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.

Substantial accomplishments to date

We launched live operations in October 2019 and are proud of what we’ve achieved:

Strong revenue growth - over 10x revenue growth between October 2019 and October 2020, and then another over 10x revenue growth between October 2020 and October 2021*.

Marquee B2B and B2G client roster - taking workers to the likes of Primark, Royal Mail and Waterstones on the private sector side, and helping transport students and staff between different University of Warwick campuses for the public sector.

Strong client satisfaction - the majority of clients are using Tandem across multiple locations

Social impact - more than £3.5m of wages earnt in roles people couldn't have access without Tandem through to end-September 2021 (assumes £9.50/hour increasing to £10.50/hour after September 2021; with an 8-hour working day on average).

Environmental impact - more than 20 passengers per Tandem vehicle compared to average commuter car of 1.16 passengers.

Investors - backed by leading VCs like Ascension and Sustainable Ventures.

2020 finalist for the UK Business Angels Association award category “Outstanding Resilience in a Challenging Time”.

*Based on unaudited management accounts

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.

Use of proceeds

Because we don't have to invest capex in our own vehicles (because we access the supply of our local transport partners with existing fleets), the majority of proceeds will be spent on growing our team. In particular:

a) We’ll hire our first dedicated business development team members, to expand our reach across the UK and begin preparation for international expansion when we raise our Series A round

b) We'll also expand our product and engineering team, to continue developing our technology, to help us sell to more B2B and B2G clients, and to make sure we're delivering a first class service to every single one of our passengers, every single day.