspective, in some sense, from a technology perspective, it shouldn't really matter. We're just orchestrating that network."
As the cost curve comes down, that flexibility positions Via to help cities do more with the same budgets — and serve more people in the process.
We recently launched Via Labs, an AI initiative aimed at helping municipal governments access modern technology for challenges well beyond transit. For Daniel, it's a natural extension of the trust we've built with cities over the years.
"We go into a city and we meet with the mayor and then all of the senior decision makers. We sit together — the fire chief, the police chief, the county clerk, the city administrator, the person responsible for building permits, the person responsible for zoning permits — and we're really trying to understand all of the problems they have and what we can quickly spin up for them that will help them solve a real problem."
Building for government has historically required enormous custom engineering investment. AI changes that:
"Today with AI, we can build things much faster and we can make them agentic, which means the tool kind of learns all these customizations that you want. We don't have to tell it in advance what it needs to do. So we can build in these new verticals in one city and then take it to other cities very rapidly."
When Daniel describes what success looks like for Via, he reaches for something larger than market share or revenue.
"I truly believe that local government has to work well for people. Their main interaction with government is at the local level. And when local government doesn't work, people start to lose trust in government in general. They start to feel the system isn't working for them. And I think that's what leads a lot of people to the extremes when it comes to politics."
We've already seen this play out in West Sacramento, where annual surveys measuring public trust in local government — which had been declining — began to turn around after Via launched its microtransit system there.
"The residents can see something being delivered to them that's very visible, that's fast. This is not an infrastructure project that takes years. An elected official can decide to do this within weeks to a few months, and you see the results on the ground."
The vision, ultimately, is a world where the private car becomes optional rather than obligatory.
"If we can have a system where you can show up in any city in the world and have access to an outstanding way to get around without having to rent a car or own a car — simply through whether it's an app or some new technology that allows you to plan your journey and pay for it — and we have a mix of these very efficient modes, that starts to displace cars. People need fewer and fewer cars because the system is so great. That would transform every city in the country into what I consider to be great cities."