urban-mobility
(10)
Jason Marks Is Building a Truck for the Space America Forgot
A childhood crash, a pole-vaulting coincidence and one oversized dog led the safety engineer to ask a compact question: how much truck does a city actually need?
The Five-Minute Meeting That Built a Motorcycle Company
Xulei Xu walked into a university meeting as a suspected idea thief and left with his future co-founders. His career since has been an argument for complementary teams, affordable electric mobility, and the occasional strategic U-turn.
Chirag Jain
Chirag Jain is the co-founder and CEO of Get My Parking, a smart parking technology company he started in 2015 with Rasik Pansare after the two met on the Jagriti Yatra train journey across India. An IIT Madras graduate who spent two years in the automotive industry, Jain set out to digitize the largely unorganized parking sector with affordable, white-labeled, IoT-driven software. Under his leadership Get My Parking has grown to serve tens of millions of parking transactions across more than a dozen countries, raised multiple rounds of venture funding, and pushed into AI-powered products like license plate recognition and the AVA voice support agent. He was named to Business World's Disrupt 40 Under 40 in 2017.
Candice Xie
Candice Xie is the co-founder and CEO of Veo, the micromobility company she started in 2017 from West Lafayette, Indiana, while still in her twenties. A finance analyst by training rather than a Silicon Valley engineer, she built Veo into the first North American shared-micromobility operator to reach unadjusted EBIT profitability - reaching roughly $52 million in revenue on about $16 million of total funding, while competitors raised billions and flamed out. Calling herself an 'anti-tech bro' CEO and the 'tortoise' of the scooter race, she designs vehicles in-house, expands one city at a time, and won the largest exclusive micromobility contract in the United States with Denver.
Sam Richardson
Sam Richardson is the CEO of Volley Automation, a robotics and software company that uses AI-enabled automated guided vehicles to densify parking garages, fitting up to twice as many cars in smaller footprints. A former Hamilton College quarterback turned channel-sales and operations leader at companies like Hewlett-Packard, Fellowes Brands and SGS & Co, he now runs Volley from a 35,000-square-foot research and demo facility the company opened in Denver in 2026 after relocating from South San Francisco. Based in Nashville, he is steering robotic parking projects across New York, Tennessee, Florida, California and Massachusetts.
Som Ray
Som Ray is the co-founder and CEO of CLIP, a Brooklyn clean-mobility company that builds the world's first no-tools, plug-and-play device that snaps onto a regular bicycle's front wheel and turns it into an e-bike in seconds. Trained as an architect in New Delhi and New York and shaped by a stint in MIT Media Lab's Smart Cities group, Ray is a design technologist and serial entrepreneur recognized by MIT Technology Review's TR35 for an ultra-low-cost wheelchair. He started CLIP in 2018 after a steep Brooklyn hill made his bike commute miserable, and built the company around a simple idea: instead of throwing out the world's dormant bicycles, electrify them.
Ezra Goldman
Ezra Goldman is the co-founder and CEO of Upshift, a San Francisco-based company reinventing how city dwellers access cars. Rather than owning or leasing a vehicle full-time, Upshift members subscribe to a car that appears at their door when needed and vanishes when they don't - a fractional model that eliminates insurance headaches, maintenance costs, and the guilt of a depreciating asset sitting idle 95% of the time. Goldman brings 25+ years of shared-transportation obsession to the role, starting with a communist-themed campus bikeshare in 1999, through an MIT master's in urban planning, a PhD stint in Copenhagen studying why Danes ride bikes, and stints at City CarShare and ReachNow before building Upshift into a platform backed by MINI (BMW), Ford, and thousands of crowdfunding investors.
Regina Clewlow
Regina Clewlow is a transportation scientist turned CEO who co-founded Populus, the urban curb and mobility management platform that became the operating system for city streets - helping over 100 cities worldwide manage the explosive growth of scooters, bikes, delivery fleets, and autonomous vehicles. Armed with a PhD from MIT and deep research roots at Stanford and UC Berkeley, Clewlow bridged academia and industry to turn GPS data and curb regulations into digital intelligence for cities. Populus was acquired by IPS Group in November 2025, cementing its place as the infrastructure layer between cities and the mobility economy.
Marty Beard
Marty Beard is the CEO and Board Member of Hayden AI, the largest provider of mobile automated bus zone and bike lane enforcement systems in the United States. A serial enterprise technology executive with a track record spanning Oracle, Sybase, LiveOps, BlackBerry, and alwaysAI, Beard brings deep expertise in scaling AI and computer vision platforms. At Hayden AI, he leads a 190-person company backed by $246M+ in funding - including a $90M Series C - to deploy vision AI on city transit vehicles that detect lane violations in real time, improving bus speeds, reducing collisions, and making urban transit safer and more reliable across cities in the US and Europe.
John Zimmer
John Zimmer is the co-founder and former President of Lyft, the ride-hailing company he built alongside Logan Green from a carpooling experiment at Cornell into a public company worth $24 billion at its 2019 IPO. Known for his hospitality-school ethos and relentless focus on human connection over transaction, Zimmer spent 16 years transforming how Americans think about car ownership and urban mobility. After stepping down from Lyft's board in August 2025, he launched Yes&, a consumer company-builder focused on health, connection, and joy.