HopSkipDrive

Solving challenges in student transportation for schools and families

Company: HopSkipDrive operates a web-based transportation booking platform designed to offer ride-sharing services for children and teens. The company's platform allows school districts (the primary focus) and parents to pre-schedule routes for students with trusted, vetted drivers to shuttle them between home and school or other activities. HSD’s software gives schools a full view of their daily transportation operations while offering the control and flexibility which is lacking from a fleet of yellow buses.

HQ Location & Year Founded: Los Angeles, 2014

Founder: Joanna McFarland founded HopSkipDrive having witnessed first-hand the difficulty of securing safe and reliable transportation for her children whenever they’ve needed it. Previously, Joanna was an executive with OneWest Bank, AT&T Interactive, Green Dot Corporation, and WeddingChannel.com, among other organizations. She serves on the Board of LA-tech.org and the Marketplace Industry Association. Joanna graduated from the Wharton School at UPenn and holds an MBA from Stanford’s Graduate School of Business.

Funds Raised and VC Investors: $70 million from 1776 Ventures, 1843 Capital, Alumni Ventures, BBG Ventures, Energy Impact Partners, FirstMark Capital, Gaingels, GingerBread Capital, Greycroft, Halogen Ventures, Keyframe Capital, Maveron, OVO Fund, Pritzker Group Venture Capital, Skyview Capital Ventures, State Farm Ventures, The Artemis Fund, Upfront Ventures and Women’s VC Fund

• Where did the idea for HopSkipDrive originate?

The idea really started from a conversation among moms at a birthday party. Every one of us had transportation problems. There was the mom who got a new job on the west side and was freaked out about how she was going to get her kids home from school. There was the mom who had two kids who had dance and soccer at the same time. I was feeling very guilty telling my son that he couldn’t do karate because I had to way of getting him there on Thursday at 3:00. As a joke I said, we should all just put money in a hat and buy a van and hire stay-at-home moms in the neighborhood to drive our kids around. Everyone kind of laughed that off and my co-founder just looked at me and said yes. How do we do that? That’s how it started.

The three of us who started the business have eight kids between us. At the time they went to five different schools and were in about 20 different after-school activities and we were really struggling with this. We started meeting to map this out and from the very beginning it was all about, “What would it take for me to put my kids in these cars? How do we design something that we feel is safe enough for our kids? Is this safe enough and good enough for our kids?”

• What is the key problem that HopSkipDrive intends to solve?

HopSkipDrive got its start in student transportation by addressing special cases like kids in foster care, students with special needs, students experiencing homelessness, school-sponsored internships, vocational courses, mid-year moves and other situations where schools are mandated to offer transportation. From that wedge, schools began increasing usage dramatically into serving all student transportation needs and to solve bus driver shortages as HopSkipDrive is more cost effective anytime there are 13 or fewer students on a bus.

Having survived Covid school closures and revenue going to nearly zero, HopSkipDrive is helping school districts to solve the significant bus driver shortage and districts needing to adapt their solutions. Our solution is cost effective, climate friendly (school buses traditionally operate with less than 50% capacity utilization), and provide for time savings in commuting for thousands of student riders.

While it’s a smaller piece of our business, we also offer parents the ability to book personal rides for their youngsters, helping to solve a problem that is all too well-known to parents who are working or lack sufficient personal transportation due to financial or other reasons.

• How are you most differentiated as a service?

Where HopSkipDrive is unique, compared to any other rideshare service like Uber or Lyft, is through the vastly more rigorous vetting process that drivers must go through to ensure the safety and security of kids, alongside providing peace of mind for parents and schools. Drivers undergo very strict selection criteria, and the company provides real-time monitoring of every single ride to make sure that nothing is amiss. To date, the company has never experienced a critical safety incident. Furthermore, our software platform that is provided to schools helps to optimize transportation for students by determining where a HopSkipDrive ride is more efficient or cost effective than a school bus.

• What are the company’s key accomplishments to date?

HopSkipDrive currently contracts with over 400 school districts, covering over 13,000 schools in 20 markets and eleven states. Since hitting a near zero-revenue bottom during the peak of Covid, we have retained every single one of our school district partners and we grew by 3x just in the past year.

• What lies ahead in the plans for HopSkipDrive?

With little in the way of alternatives to traditional school buses, HopSkipDrive will continue to expand into new markets all across the country. The need for school districts to find more suitable transport options for their students, while controlling costs and carbon emissions, is a nationwide issue. On top of that, we are continuing to develop best-in-class tools that allow school districts to monitor and optimize their transportation offering and we have many features in the works that will be hugely beneficial to the schools that use our RideIQ software program.

Ron’s Take

HopSkipDrive is solving several relatable and acute problems for multiple constituents: kids, parents, school districts and school administrators, as well as providing income opportunities for a special class of caregivers, who might not otherwise choose to work in this field. As a parent myself, I have seen firsthand the challenges that parents go through in finding transportation without fail, in spite of a full load of work and other personal responsibilities. Moreover, schools must manage budgets, find enough drivers, curb carbon emissions, solve for individual cases, all while they have traditionally lacked much flexibility in doing all of this at once. HopSkipDrive is at the forefront of a paradigm shift that empowers schools and parents with the ability to make the best decisions for their kids and their communities at large.

Disclaimer: Alumni Ventures invested in the Series B round of HopSkipDrive in September 2019.