A recent article written about CityRyde:
Timothy Ericson and Jason Meinzer were rooming in London in the summer of 2007 when Ericson took a weekend jaunt to Paris and randomly witnessed the launch of Velib, the largest bike-sharing system in the world. The scene was bustling–bike-sharing stations every few blocks throughout the city.
Only two years later, Ericson and Meinzer are at the helm of the largest bike-sharing consultancy in the world. If they have their way, CityRyde will also lead the carbon offsetting movement in the transportation sector through their Oyster software offering.
For that to happen, though, Philadelphia-based CityRyde needs investors to take its software to the next level, and is almost halfway through a round of financing that has drawn a variety of interested parties.
“It’s kind of cool, we fit into a bunch of different categories,” says Ericson, a New Jersey native who graduated from Drexel University with Meinzer. “We have interest from people who’ve done work with high-tech software development, people with backgrounds in carbon-type projects, and investors in transportation.”
Ericson says every major city in the U.S. is examining bike sharing, the fastest-growing form of transportation in the world, and he gets calls every day from across the globe from folks who want to bring bike sharing to their city.
CityRyde’s long-term goal, however, is to shift its focus from bike sharing to the carbon market industry, and apply its software to car sharing and other forms of public transportation. The carbon credit market is expected to reach $100 billion by 2012, and right now Oyster is the only software that can track, monitor, verify and monetize carbon credits from bike sharing operations.
“The traction we’ve had in the last few years has been tremendous because we’re in two hot markets,” says Ericson.
Source: Timothy Ericson, CityRyde
Writer: Joe Petrucci
