As a child in India, Ritu Narayan watched her mother leave her job to ensure her children got to school safely. Decades later, as a mother herself in the U.S., Ritu faced the same challenge.
“I could track my pizza and packages, but I had no idea if my kids had made it to school safely,” she recalls.
Narayan launched Zum with community impact in mind and the goal of connecting all stakeholders on a single platform to enhance safety, transparency, communication, and efficiency for all, including students, parents, drivers, transportation managers and operators, and school and district leaders.
“It was clear from the beginning that parents and our school district partners were responding to a solution designed by someone who understood their struggles and was committed to making their day-to-day lives easier while also making daily operations safer, seamless, efficient, and accessible,” Narayan shares.
Now, celebrating its 10th anniversary, Zum is proudly serving over 4,000 schools across 14 states, including some of the nation’s largest school systems such as Los Angeles Unified, Boston Public Schools, Omaha Public Schools, and Virginia Beach City Public Schools. Zum provides school bus transportation services powered with Zum’s technology as well as Zum’s robust technology platform as a stand-alone solution for school districts, offering a comprehensive solution and flexible approach designed to meet the unique transportation needs of each school district and stakeholder. With this innovative, highly flexible, tech-driven approach, Zum is committed to making transportation safer, more efficient, and sustainable.
A Technology Leader in Student Transportation
Zum is modernizing school transportation with an all-in-one, cloud-based platform designed specifically for student transportation. The
comprehensive platform and services combine safety, transparency, and efficiency—equipping school districts with tools to manage, monitor, and optimize their transportation systems. Kim Raney, Executive Director of Transportation for Oakland Unified, shared: “Zum’s technology provides robust real-time data as a live feed to monitor every aspect of the operation, including on-time performance, service quality, and efficiency. Parents and school and district administrators can track their student’s rides in real time with proactive notifications, helping to ensure that all stakeholders are informed of any route changes or traffic delays.” Zum designed the platform as a turnkey solution that integrates with any existing software or data systems in use within the district. Narayan shared: “We believe that technology needs to be easy to use, flexible to work within any operation, and designed with each user’s unique needs in mind in order to enhance trust, safety, transparency, and efficiency across the entire system.” Zum’s commitment to operational efficiency is further demonstrated through the advanced routing system and robust, real-time data, which is available to districts.
Key features within Zum’s fully integrated platform solution include:
• Parent App: Real-time updates on bus arrivals, driver details, and student drop-offs for peace of mind.
• Driver App: Turn-by-turn navigation, along with special instructions to ensure every student’s safety.
• Routing & Analytics: Real-time data for smarter, data-driven decisions that enhance efficiency, reduce delays, and seamlessly monitor every aspect of the operation.
• Field Trip Management: Streamlined processes for scheduling and managing extracurricular transportation.
• Admin Dashboards: Real-time data and role-based access for transportation and operations managers, school and district administrators to monitor performance, optimize routes, and manage daily operations with ease.
Partnering with School Districts
For districts like Kansas City Public Schools, Zum’s technology platform has been a game-changer. “It’s about trust and peace of mind,” says Jordan Gordon, COO of Kansas City Public Schools. “The system has enhanced everything from communication to data analytics, making transportation more reliable and consistent.”
In 2024, Boston Public Schools chose Zum’s platform to support its 750 buses, improving transparency, ridership and attendance, and operational efficiency for the district’s 54,000 students. “Zum’s technology enhances the experience for everyone—parents, drivers, and schools,” said Mary Skipper, BPS Superintendent.
A Culture Built on People
At Zum, the mission goes beyond solving logistical problems—it’s about fostering a culture that puts people first. Narayan emphasizes that the company designs its technology to make life easier for everyone involved, from drivers to transportation directors to families.
“We care deeply about the experience of our customers—students, families, drivers, and school district partners,” Narayan says. Zum’s dedication to customer satisfaction is reflected in its 4.9 out of 5-star average from over 500,000 parent ratings.
Improving Safety and Efficiency
Zum’s impact is measurable. For the 4,000 schools it serves, on-time arrivals have soared to 98%, and commute times have been cut by up to 20%. In Oakland, the percentage of students spending over an hour on a bus dropped from 70% to under 10%. Zum’s tech also helps school districts identify efficiencies across the system using Zum’s route optimization software, real-time performance data, ridership and attendance data, and utilization tool, which allows districts to model different routing scenarios, (such as bell time changes, tiering, and route stacking,) to evaluate the impact of potential changes on transportation; identify efficiencies before making a change; and solve for challenges such as compression or delays within a tiered system.
“The efficiency and real-time data Zum provides have transformed how we operate,” says Ken Martinez, Transportation Manager at Salt Lake City School District, a district that adopted Zum’s technology platform to manage their district-owned and district-operated school bus fleet. “What used to take hours now takes minutes.” Martinez shared several examples: “Before, getting the data to redraw routes and boundaries would have taken hours, days. With Zum, it takes less than a minute.”
The Road Ahead
In 2024, Zum expanded into eight new states, celebrating new district partnerships across the U.S., including Omaha Public Schools, NE; Kansas City Public Schools, MO; Poudre School District, CO; Virginia Beach City Public Schools, VA; Boston Public Schools, MA, and Reading School District, PA, to name just a few. Zum’s 50 million rides and 30 million miles driven are just the beginning.
Narayan is proud of the difference Zum is making in thousands of schools, and for students and families nationwide. “We won’t stop until every student has a safe, reliable, and equitable ride to school,” she says.
A decade after founding Zum, Narayan says she is more committed than ever to the company’s core mission — one that began with her own family.
“What inspires me and brings me confidence every day is the firm belief that all students deserve access to safe, reliable, and modern transportation to and from school and other critical services in order to thrive,” she says. “At Zum, as long as we remain focused on that mission and the children, families, and schools we serve, then the day-to-day decisions become easy.”