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A unicorn on the school run

A unicorn on the school run

Zum, the school bus startup born from a mother’s problem

Zum is the California startup that runs school transportation for districts, and it is now valued at $1.7 billion. Forbes Italia told the story in a profile of its founder and CEO, Ritu Narayan, who made the Forbes 50 Over 50 list for 2026. Reading it gave me a small jolt. Narayan is 53, like me, and before becoming an entrepreneur she worked at eBay, where she led a billion-dollar business line. I also spent quite a few years in the eBay galaxy. My own contribution to school logistics, however, never went beyond frantic dashes to reach the gate on time.

How Zum started: two kids and no school bus

Any working parent knows the original problem. Narayan had two children, aged 3 and 8, to get to preschool and school without missing meetings. Their private school offered no bus, Bay Area traffic is notorious, and part-time sitters were expensive and unreliable. In the background there was a family precedent: her mother, an educator in India, had given up her job for exactly this reason. One question kept nagging her: will I have to sacrifice my career too?

In 2015 she left eBay and founded the company in Redwood City with her brothers, Vivek and Abhishek Garg. It was first called Liftee, a ride-sharing service designed for kids, with strict driver background checks. For a while she sat behind the wheel herself, an experience she now describes as demanding.

From ride sharing to its own fleet: the pandemic pivot

Wealthy families liked the model, and thirty private schools had signed contracts, but growth was too slow. When the pandemic closed California’s schools, Narayan seized the moment to rethink everything. Zum became a platform serving entire districts: it leases depots, buys and maintains buses and vans, hires the staff, and tracks every vehicle digitally. In such an old-fashioned sector, the founder argues, every layer had to be rebuilt, from hardware to software.

Anyone who read my piece on the leap from startup to scaleup will recognize the move: you give up the ease of being a middleman to build your own infrastructure, which costs more but is very hard to copy.

The Uber of school buses: app, GPS, and AI-optimized routes

Every vehicle carries a tablet and a GPS unit linked to an app where parents and teachers follow the trip in real time, with an experience similar to Uber or DoorDash. Operators work on a screen that resembles air traffic control: a green dot when the bus is on time, yellow when it runs 5 to 10 minutes late, red beyond ten. AI analyzes the routes and cuts miles, time, and costs.

As a UX writer, what strikes me most is what disappears: drivers’ paper notes, frantic phone calls, the wait at the gate without a clue. In Oakland, the transportation director, a former FedEx manager, recalls that the office used to run on faxes and half-hour delays were routine. A system stuck in the 1940s.

Zum by the numbers: valuation, revenue, and district contracts

  • A $1.7 billion valuation and $430 million raised, with Ulu Ventures among the first backers in 2016 and Sequoia leading the Series A round in 2017.
  • 2025 revenue of $333 million, up 35% from the previous year.
  • About 5,000 US schools pay for the service, spread across 18 states.
  • Contracts lasting five to ten years, which guarantee predictable income.
  • San Francisco signed a five-year, $150 million deal in 2021: the fleet and route analysis cut buses from 236 to 193, saving $3.5 million a year.
  • Oakland signed a five-year contract worth $11.2 million a year in 2024.

The potential market is huge: the United States spends almost $40 billion a year to take around 26 million young people to school and sports. Narayan sums up the ripple effect this way: once Zum enters a district, all the neighboring ones want it too.

Mothers leaving their jobs in Italy: the 2025 labor inspectorate data

Now let’s move to Italy. According to the report from the National Labor Inspectorate (INL), 59,770 resignations and consensual terminations by parents of children under three were validated in 2025: 40,628 involved mothers, 19,142 fathers. The reasons differ sharply. Only 14.1% of women leave to join another company, compared with 62.3% of men. For more than 15,000 working women, the lack of relatives to rely on and the shortage of services weigh heavily, while among men the same reasons appear barely a thousand times.

The gap between mothers and fathers: Save the Children and Openpolis

Save the Children’s “Le Equilibriste 2026” report completes the picture. Among people aged 25 to 54, 63.2% of mothers with at least one minor child are employed, compared with 92.8% of fathers. In southern Italy the female share drops to 45.7%. Part-time work involves 32.6% of moms and 3.5% of dads. According to Openpolis’s analysis of Istat data, Italy ranks last in the European Union for employed mothers, with a 28.6-point gap compared with fathers, surpassed only by Greece. The same study links female employment to the availability of school cafeterias and extended hours: where school keeps kids longer, women work more.

Why Italy’s municipal school bus doesn’t solve the puzzle

In Italy, school transportation is a municipal service, provided on request and for a fee, with offerings that vary widely from one area to another. It often covers only some grade levels, follows rigid routes and schedules, and is almost absent in large cities. Afternoons remain uncovered too, with swimming, English lessons, and soccer practice. The gap between the end of school and the end of the workday is filled by grandparents, who are in fact Italy’s most widespread welfare system. When they aren’t around, the sacrifice almost always falls on mothers, as the inspectorate’s numbers confirm.

My experience: flexibility, an only child, and a lot of luck

I realize I’ve been lucky. I could always count on a certain flexibility in my hours, which let me race between preschool and school whenever needed, with a few meetings moved and plenty of guilt absorbed. And I have only one child: with two or three, the juggling act would have become a puzzle worthy of an optimization algorithm. Many women have neither of these conditions, and for them a platform like Zum would make the difference between staying in the workforce and leaving it.

Today my son is a teenager and the issue has shifted to getting around on his own, where choices remain delicate, as I wrote about souped-up fat bikes.

Employee benefits and school transportation: room for an Italian Zum

The demand is there, and it would be strong. Still, there’s no shortage of obstacles: fragmentation across thousands of municipalities, slow public tenders, safety standards to guarantee, and a deep-rooted habit of making do within the family. One lever already exists. Italian corporate welfare rules allow employers to provide daycare, preschool, school meals, summer camps, and scholarships for employees’ children tax-free. Transportation would be the missing piece to connect home, school, and office.

Narayan turned a personal emergency into a $1.7 billion company because she saw an outdated public service and rebuilt it from scratch. In Italy the problem is the same, even more acute. What’s missing is someone willing to tackle it: a bold municipality, a company that cares about its employees’ well-being, or a founder with two kids and little patience.

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Chiara Bonifazi