14
Jan
Schenectady-based Transfinder bus routing software firm sees record revenue
- Posted By: Robb Snyder
- Category Featured, Company News
From The Times Union / By Rick Karlin / January 14, 2023
SCHENECTADY — The ongoing shortage of school bus drivers and a growing demand to track incidents of student misbehavior have contributed to what Transfinder said is its 25th year of consecutive sales growth.
“Transfinder is just hitting its stride,” company President and CEO Antonio Civitella said in announcing the company brought in $28.9 million in revenue in 2022, a 24 percent increase over 2021.
The company uses algorithms to help school districts configure efficient bus routes. The business currently serves about 2,300 districts in the U.S. and Canada.
With bus drivers hard to come by, Civitella said Transfinder's formulas can develop ways to maximize the driver time they have.
Adding to the growth is a system in which teachers or other school employees can document and track disciplinary or other incidents with students.
“It’s become a big issue,” Civitella said of the incident tracking.
He believes an efficient tracking system can help cut down on incidents since it offers an alternative to having a teacher do an ink-on-paper write up that gets filed in a drawer and forgotten.
“If that piece of paper was written up and filed but no one had a conversation with a kid… that’s the problem,” he said.
Transfinder has also seen growth through a parent app, Stopfinder, which allows parents to track their child’s bus in real time as well as have two-way communication with district officials. Currently, 500,000 parents are using the Stopfinder app.
Transfinder has 174 employees globally, with 111 in the United States, mostly in the Capital Region.
Many of the employees work from home, though, and the company has had offices in Austin, Texas and Shangai where employees develop and test Transfinder software.
Civitella wouldn’t reveal the privately held company’s profits but he said much of the revenue goes back into the business, including the hiring of people to constantly develop, upgrade and test the software and algorithms they use to increase bus route efficiency.
That strategy pays off, he believes, as a good deal of the company's growth is from school districts that had previously worked with competitors in the bus-routing space.
Click here to read the Times Union article.
