Truck-sharing startup Bungii expands into another huge market
May 18, 2018 | Bobby Burch
Kansas City-based truck-sharing app Bungii is hitting the gas on its East Coast expansion.
Several months after opening operations in Atlanta, the truck-sharing startup announced Thursday that it will offer its platform in the Washington D.C. area. The expansion includes neighborhoods in the District of Columbia, southeastern Maryland and northeastern Virginia.
With the D.C. metro, Bungii can reap benefits from the area’s high population density, co-founder and president Ben Jackson said.
“The denser the city, the less strain it puts on driver availability from an operational perspective,” he said. “Building a marketplace is tough and the great thing about Bungii is that we’re tasked with building a marketplace from the ground up in every city we expand into. After launching in KC and expanding to ATL, the density D.C. provides is a huge win, operationally.”
Led by Jackson and co-founder Harrison Proffitt, Bungii created an app to connect users with area truck drivers to haul items. In January, the startup closed its Series A round at $3 million featuring such investors as Kansas City-based PerceptiveEquity and C2FO CEO Sandy Kemper.
Only about 18 months old, Bungii has tapped Kansas City as a testbed to learn more about its customers and how to streamline its operation, Jackson said. For instance, the company now knows to more methodically hire truck drivers as independent contractors to provide them more consistent work, he said.
The driving force behind the firm’s growth is its customers, who report high satisfaction with the Bungii’s services, Jackson said.
“Word of mouth makes up the vast majority of customer acquisition,” he said. “We enjoy a net promoter score of 94 — USAA has the highest NPS score of any fortune 500 company with an NPS of 80. Our team — from our software engineers to our drivers, to our customer service — do a fantastic job ensuring the highest quality of service across the board.”
Bungii has more than 100 active drivers in Kansas City, 150 in Atlanta and about 25 in the quadrant of D.C. it launched Thursday.
Kansas City was instrumental to learning how Bungii should expand across the U.S., Jackson said.
“It’s easy to will a concept into existence within walking distance of where it was created. But the real problems start occurring as you begin looking to scaling — especially on a national level,” he said. “I like to think Kansas City was where Bungii was born, Atlanta was where Bungii was raised and now that we’re expanding beyond Atlanta, we’re somewhat entered the adult phase of expansion. I’m by no means saying we’re there as a company but the success we had in Atlanta validated our ability to execute in multiple markets.”
Learn more about the company here.
2018 Startups to Watch
stats here
Related Posts on Startland News
Kauffman Foundation rolls out $1.2M microlending program to help underserved entrepreneurs
Amid a swarm of 160 events as part of Global Entrepreneurship Week, the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation announced a new microlending program to spur investment in underserved entrepreneurs. In partnership with four microfinance lenders, the foundation issued a series of grants totaling $1.2 million that a will change the way the nonprofit microlenders capitalize their…
Scared away from networking events? Anti-social introverts can turn to tech
Networking strength comes in numbers — even for anti-social introverts, Jeremy A. Smith told a crowd Tuesday at Global Entrepreneurship Week. “Anti-social people, myself included, hate events,” he said. But like all other entrepreneurs, such introverts still must build and maintain actionable professional networks from which they can request and receive value, Smith said. In-person networking…
Longfellow Farm coworking the soil amid KC’s urban food desert
In a city ripe with coworking office spaces, there’s a hunger for similar environments outdoors, Ami Freeberg said. As with maintaining individual workplaces, traditional urban farming also can be isolating and expensive, the Longfellow Farm manager said. By working together, however, the collaborative process allows for shared resources, greater human expertise and, of course, more…
Procrastinating? Eat the frog, don’t chase the squirrels
On the metal wall in front of my desk, I’ve magnetically fastened a famous recommendation from Mark Twain. “Eat a live frog first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day,” the humorist from Missouri wrote. Though it can become an aspiration rather than a rule,…