Zūm Expands Student-Transportation Platform Into New York, Its 19th State

Zūm is expanding its student-transportation platform into New York, making the state the 19th in the company’s national footprint. The privately held company said specific New York school-district partnerships will be announced in the coming weeks.

The announcement establishes a presence in the state but does not yet identify the districts involved, contract values, start dates or the number of routes Zūm will operate. Zūm said more than 6,500 schools now use its Connected Mobility Experience, or CMX, system across 19 states. The platform combines transportation operations with software for functions such as routing, dispatch, driver management, safety and communication with schools and families.

New York entry comes before district contract announcements

In its New York expansion announcement, Zūm described the state as a foundation for further growth across the Northeast. The move follows the company’s first East Coast Mobility Summit in New York City in July, when Zūm said it was operating across 18 states. That event, held at Nasdaq MarketSite, focused on the use of technology and artificial intelligence in student transportation and included district officials and policy discussions on service reliability and educational access.

New York now moves from a market Zūm was publicly courting to part of its operating footprint, but the absence of named district customers is an important limitation on what can be concluded today. Until those agreements are announced, the scale of the New York business, including its revenue contribution and required fleet investment, remains unknown.

That matters because Zūm’s business can take several forms. The company sells technology through CMX, while in some districts it also supplies buses, employs drivers and manages transportation operations. Its platform is designed to connect route planning, dispatch, vehicles, workforce systems and real-time information in one operating environment. The commercial value of a new state therefore depends not just on geographic presence, but on the size and structure of the district contracts eventually attached to it.

Zūm’s July New York event also showed that the company was positioning the region as more than a single-city opportunity. At that point it said more than 6,500 schools across 18 states had relied on CMX, up from more than 4,500 schools in 17 states when it announced new funding in April. The New York entry adds another state to that footprint, although the company has not said whether the 6,500-school figure has increased since its August 13 update.

A large market with difficult transportation problems

New York offers scale, but school transportation is highly local and contract-driven. New York City alone illustrates both the size of the opportunity and the operational difficulty. A December 2025 audit by the New York City Comptroller’s Office said the city’s school-bus system transports more than 145,000 public, charter and private-school students at an annual cost of nearly $2 billion.

The same audit found weak oversight of contracted bus and technology vendors, inadequate use of GPS and complaint data, and persistent service problems. The Comptroller’s Office said the city’s Office of Pupil Transportation received more than 150,000 complaints in the 2023–2024 school year, including more than 14,000 reports of no-show pickups. It also found that technology intended to improve routing and let parents see when students board and leave buses had not been fully implemented as planned.

Those findings do not mean Zūm has won business from New York City. The company has not announced the city, the New York City Department of Education or any other specific New York district as a customer in its expansion release. They do, however, show why school districts may be interested in tools that promise better route visibility, performance monitoring and communication with families, which are central features Zūm markets through CMX.

The procurement challenge is also different from expanding a consumer app into a new state. Student transportation contracts are usually awarded by individual districts or public authorities, often after competitive bidding and with detailed requirements around staffing, fleet availability, safety, special-needs service and technology. Statewide expansion therefore gives Zūm access to more potential customers, but revenue is likely to arrive district by district rather than through a single New York launch.

Growth has been backed by fresh capital

The New York move comes during a year of rapid expansion for Zūm. In March, the company reported unaudited 2025 revenue of $333 million, up 35% from the prior year, and said total contract value exceeded $2 billion. It also reported reaching adjusted EBITDA breakeven. Because Zūm is privately held, those figures are company-reported rather than results filed with a public-market regulator.

A month later, Zūm announced a $100 million investment from TPG through The Rise Funds. The financing brought total funding to $430 million and valued the company at $1.7 billion, according to Zūm. The company said the capital would support wider deployment of CMX, continued investment in AI-driven operations and infrastructure needed for larger mobility systems.

Zūm’s geographic count has moved quickly since then. The April funding announcement described operations across more than 4,500 schools in 17 states. By July, the company said more than 6,500 schools in 18 states had relied on CMX, and an August 13 update still listed 18 states. The New York announcement takes that total to 19 while keeping the school count at more than 6,500.

Management is pitching that growth around a model that combines software with transportation operations rather than selling routing technology alone. Zūm has also invested in electric school buses and vehicle-to-grid projects in some districts, but it has not said whether electrification will be part of its initial New York contracts. The first meaningful measure of the new state’s contribution will be the district partnerships the company says it plans to announce in the coming weeks.