Brazilian infrastructure conglomerate Grupo CCR and J2L Partners led a BRL100m Series B for Quicko, a Brazilian smart mobility startup working on commuter transit. CCR and J2L Partners invested USD10m in 2019.
(LABS News) – The Brazilian mobility startup Quicko announced a BRL 100 million Series B round led by the Grupo CCR and following by J2L Partners, both already Quicko investors. Quicko is a platform that offers route suggestions for smarter and more optimized urban travel. The suggested routes combine public and private transport modes available in each city, such as buses, subways, trains, taxis, ride apps and shared bicycles.
According to Pedro Somma, Quicko CEO, the startup is the first and only Brazilian Mobility as a Service (MaaS) platform, working as a mobility and convenience marketplace. “Our idea is to bring together everything the users need for their daily journeys, from suggesting transport routes to purchasing tickets. It is about mobility serving people,” he explains.
Through the Quicko app, users can also recharge the public transport ticket and track the bus location in real-time. In addition, the app provides information about how is working public transport on the day and has a collaborative feature for sharing information about buses capacity, delays or poor maintenance of buses, among others.
The investment will be used to bring Quicko to the country’s major metropolitan regions by the end of the year. Launched in November 2019 in São Paulo, currently Quicko also operates in Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte, Salvador, Porto Alegre, Curitiba, Fortaleza and Campinas.
According to the startup, despite the reduction in travel due to the pandemic, the app managed to grow its user base elevenfold last year; there were more than 3.2 million downloads. For Quicko, this growth is because the contingent of people who could not join remote work started to look for safer, faster and less crowded routes – information that Quicko can deliver.
Somma says that Quicko has a competitive advantage over foreign platforms, which is knowledge about the country’s mobility – a problem well known to Brazilians and a public authorities challenge. “None of them is aware of the Brazilian reality and have the same agility to develop mobility solutions like we are,” he says.
This second round bets on the business value of the data generated by Quicko’s technology. The main investor, Grupo CCR, operates with mobility infrastructure and has concessions in road and airport modes. Recently, it won the auction of lines 8 and 9 of CPTM (the Paulista Metropolitan Transport Company) and will be responsible for the daily transport of more than 3 million people.