Enterprise carpooling startup Scoop just closed a $60 million round led by Activate Capital, with participation from Goldman Sachs, NGP Capital, Total Group, BNP Capital and others to fuel its expansion and growth. This round brings Scoop’s total funding to $106 million.
Scoop, which launched back in 2015, is a corporate carpooling service that works with the likes of LinkedIn, Workday, T-Mobile and more than 50 other companies to help their employees get to and from work.
With Scoop, trips are pre-scheduled, so you can select from one or more times you’d be willing to leave in the morning and afternoon, and have up until 9pm the night before for morning trips and 3:30pm the day of for afternoon trips to schedule your ride. After the deadline, Scoop’s algorithms work to automatically create the most efficient carpools based on routes, detours, company preference, favorites and more.
Currently, Scoop operates in more than 2,000 cities across six major metro areas, including the San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle, Portland, Reno and Los Angeles. To date, Scoop has facilitated 7 million carpool trips.
Scoop is not the only, nor the first, company to do carpooling. Lyft, for example, began as a carpooling service called Zimride, which is now owned by Enterprise. There’s also Carma, which partners with federal and state transportation agencies.
Late last year, Scoop partnered with Lyft to supplement its offerings to its customers. That partnership has continued into the present day.
“By partnering together, Scoop and Lyft are ensuring that commuters not only gain a stronger sense of community by carpooling to work with co-workers and neighbors, but that they also feel supported in the event of last-second schedule changes and know they have guaranteed transportation home,” Scoop co-founder and CEO Rob Sadow said in a statement to TechCrunch. “With this program, carpoolers are able to request a Lyft or view public transit options through the Scoop app.”
