We are excited to announce Volition Capital’s investment in BusRight, a modern operations platform purpose-built for student transportation. BusRight ensures every student can safely and reliably access their education. The company’s technology solves transportation leaders’ most critical challenges: a crippling school bus driver shortage, overwhelming parent demands, and increasing route complexity. The platform brings driver navigation, routing, student ridership visibility, parent communication, and live GPS tracking into one unified platform. As a result, transportation leaders can build routes in 60 seconds, track buses in real time, and communicate with parents in a single click – all in one intuitive platform.
Student Transportation Is Critical Infrastructure – and It’s Reaching an Inflection Point
Every school day, over 20 million students rely on school buses to access their education, making student transportation the largest mass transit system in the United States. Yet the people responsible for operating this system, including transportation directors, routers, dispatchers, and drivers, have historically been underserved by modern technology despite carrying a mission-critical responsibility.
That gap is becoming impossible to ignore. School transportation has grown more complex over the past decade. Driver shortages routinely leave districts short 15 -30% of their workforce on any given morning. Routes change daily due to absenteeism, construction, weather, special education needs, and custody arrangements. At the same time, parents increasingly expect real-time visibility into where their child is, when the bus will arrive, and who is driving – expectations shaped by an “Uberized” world of instant information.
What was once manageable with pen-and-paper routes or legacy on-premise software is no longer sufficient. Transportation departments are under pressure to deliver safer, more reliable service with fewer resources, while maintaining trust with families and complying with regulatory and reporting requirements. This convergence of operational strain, safety expectations, and technological readiness has created a clear inflection point for the industry.
A Modern Platform Built for the Realities of School Transportation
BusRight was built for a transportation system that has become dynamic rather than static, where routes, staffing, and parent communication change in real time. The company provides an all-in-one student transportation management platform that powers routing, driver navigation, live GPS, student tracking, and parent communication through a single, all-in-one platform.
For transportation leaders, BusRight dramatically simplifies route creation and daily adjustments, enabling teams to build and modify routes in minutes rather than hours. For drivers, tablet-based, turn-by-turn navigation keeps them on safe roads and gives them real-time context at every stop, improving confidence and reducing risk. For families, live ETAs and real-time updates delivered every two seconds provide transparency and peace of mind.
The impact is tangible. In some districts where the parent app is deployed, transportation departments have reduced inbound call volume by more than 80%, freeing teams from what had effectively become call-center operations. Technology like Safety Pass where students are scanning on and off the bus with ID cards, provides real-time visibility into which students are riding, ensuring no child is ever lost and enabling more accurate reporting and route optimization.
Rather than stitching together point solutions, BusRight unifies the core challenges of student transportation into a platform that is intuitive, fast to deploy, and easy to learn. That simplicity matters in an environment where time and staffing are scarce.
BusRight’s Origin
BusRight was founded in 2019 by Keith Corso and Phillip Dunn with a simple but powerful belief: public education creates freedom and the industry is supported by transportation leaders that run the largest mass transit network. Phillip previously served as CIO for one of the largest school districts in the country, where he experienced firsthand the operational chaos and lack of real-time information that transportation teams navigate daily.
Since then, BusRight has grown rapidly and capital-efficiently, serving school districts across 36 states and supporting hundreds of thousands of transportation leaders, drivers, and parents each week. The company has sustained 100%+ revenue growth for five consecutive years, paired with a deep and growing trust from its customers. Transportation directors consistently cite ease of use and customer service as key differentiators. In several states, BusRight now partners with nearly half of all school districts, an early signal of category leadership.
Why We’re Excited to Partner With BusRight
What ultimately excites us about BusRight is not simply that it improves routing or communication, but that it is quietly laying the foundation for a modern operating system inside one of the most complex environments in the country: K–12 schools. Student transportation is where that transformation begins, but it is not where it ends.
By pairing purpose-built in-vehicle hardware with intuitive, AI-based software, BusRight is already coordinating real-world operations at scale across buses, drivers, students, and families. This progress reflects a team that is deeply obsessed with customer satisfaction and unafraid to challenge long-standing industry norms, enabling the product to evolve quickly alongside districts operating under real-world constraints.
Transportation is a uniquely strategic entry point because it touches nearly every student and family every school day. By becoming the system of record for how students move, BusRight establishes a durable foothold inside districts that can expand into broader operational workflows over time. We have been consistently impressed by the team’s passion, creativity, and willingness to push beyond the status quo, and we are excited to partner with them as they help school districts modernize operations and support teams that have long been asked to do more with less.
