Every weekday in the United States, roughly 26 million students ride nearly 480,000 school buses. Despite being the largest mass transit system in the country, student transportation has historically run on spreadsheets, radios, and decades‑old software.
That gap between system importance and software sophistication is exactly the kind of opportunity we look for at Automotive Ventures. It is also why we invested in BusRight.
With the company announcing a new $30 million financing, we are excited to see the momentum building behind a platform that is modernizing one of the most overlooked mobility systems in the world.
BusRight was founded by Keith Corso and Phil Dunn. Keith first began thinking about the problem while still in high school after seeing how inefficient and outdated student transportation systems were in his own community. That early observation became the foundation for BusRight.
Phil complements that vision with deep operational experience inside public education. As the former Technology Director for Broward County Public Schools, the sixth largest school district in the United States, he oversaw large-scale technology systems supporting one of the country’s largest student transportation fleets.
Together, they built BusRight with a simple goal: give transportation directors modern software designed specifically for the realities of running school bus operations.
The Largest Transit System You Never Think About
Student transportation is an operational challenge hiding in plain sight.
Transportation directors across the U.S. collectively manage tens of billions of dollars in annual transportation spend while coordinating routes, drivers, vehicles, and families across constantly changing conditions. Driver shortages, increasing route complexity, electrification pressures, and rising expectations from parents have only made the system harder to manage.
Yet many districts still rely on fragmented legacy tools or manual processes.
BusRight replaces that patchwork with a unified operating system for student transportation,combining routing optimization, driver navigation, real‑time GPS tracking, and parent communication in a single platform purpose‑built for school districts.
The result is something deceptively simple: transportation teams finally have the visibility and coordination tools they need to run their operations with confidence.
Why We Backed BusRight
At Automotive Ventures we often talk about a founder archetype we like to back: people with a maniacal focus on an important real-world problem and a sense of urgency to fix it. From our very first meeting with Keith and Phil, it was clear they embodied that mindset.
Keith and Phil built BusRight alongside transportation directors, deeply understanding the operational realities they face every day. Rather than layering software onto legacy tools, they built an integrated platform designed specifically for how student transportation actually runs.
That combination of operator empathy, product clarity, and relentless focus is something we consistently see in founders building enduring companies in the mobility space.
Excited for What Comes Next
BusRight just announced that it has raised more than $30 million in a new funding round led by Volition Capital. The new capital will support continued investment in BusRight’s technology and software platform, including new products and services such as a 24/7 AI-powered student transportation agent, precision hyper-local mapping intelligence, and NFC-based child safety features. In connection with the financing, Tomy Han, Partner at Volition Capital, joined BusRight’s Board of Directors.
For us, BusRight represents exactly the type of company we aim to support, founders building modern infrastructure for real-world mobility systems that millions of people rely on every day.
We are proud to have invested early and are honored to be along for the journey as Keith, Phil, and the BusRight team continue building the operating system for student transportation.
To learn more about BusRight, watch the three videos below:
Guiding You Through The Years | BusRight
BusRight Stories - North Suburban Transportation
