When Azmat Yusuf moved to London, he found the complex public transportation network of England’s capital frustratingly confusing. So he created CityMapper, a free app that helps manage travel by uniting information various modes of transportation in one app to give users a holistic solution to plan their travel.
“I thought I was the only idiot that needed help, but it turned out a lot of people needed help,” Yusuf remarks. He dove into research, including a “voracious consumption of Ted Talks,” until he succeeded in creating an app to help navigate London. CityMapper has since taken off across the globe, from Tokyo to Boston.
CityMapper’s Global Success
CityMapper shares similarities with Google or Apple Maps except, as Yusuf explains, it is “less based on mapping and more on getting from A to B.”
The app uses private, public, individual, and shared transport data to find the quickest way for one to get around. This task can be tough in cities with complicated public transport systems. In 2013 the app won the Metropolitan Transport Authority’s App Quest competition, and New York Times writer Jonah Engel Bromwich raved: “CityMapper is, quite simply, the best travel app to be introduced in New York City.”
The app provides not only public transport information, but also ridesharing and bicycle routes. It even tells users how many calories the walk would burn. The app is quick and the instructions are clear, as well as available in a multiple languages.
CityMapper’s Founder, Azmat Yusuf, Successful and Reclusive
Despite his fast and growing success as an entrepreneur, Yusuf avoids the spotlight. Pakistani-born and US-educated, he moved to London to work for Google. But Yusuf soon set his sights on what would soon grow into a successful start-up of his own.
Yusuf nonetheless remains a bit of an enigma, mostly avoiding public talks and interviews. The entrepreneur is equally wary of investors, although that doesn’t stop them from investing. Almost $42 million has already been poured into the app. In a rare Tech Crunch interview, Yusuf brushed off questions of how the company will make money, arguing that CityMapper prioritizes “better utilization of the city[‘s resources].”
Although the experiment was not successful, CityMapper did attempt to launch its own bus system in London in 2017, which “adapted to user demand and changed route accordingly.”
While the CityMapper bus system ultimately failed, Yusuf wasted no time moving forward. Drawing a lesson from the attempt, he improved the tech in other other areas. “When you build a tech startup, you think you want to solve problems,” he explains,. “But at some point, you have to build scalable business models. We got caught up in trying to solve a problem, but we couldn’t really find the positioning that we could scale it with.” As a result, he launched the project’s latest development.
Azmat Yusuf Rolls Out “Pass”
Rather than creating a bus system, Yusuf turned his attention to the issue of ticketing on public transportation. CityMapper launched a subscription service called Pass that gives members discunted access to public transport in London. “This is the beginning of an era,” says the app’s Medium page. “Pass is on a mission for us: supporting public transport… Pass [also] helps out private transport partners complement public transport in multimodal cities.”
When asked if he would consider selling CityMapper to Google, Yusuf responded: “That’s boring. If you have the opportunity to build something that’s great and solve real problems, which we think we can, why would you not do that? Isn’t that the whole point?”
CityMapper is currently available in 31 cities, including 8 American cities, and is rapidly expanding to even more.
