this summer. “We just saw that our passions are so closely aligned,” Kopser said. “They made an offer: Let’s work together as partners to change the face of transportation in the future.”
With the Daimler resources, Kopser says, RideScout plans to more than quadruple its engineering corps to 30 people from 6 in the next four months, and get to work on a “giant laundry list” of features integrating RideScout with users’ calendars and contacts, among other things.
Long term, Kopser said he is focused on “creating the operating system that will power the evolution of autonomous vehicles and driverless vehicles.” It’s a bold vision, but it could well be where transportation-focused technology is headed.
“These are the Car2Gos of the future,” he said. “They are there when you need them; they drive away when you’re done and pick someone else up.”
RideScout, he added, would connect users to services like this.
The company will continue to be headquartered in Austin and will operate as a subsidiary of Car2Go. Kopser will remain at his current position at RideScout, which currently has 16 employees and previously raised $2.5 million in funding. The startup was in the middle of raising a Series A round when he began negotiating with Car2Go.
In the three years since he founded RideScout in 2011, Kopser, who previously served in the U.S. Army in Iraq and Afghanistan, has become a transportation evangelist. When the startup kicked off operations, Kopser sold his car and his Twitter feed is a transit travelogue of the planes, buses, car-shares and other modes of transport he uses traveling across the country to promote RideScout.
In particular, Kopser used his blog “Road Scholar” to raise awareness of how the lack of transit options in car-centric cities like Austin contributed to the rash of drunken-driving deaths during South By Southwest this past spring.
With Texas roads and highways getting increasingly jammed and a limited public transit sector, alternative taxi services like Lyft and Uber have come to the state, battling local regulators to offer their services. It all adds up to fertile ground, not only for RideScout, but other transportation startups as well, Kopser said.
“With this partnership, we have a chance to attract innovators in ride-share, paratransit, and other transit-oriented companies to Texas,” he said.
