‎ Ritu Narayan founded Zum after struggling to find reliable school transportation for her children. Today, her $1.7 billion company is bringing 21st century technology to a stodgy workhorse. By Maggie McGrath, Forbes StaffThirteen years ago, Ritu Narayan was a digital whiz overseeing a billion-dollar line of business at eBay when she was faced with a very analog problem: how to get her kids, 3 and 8 at the time, to daycare and school without missing meetings. The private school didn’t have a bus, Bay Area traffic is notoriously terrible and the part-timers she hired to help were both expensive and inconsistent. Her dilemma was filled with echoes from her childhood in the foothills of the Himalayas. “My mom, as an educator in India, had left her job for the same reason,” Narayan says. “And I’m here sitting in Silicon Valley at the center of innovation, and I’m also thinking: Would I have to leave my job, my career?” Cody Pickens for ForbesNarayan did leave eBay, but not to become her kids’ chauffeur. Along with her two brothers, Vivek and Abhishek Garg, she cofounded Zum, a Redwood City, California–based student transportation outfit that is trying to use technology to improve every aspect of the student bus experience. Zum leases bus yards, buys buses and small student shuttle vans and connects them (via a tablet and GPS) to an app that allows parents and teachers alike to track the vehicles on their routes. Think Uber for school buses. Launched in 2015, Zum has grown into a transportation unicorn: With $430 million in funding raised, it is valued at $1.7 billion. Revenue in 2025 hit $333 million, up 35% from 2024, with 5,000 schools nationwide paying for the service. This momentum vaulted CEO Narayan, 53, onto the 2026 Forbes 50 Over 50 list—our annual roundup, produced in partnership with Mika Brzezin­ski and her Know Your Value initiative, of women who notch their greatest professional accomplishments after age 50. (For the complete list of 200 women, please see forbes.com/50over50.) Right now, schools in 18 states use Zum’s technology, though Narayan says it’s just “a matter of time” before she’s in all 50. “Once we are in a district, everybody around wants it. Like when when we got the Kansas City [contract], the Omaha Public School District wanted us, and St. Louis, Missouri, wanted us,” she says. “Word spreads very fast.” That growth is mostly a testament to how screwed up our school bus system currently is. America spends nearly $40 billion a year to get kids to and from school (it’s one of the biggest line items in K-12 education spending), yet a combination of driver shortages and a patchwork of state-by-state approaches to busing means not all kids actually take a yellow school bus to and from elementary, middle or high school. The rest rely on parents, guardians or public transit. “I had no idea how big and complicated this market really was. We’re talking about 26 million kids getting driven to and from school, to and from after-school sports,” says Miriam Rivera, the cofounder and managing director of Ulu Ventures, a Palo Alto, California–based VC shop which was one of Zum’s earliest investors in 2016. “The other thing that surprised me was [that there was a Zum] competitor that at that time had raised over $12 million and delivered 60,000 rides, whereas Zum had raised less than a million dollars and had already delivered about 20,000 rides.” Illustration by Patrick Welsh for ForbesHow To Play ItBy John BuckinghamWhile Zum could be a home run for its founders and investors, I like to play tech moonshots with a deep-pocketed partner; hence my affection for Alphabet. The cash-rich online advertising and cloud services titan generated more than $30 billion of net income in Q1, some of which was used to offset $1.2 billion of net losses on its promising Other Bets initiatives. These include Wing (last-mile delivery), Intrinsic (industrial robotics), Isomorphic Labs (drug discovery), Calico (biology of aging research) and Willow (quantum AI), not to mention Waymo (autonomous vehicles), which per company documents had a $126 billion valuation in February 2026.John Buckingham is cofounder of Value87 Investment Partners.In other words, Zum is scrappy—and so is Narayan. In the company’s earliest days, she called it Liftee; it was basically a ride sharing service for children, with extra layers of security and safety screening for drivers. Narayan even worked as a Liftee driver herself for a short period (it was, she says, a “nerve-wracking” experience). The model worked well enough among a wealthy demographic in the Bay Area (30 private schools even signed contracts), but ultimately it wasn’t scaling fast enough. When the pandemic closed all in-person schooling in California, it provided a chance to regroup. Narayan reorganized Zum’s business model from a ride sharing service to a district-wide enterprise platform that can both physically deploy and digitally track a fleet of school buses. The result is something faster and more efficient than the traditional yellow bus model. “Very quickly we realized that not having your own infrastructure would become a limitation to scaling—plus, the industry is so old, you have to basically transform every single layer,” Narayan says. “You cannot just operate at one layer and think you’ll get the results you’re expecting.” Zum does all the typical things a school bus operator would do: It buys (and maintains) the buses, leases space to park them and hires drivers. But it also uses AI to analyze existing bus routes to save time, miles and money. On the dispatcher side, the software looks like something air traffic controllers might use: a map with moving green, yellow or red dots to mark where the buses are and whether they’re basically on time (green), five to ten minutes behind schedule (yellow) or more than ten minutes late (red). A parent-friendly version of the app looks a lot like Uber or DoorDash, where it’s possible to see the bus approaching your stop. Gone are the clipboards that school bus drivers use to keep track of the kids who board their bus each day. Also gone are the slew of phone calls and text messages between schools and parents if there’s a delay. Typically, Zum’s contracts are more expensive upfront when compared with traditional bus providers, but its technology can reduce the number of buses needed, resulting in cost savings over time for the school district. Narayan says a “fleet-and-route” analysis Zum gave to San Francisco Unified School District (as part of a five-year, $150 million contract it signed in 2021) took the district’s bus numbers from 236 buses to 193, saving $3.5 million a year. “Anytime [SFUSD] had a new need, they would just add one more bus to the road. We went in and optimized the system,” she says. Kimberly Raney, the executive director of transportation at Oakland Unified School District and a former manager at FedEx, has a few horror stories about what student busing looked like before Zum came to town. Raney took her job in 2016, and in those days, nearly everything she did involved telephones and fax machines. When parents needed to change a student’s pickup location, they’d fax the new address to the district, which then had to fax the information to the school bus vendor; when buses were running late—and they were regularly 30 minutes late, she says—it would require a literal game of telephone to transmit the information among drivers, dispatchers, parents and Raney. “It ran very much like the 1940s and ’50s and ’60s,” she says. That is, until OUSD signed a five-year, $11.2 million–a-year contract with Zum in 2024; since then, Raney’s fax machines have gone silent. Zum’s long-term contracts are part of what attracted investors like Rivera to the company—after all, guaranteed revenue over a five- to ten-year period is a hard thing to turn down for an early startup. Bryan Schreier, a partner at Sequoia (which led Zum’s 2017 Series A), says another of Zum’s big value propositions is that it cannot be replicated by an Uber, Lyft or even OpenAI. “This is one of those unique businesses that is really shielded from disruption by the current wave of AI or other elements. There’s AI at the core of what they do, and it’s enabling them to disrupt the incumbents,” he says. When Narayan was growing up in India, she dreamed of being that country’s first female astronaut. She didn’t achieve that, but she still managed to take a giant step—not for mankind, maybe, but for harried parents everywhere.More from ForbesForbesHow Halle Berry Became The New Face Of MenopauseBy Maggie McGrathForbesHow This Founder Turned A Crocs-Inspired Tote Into A $100 Million BusinessBy Lindsey ChooForbesVanna White Is Television’s Most Unshakable StarBy Erin Spencer Sairam