🌐 Right on Schedule: Zum Brings America’s School Bus System into the 21st Century

So often we hear the refrain, “The system is broken.”

It could be our politics. Oversight of Wall Street. The college football playoffs and player transfer portal. Need a doctor’s appointment? The next opening is in three months.

Name a system, and it just doesn’t feel like it’s working how it should. It’s dispiriting, frustrating, and, at times, infuriating.

The problems seem to be getting bigger. Our ability to solve them? Slipping.

But every so often, someone comes along and says, “We need to fix this. I will fix this.”

Ritu Narayan, founder & CEO of Zum, is rising to the occasion.

The challenge? School buses.

There are 500,000 of them in America, transporting 27 million kids, our most precious cargo, to and from school every day. It’s the largest mass transit system in the country, 10 times the size of air travel, the second largest system, which transports 2.9 million people a day on 45,000 flights.

So, what’s the problem? 

Just about everything, but for starters, nobody knows where they are.

Today, we track every online shopping purchase, Uber ride, and food delivery. But the school bus, the vehicle transporting America’s future? Parents and school administrators are in the dark.

Kids riding the bus today have the exact same experience their grandparents had, only worse. 

School buses are chronically late, routes are inefficient, and the societal ripple effects are massive: missed class time, exhausted kids, parents leaving early or arriving late to work, and frustrated administrators. 

In just one example, in October 2022, New York City reported 14,500 monthly instances of late buses—with students arriving an average of 41 minutes late to class. While issues persist in NYC, it’s not alone; school districts in cities like Houston, St. Louis, and Washington, D.C. face similar problems.

I know this pain personally. My nine-year-old daughter’s elementary school is 2.2 miles away. Her school starts at 7:40 am. To catch the bus, she needs to wait outside in the dark at 6:30 am.

70 minutes to travel 2 miles. An early start time that offers only the slightest chance she’ll ever get the doctor-recommended 9-12 hours of sleep for children her age.

And why so early? Because the school district doesn’t manage its bus fleet effectively. Elementary school has to start before middle school, which has to start before high school. 

For all stakeholders involved, the issues feel local, so it’s hard to piece together just how much American society is imperiled by the old-fashioned yellow bus.

But when a system is broken everywhere, the damage stacks up.

Plus, the environmental and health concerns are just as troublesome. School buses run on diesel fuel, emitting a collective 8.4 million tons of carbon annually. The EPA identifies diesel exhaust as a carcinogen. For students and people living in dense urban communities, the impacts are multiplied.

The Startup Fixing America’s School Bus System Is Worth $1.3 Billion

Back to Ritu Narayan. In 2019, she and her company decided to fix this system—all of it.

With over a decade of Silicon Valley experience, developing and managing products at companies like Oracle, Yahoo, and eBay—and as a mom who understood student transportation frustrations firsthand—Ritu decided enough was enough.

Ritu launched Zum several years earlier as an “Uber for student transportation,” using technology to let parents track their kids’ rides and ensure drivers were thoroughly vetted. 

Then, the city of Oakland approached Zum with a bigger challenge: manage the entire school bus system. 

Ritu and her team seized the opportunity. Now, Zum is rewriting the rulebook for student transportation. 

Here’s how:

✅ A user-friendly app with real-time tracking so parents know where their children are and when the bus is coming.

✅ AI-enabled bus route optimization that cuts time, costs, and carbon emissions.

✅ Electric buses, including the nation’s first 100% fully electric fleet in Oakland, CA..

✅ Vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technology that enables EV school buses to feed energy stored in their batteries back to the grid during peak demand.

✅ Asset optimization, reducing the number of buses needed—for Oakland, Zum’s optimization efforts reduced the fleet from 136 down to 74 buses. 

✅ Zum-hired and managed drivers who receive real-time performance feedback to boost morale and keep the buses on schedule.

The result? Today, Zum is experiencing exponential growth.

Boston, Chicago, Kansas City, Los Angeles, Nashville, San Francisco, and Seattle—Zum has taken over their student transportation.

In just 5 years, Zum has scaled up to manage student transit for over 4,000 schools.

In 2023, Zum hit the Inc. 5,000 list of fastest-growing companies in America.

In 2024, the company raised a $140 million venture round, valuing the company at $1.3 billion and moving Zum into elite status as a climate tech unicorn.

This isn’t just about getting kids to school on time and cutting carbon. Zum proves you really can fix a broken system.

To do it, Ritu has led Zum on a journey to become more than a tech, logistics, HR, or infrastructure company. Zum has fixed the system by becoming the system.

Zum’s secret sauce?

1. World-class management: the team handles every detail behind the scenes so parents, students, drivers, and administrators have a seamless experience.

2. Collaboration at scale: Ritu calls it “inspiring the technology ecosystem,” and it allows Zum to rally schools, utilities, and communities to work together at lightning speed.

3. Empathy above all: Ritu and her team understand the issues affecting all system stakeholders —parents, kids, administrators, and drivers—and design intuitive software, logistics, and operational outcomes that transform frustration into delight.

Ritu joins Supercool this week to share how Zum is building the future by transforming the daily school bus ride into a smart, sustainable, and efficient system—for everyone.

You can find this episode of the Supercool podcast on Spotify, Apple, YouTube, and all other platforms.  

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Number of the week: 97%

That’s how many fewer parts electric school bus engines have compared to diesel engines, netting a 30-50% savings on maintenance costs each year.

Quote of the week:

“It has to be a painkiller. In our case, I have two children. That's the reason the company was founded. Every single morning and every single afternoon, you feel the pain. If that system doesn't work, nothing else works. You can't go to work. You can't take care of any other thing. Transportation directors used to tell us they would stay back till seven o'clock working on walkie-talkies till the last student was delivered safely. And in our case, they have everything on the tip of the mobile app and their systems.”

- Ritu Narayan, Founder & CEO of Zum

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Building The EV School Bus Future

Zum’s mission is to have electric school buses everywhere the company operates by 2027. Meanwhile, other U.S. school districts are accelerating EV plans, with some also going 100% electric.

In 2024, the small Pennsylvania steel town aptly named Steelton rolled out the nation’s first 100% solar-powered, electric school bus fleet. The town’s 1.7-megawatt solar farm provides energy for charging. Students enjoy a more comfortable, quiet ride, and the town’s air is healthier.

Highland, a startup focused on transportation-as-a-service and fleet electrification, also works with school districts. In 2021, Highland and Montgomery County, Maryland, partnered on a $169M deal, then the nation’s largest EV school bus contract, to provide over 300 buses.

Nuvve, a San Diego, CA-based startup, is helping school districts adopt EVs and Vehicle-to-Grid technologies, like Zum deployed in Oakland. Nuvve has projects up and running with school districts in San Diego, Durango, Colorado, and Troy, Illinois.

Coalition-Building As Climate Innovation

Building the low-carbon future takes more than cutting-edge technology and reimagined business models. It requires the ability to forge partnerships, build groundswell, and inspire people’s best efforts over long durations.

Those who succeed in building the future excel at it.

At Supercool, we consistently see this trend at play:

Zum: Inspiring the technology ecosystem

Operationalizing electric school buses is a massive infrastructure project. For Oakland’s school district, Ritu and her team acquired the buses from Chinese manufacturer BYD. Tellus Green Power provided the bidirectional chargers. PG&E, the utility, installed the necessary infrastructure to deliver 2+ megawatts of power to the bus depot.

Making all of that happen on time is mission-critical and incredibly tricky. Oakland represents the largest Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) EV school bus project in the country. Everything is happening at a scale never done before. 

V2G is an important revenue stream ($10K—$18K per bus annually) for Zum that makes buying and operating expensive EV school buses economically viable. It enables Zum to charge its bus fleet during the day when renewables like solar are prevalent, and energy costs are low. Then, in the early evening, when more fossil fuels are on the grid and energy prices are high, Zum sells its battery-stored energy back to the grid, effectively displacing fossil fuels and generating revenue.

Grimm+Parker Architects: Inspiring the building ecosystem

Amy Upton, Principal Architect at Grimm+Parker, described on Supercool how she and her firm led the coalition of designers, engineers, city planners, school families, staff, and administrators who came together to build two of America’s first net-zero energy schools, Holabird Academy and Graceland Academy, in inner-city Baltimore. 

According to Amy:

“It really is about getting more than just buy in. It’s getting enthusiasm and passion about the goals of the project from the top down and the bottom up, from every direction.

“It’s getting the excitement and leadership of Baltimore City Schools where they're like, yep, we want to take this next step. We think we can do it. Baltimore, we deserve a win. Being urban, a lot of times they're dealing with older building stock and less resources. And there's just constant systemic issues that over time affect their populations adversely. It was great to have that buy-in from the top. 

“We had a lot of extra meetings, even with every single facility person. We talked with them about how they respond to maintenance tickets and how we can make it easier for them…So making sure that everybody has that experience and enthusiasm or passion for doing a holistic, high -performance building.”

Today, solar panels on the roofs and geothermal tubes below the ball fields combine with a super-insulated building envelope to eliminate energy bills at these schools. Plus, students no longer strain to hear their teachers over the din of cars passing by on the adjacent I-95 freeway.

The result? Test scores are up. Absenteeism and detention rates are down.

City Threads: Inspiring the transportation ecosystem

Kyle Wagenschutz, a Partner at City Thread, is the nation’s leading expert on quickly constructing urban bike lanes. Over 70% of Americans want more of them. Cities proclaim plans to build them and then watch as execution gets drowned in a swamp of business-as-usual hold-ups.

In 2018, Kyle co-led the nation’s largest experiment, The Final Mile Project. The objective: work with Austin, Denver, New Orleans, Pittsburgh, and Providence to build safe, connected bike lanes in months, not decades. 

300 miles and 20 months later, they succeeded.

One key insight Kyle shared on Supercool: the team built a bigger tent of community support. The most important advocates were historically the least likely: car drivers who never ride bikes.

How? An approach that appealed to nostalgia and bygone days when streets and neighborhoods were safer, slower, more lively, and bikes had a place. 

In all three cases, inspiring the ecosystem is critical to building the infrastructure central to the low-carbon future.

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