Yahoo Finance Gett CEO Dave Waiser on Shaking Up Future of Corporate Ground Transportation
Gett Co-Founder & CEO Dave Waiser
By Jarrett Banks
Corporate-transportation platform Gett is merging with special-purpose acquisition company Rosecliff Acquisition Corp. I (Nasdaq: RCLF). The company focuses on streamlining a company’s ride-hailing, taxi and limousine booking options around the world into one platform.
IPO Edge sat down with Co-Founder and CEO Dave Waiser to find out more about the company’s unique solution.
IPO Edge: Over 10 years you have evolved Gett from a country-specific ride hailing company into the global market leader in corporate ground transportation management. Can you walk us through that journey and explain your unique market positioning?
Our focus at Gett is to be the industry standard in corporate spend management for ground transportation. Over the past decade, we emerged and grew into a leader in the ride-hailing industry in Israel and the United Kingdom, accumulating unique insight as a major provider of transportation for corporations. This has been integral in forging an entirely new, even more exciting business model, and establishing category leadership. We were able to experience how much was broken in this fragmented market, and then go about fixing the outdated, inefficient market that is well overdue for disruption.
Today, there are two key aspects to our business: 1) our global marketplace of aggregated ground transportation vendors, from traditional ride-hailers to regulated taxis to executive limos; and 2) our cloud-platform for corporations to comprehensively manage and optimize all their spend on ground transportation.
We’ve drawn from our experience to become the category leader at vendor aggregation – specifically, our history is what informed us with the data and strategy to pivot our focus to the underserved, fragmented B2B ground transportation management (GTM) market, where we now provide access to over 2,000 partner fleets and 3.2 million cars on a market-leading ground transportation marketplace.
Equally important to our value proposition is Gett’s category defining cloud-platform that enables companies to manage their entire ground transportation spend across multiple geographies. Working with over a quarter of Fortune 500 companies, Gett aggregates all transportation vendors on a single platform and helps companies optimize the best transportation options – stratifying by geography, price, speed, compliance, environmental impacts and more, all while making the important considerations that reduce their spend overall.
IPO Edge: Gett is essentially an enterprise software platform that offers both access to a ground transportation marketplace as well as tools to manage the corporate spend on that mode of travel for employees. What do investors need to understand about this rather unique business model?
Gett is leading and reshaping the GTM category by helping corporations reduce their ground transportation spend by an average of 25% and up to 49%, primarily by minimizing unmanaged spend. Every company out there has shadow costs and we believe we know how to fix it. For a sector where spend is estimated to exceed $100 billion per year worldwide, that adds up to significant savings for companies, large and small. It is important to note that behind optimized spend there are optimized miles as well. Personally, I am very excited to provide the opportunity to our customers to make the right choices and improve their ESG profile.
Similar to telephonic and internet grids, Gett aspires to become the industry standard in corporate ground transportation.
Through Gett’s platform rather than a traditional fleet operator, a client can aggregate and access all of the transportation options in their city and across multiple geographies – from taxis and limos to corporate fleets of cars and ride-hailing brands – from a single app in convenient currency and language. Gett’s platform helps optimize a client’s spend while simultaneously ensuring corporate safety protocols. By using Gett’s platform, corporate operations teams will be able to gain a better understanding of what their spend will look like by seeing all of their options in one place, as opposed to the fragmented, antiquated systems they’ve been forced to manage for years.
IPO Edge:What are the biggest challenges with corporate ground transportation, and how does Gett help to solve them?
It’s clear that the COVID-19 pandemic had a major impact on travel at large, including corporate travel and ground transportation. While the pandemic reduced volumes industry-wide, it also accelerated a shift to B2B transportation reflecting an evolved landscape that prioritizes the realities of our world now.
When considering what’s best for their ground transportation needs, organizations now need to think of other factors. The pandemic has shown that many companies can lean into a remote-first work environment, greatly affecting the need for large and more dispersed ground transportation spend. Furthermore, the pandemic has highlighted how important it is for companies to both enable and engage their remote employees in a safe manner by leveraging software tools that remove unnecessary bureaucracy. In doing so, services like transportation can be viewed more as a perk for employees while also highlighting the environmental savings that software tools like Gett make possible. Notably, a shortage in drivers industry-wide made it impossible for a single provider to deliver a consistent quality of service, so companies needed to utilize a multitude of options more than ever, in order to meet their existing demand. As things evolve, we expect that this shortage will abate; however, we believe the transformation of how companies manage employee travel and spend will only continue to accelerate.
What has become even more evident is that certain ground transportation vendors have strengths in certain geographical markets – it is rare to find the same vendor boasting equal amounts of ride capacity and quality of service in every single market. Again, growing a physical fleet business worldwide is extremely difficult. It is often very burdensome for companies to track themselves, so they can rely on a specialist like Gett to apply its industry-insider knowledge and expertise to identify the best options in each market the company may need rides.
All of these new realities require businesses to rethink their approach to GTM, which includes modernization of their infrastructure to more effectively support, track, and manage the use of multiple vendors. This helps provide more predictable and reliable pick-up times as well as overall geographical coverage, while emphasizing a cost-effective and safe riding experience. We believe that there is no better time to assess the fit for what companies need for their ground transportation, and the demand for our platform is evidence of that.
IPO Edge: You have spoken recently about your planned expansion into the U.S. and other regional markets worldwide. What is Gett’s growth strategy?
Our growth strategy is about continuing expansion into new geographic regions, based on the territories that our clients are already operating in. Just last month we announced the exciting milestone that we now aggregate over 2,000 fleet-partners around the world – doubling our number of partners in 2020. This complements the steadily increasing demand from corporate clients, who are looking for the largest spread in ground transportation options around the world.
As our enterprise clients continue to utilize and find value in our platform, our geographic growth is directed towards providing ground transportation in the key markets where they operate – not just where they are headquartered. We’re expanding into more regional markets worldwide by onboarding many more partners to expand the “transportation grid”, ensuring we can help our clients across more of their own territories. Just like a power grid, we see the transportation grid as something that companies can, and should, be able to plug into as a way to access resources on demand. This allows businesses to lift the limitations they’re facing with other ground transportation providers, through an easily accessible, more ubiquitous, and inherently more intuitive platform.
We believe that we’re not just a super app for all ride-hailing options in their particular city. What sets Gett apart is our ability to track and manage a company’s corporate travel spend across all ground travel options, while working to reduce the costs of a multibillion-dollar industry.
IPO Edge: How will becoming a public company help Gett competitively?
Going public now comes at the perfect time to capitalize on the massive market opportunity of ground transportation management. When our business combination with Rosecliff Acquisition Corp I (RCLF) closes, we will be one of the first public companies working in corporate ground transportation, setting ourselves as a leader in the industry. This sector is one in which we believe there is tremendous potential, and by reaching public markets, we will be better able to demonstrate our first-mover position and asset-light approach to an expanding geographic footprint. With global corporate ground transportation management forecasted to grow at 18% CAGR through 2025, we also believe that going public offers us the catalyst, and right currency, to drive fast and steady growth over the next few years.
Contact:
Jarrett Banks, Editor-at-Large
Twitter: @IPOEdge
Instagram: @IPOEdge
