Ride Tandem

Idea

Introduction

Our mission is to connect people with job opportunities, key services and social connections by building a new, more flexible form of public transport.

Public transport is broken outside of big cities. It’s expensive, it’s unreliable and with over 3000 bus routes cut in the last 10 years in the UK alone, it just doesn't get people to the places they need to go. In many towns – not least those the government talks about wanting to ‘level up’ – this even includes the ability to go to work.

Our technology turns existing taxi, minibus and coach fleets into smart, shared shuttles. We call on their fleets when needed but incur zero costs and create no emissions when they're not.

We’re growing through a B2B2C approach, selling services to businesses who are struggling to recruit people because people literally can't get to where those jobs are, often in out-of-town warehouses or business parks where there's no public transport at all.

Monetisation strategy

The financial risk in launching new services is ‘underwritten’ by our B2B/B2G clients. We collect passenger fares through our app and if the sum of those fares is less than the total cost of running the service (including Tandem’s profit margin that is added on top) then we invoice the B2B/B2G customer for the difference.

For example - assume cost of one of our route services is £530/day (after accounting for the normal cost of our transport partner's service and Tandem's profit margin on top). Passengers are charged £5 for a return trip. If there are for example 100 passengers across two shifts per day, then £500 of passenger fares would be collected, meaning that the underwriting client like an employer would pay just £30/day to cover the remaining shortfall.

The underwriting model also means that clients have a strong incentive to market Tandem’s service to the passengers.