Sam Ryan

The commute, as a business model

Zeelo is a smart bus platform. That is the sentence Sam Ryan has been saying, in various forms, since 2016, and it is the sentence that has now attracted roughly $56.5 million in venture capital, most recently a $23 million Series B that closed in June 2025. The pitch: a lot of people go to work or school, most of them are not knowledge workers with a laptop and a flexible calendar, and their commute is the single largest determinant of whether they keep the job. Zeelo runs the shuttle. Zeelo owns the software. Zeelo does not, in most cases, own the bus.

The company describes its addressable universe as "frontline workers of household brands" plus independent schools. That is: distribution centres in the Midlands, food-processing plants in the American South, boarding schools in Sussex, retail hubs off the M25. These are places where the commute is a logistical fact, not a lifestyle question, and where a well-run coach service is worth roughly what a signing bonus is worth. Zeelo's dashboard lets a corporate transport manager see who booked, who boarded, where the vehicle is, and how much CO2 was not emitted because those forty-nine people were not driving forty-nine cars. It is, in the technical sense, a SaaS company. It just happens to be a SaaS company whose product depends on a driver getting to a depot at 4:37 a.m.

Ryan is 30-something, British, a University of Leeds graduate with a degree in accounting and finance, which is not the degree one would predict for someone running a transit tech company. He was named to Forbes' 30 Under 30 Europe list for Technology in 2022, won European CEO of the Year in 2023 for what the judges called a "game-changing contribution to sustainable mobility," and was included in the Boston Business Journal's 40 Under 40 in 2024, by which point he had moved to Massachusetts to build out Zeelo's US operation. He is one of those founders whose LinkedIn location is a bit of an ongoing negotiation.

The JumpIn exit

Before Zeelo there was JumpIn. Ryan and his co-founder Barney Williams built it while they were still students at Leeds - a ride-sharing app aimed at other students, the kind of undergraduate project that most people abandon when finals arrive. Theirs did not get abandoned. In 2014, Addison Lee, one of the largest private hire operators in London, bought it. Ryan was 22.

The instinct after selling a first company is to raise a bigger round for a bigger version of the same idea. Ryan and Williams did roughly the opposite. They spent two years thinking about what had actually annoyed them in the first place, which was a specific complaint: coaches to big events - festivals, matches, stag-dos - were overcrowded, unreliable, and priced as if unreliability were a feature. The frustration transferred cleanly from consumer ride-share, where the market was already crowded, to enterprise transit, where it was not. In 2016, with a third co-founder, Dani Ruiz, they started Zeelo.

Course-correcting, not pivoting

Ryan has a small philosophical position about pivoting, which he articulated in a 2022 EU-Startups interview and has repeated since. The word "pivot" implies drama and reversal, which he thinks is misleading. The more accurate word is "course-correcting," which implies that the destination has not changed and only the heading has. Zeelo's early years contained a lot of course-correcting: from events to corporate shuttles, from corporate shuttles to frontline workers, from a two-country operation to a three-continent one, from selling seats to selling programmes.

The other thing he tends to say, which sounds less quotable but is probably more operationally important, is that hiring is the leverage. "A good hire was as much about values and cultural fit as it was about experience," he told the same interviewer, and it is the sort of thing a founder will only insist on after they have hired someone with the wrong values but the right CV and had to unwind it. Zeelo's headcount is now around 160, split across London and Boston, with engineering in Node.js, React, Python, and dbt - a fairly normal SaaS stack for a company whose product is, once you strip the software back, a bus.

What Zeelo actually does

The product, described plainly: a company - say, a large UK grocery chain, or a US school district, or an independent boarding school - has a transportation problem. Its workforce or student body lives across a scattered set of postcodes. Public transit does not connect these postcodes at the hours in question. Building a private shuttle network in-house requires depot management, driver scheduling, safety compliance, an app for the passengers, an app for the drivers, and a client dashboard for the customer to see whether any of it is working. Zeelo does all of that on behalf of the customer, partnering with operators for the vehicles themselves. The claim on the tin includes: real-time vehicle tracking, dynamic route adjustment, demand forecasting, sustainability reporting, and support for the transition to electric fleets without the customer having to buy the electric buses themselves.

The last point is the one Ryan seems keenest on. "There are no infrastructure costs," he has said of the electric transition, "as it's possible for our clients to make the switch to electric buses." That is: Zeelo can pass along the greening of the fleet as an operator-side capex event, not a client-side one. If you are a large employer with a sustainability report and a shareholder who reads it, this is a useful thing.

In his own words

Small facts, useful context