School transport provider celebrates litany of successes one year on

The company, founded with the intention of transforming the traditional school bus run, enables schools and businesses to maximise the safety, wellbeing and productivity of their students and employees, while driving down transport costs and CO2 emissions.

By combining leading-edge proprietary technology with a nationwide network of vehicle operators, the business now manages a UK-wide virtual fleet of 40,000 vehicles and works with schools, multi academy trusts and local authorities, tracking over 400 routes daily on home-to-school services for over 15,000 pupils.

In the last 12 months, Kura has increased its school customer base by 35% to reach its target milestone of 50 school clients. As part of that growth, the company expanded the number of routes it manages by 20% and the number of registered pupils by 41%.

Kura also saw a 29% uplift in parents using its observer app each day, which helps to safeguard children by constantly monitoring every aspect of the home-to-school journey across every route, including location, delays and speed of travel. Kura has improved the user interface, meaning parents enjoy a more streamlined experience despite the surge in both passengers and app users.

As a result of this growth, Kura has increased its headcount by 20%, with growth in Development and Customer Success teams.

Reflecting on Kura’s successes, CEO of Kura, Godfrey Ryan commented: “With the pressures of the pandemic, fuel and HGV-driven driver shortages and the resulting school closures that came with it, we really are delighted to have enjoyed such growth over the last year. The highlight has to be successfully penetrating new multi academy trust and state school markets with our software.

“A key reason for our success has been the work we’ve put into building long-term, strategic partnerships and specialising in meeting the needs of our education and corporate customers. For example, we continued to pay home-to-school operators during lockdown, even when schools were closed, to ensure their survival so we could be up and running quickly again when schools re-opened.”

Boosting Kura’s reach was achieved via offering its proprietary software to schools as a standalone service to help them better manage their own transport or local operators. Indeed, this successful strategy saw Kura voted 7th out of 66 companies in the TechRound SaaS66 awards for 2021.

Godfrey added: “Our strategic and cultural shift towards becoming a SaaS provider is allowing more organisations to experience the benefits of Kura technology, with onboarding available at any time of year. This includes multi academy trusts and state schools through their local authority and the introduction of our tech on corporate and business park shuttles.

“We’ve also deepened our customer-focus, evidenced by investing in the production of leading insight pieces such as the Investing in Technology for School Transport and Commuting to 2025 reports, widely published in recent weeks.

“With more new schools set to be signed before the end of this year and a successful trial of our technology in the first non-UK country completed, we’re hopeful that 2022 can be our best ever”.