Nissan's Alliance Ventures Invests in Montreal-based Transit App

Nissan-Renault-Mitsubishi's venture capital arm has made an investment into a Montreal-based company that is developing apps to improve urban mobility.

The company is called Transit, and their app is designed to aggregate and map public transit data in real time, and it works in more than 175 cities around the globe. The app lets users schedule trips using multimodal services. That means it can mix different bus and rail services, and even include bike, ride, and car-sharing services as part of the route. It tracks the actual progress of the desired bus and train and notifies the user when it's time to catch transit, not just the time it's scheduled to arrive.

It's the latest investment for Alliance Ventures, the venture capital arm of, appropriately, the three-automaker alliance. "We are pleased to make a strategic investment in Transit, the leading urban mobility navigation start-up in North America. This investment, which will advance Transit's efforts to make mobility seamless and accessible in cities, fits with the Alliance 2022 strategy to become a leader in robo-vehicle ride-hailing mobility services and a provider of vehicles for public transit use and car-sharing," said Alliance Global VP Francois Dossa.

The fund is set to invest up to US $1 billion by 2022, using funds to target businesses and start-ups in new mobility, autonomous driving, connected services, and EV tech. The venture is a 40 percent investment each from Renault and Nissan with the remaining from Mitsubishi. Other investments include Boost.ai artificial intelligence and Aquabyte computer vision software.