The Shotl you helped us become

If you last met Shotl as an app for booking an on-demand minibus, there is a lot we would like to show you.

Over the past few years, our customers have helped us become a different kind of company. You have brought us the awkward connections, the tight budgets and the everyday questions that a software demonstration can miss. We have worked through them together, and what we learned has changed both our technology and the way we work.

Today, we’re introducing a new logo and corporate identity, alongside a new website that tells our story properly. As we approach our tenth anniversary in March 2027, I want you to meet the Shotl our customers already know.

The decision that brought us closer

Getting here has taken us through some difficult years. COVID-19 disrupted public bus-service deployments as well as projects at large private sites. Plans were interrupted, budgets came under pressure and we had to adapt quickly.

Our subsequent time within Swvl opened new possibilities. Following the acquisition in 2021, we had more resources to develop our technology and explore new markets. In March 2022, we became part of a Nasdaq-listed group when Swvl went public. For a company that had started just five years earlier, it was a moment of enormous pride, shared with the customers, partners and team who had helped us get there.

That chapter brought a strong year of growth and experimentation for Shotl. We could test ideas, work in new settings and learn faster. Some experiments worked; others did not. Both helped us understand more clearly where our technology makes a difference and what customers needed from us.

As budgets tightened and Swvl faced pressure on its market value, the group changed its strategy. For our customers, that raised a much more immediate question: what would happen to the company supporting their services? They had committed time, money and their own reputations to making those services work. People were already relying on them.

In 2023, we reached an agreement with Swvl to buy Shotl back. For us as founders, and for the loyal clients who wanted to keep working with us, that agreement meant we could take responsibility for what came next. Buying the company back was a commitment to those relationships and to the services we had built together.

A team that had grown to nearly thirty people became five. That was a painful adjustment. The months that followed involved long days and weekends as we supported existing services and the deployments already under way. We knew there were drivers starting their shifts and people waiting for a ride. Our job was to keep showing up for them.

Our long-standing clients chose to stay. Their continued business and trust were crucial to keeping Shotl alive while we restructured. They gave us the chance to concentrate on what mattered most: their services, their needs and the problems we could solve together. You told us what needed attention, challenged us when something could work better and helped us decide where to put our effort.

Few people know this part of our story, and it matters deeply to us. We rebuilt with our customers beside us. That experience made us more focused, more resilient and closer to the people whose work depends on ours. It shaped the company we are today.

The service had to fit the place

Many people know us for demand-responsive transport: shared journeys that adapt to riders’ requests. The questions our customers brought us soon reached beyond that model.

A town needs to keep its busy morning bus and make the quieter hours more flexible. A transport authority needs a local service to get people to a railway station, while protecting the bus routes it has already invested in. An operator needs different vehicles serving different areas, with some working independently and others sharing the load.

Those needs shaped what Shotl offers today. Fixed route, Demand responsive and Dynamic bus line services now run side by side, under the name of the city, operator or company that runs them. Multimodal bookings connect a journey to the wider public transport network.

Door to door services account for riders who need additional support, including a pickup at home.

The people running a service also need room to adapt it. Through the Operations Dashboard, they change service areas, stops and operating hours, and configure how vehicles work across those areas. Local knowledge becomes a change in the service, without waiting for a new software release.

For a small municipality, the starting point may be one or two vehicles. The work is to understand which journeys they can realistically cover, how they connect to existing transport and what the town can afford to sustain. Sophisticated software should be within reach of places with modest budgets, too.

The Passenger App and Driver App have evolved alongside, with attention to clearer journeys and instructions. The Passenger App works with screen readers for riders with visual impairments, and operators can book on behalf of riders who phone their own call centre.

Connections to other mobility apps through the Shotl API, and our pilots with autonomous vehicles, have broadened the possibilities further. The purpose stays grounded in the journey: help people book through the channels they use, and help the service work with the transport around it.

A new website with our customers at its centre

Much of this progress happened in conversations with customers, in software updates and in the daily work of running services. Our public story had fallen behind. The new shotl.com gives that work the space it deserves.

You’ll find case studies, videos and the voices of the people involved, with results that show what changed in each place. These are only a small part of the projects we have worked on.

We have chosen them to help you recognise a situation close to yours and understand how the service was shaped around it.

If you are considering a service of your own, you can request a free simulation. Share the area, likely demand and available vehicles, and we will work through the assumptions and results with you. You deserve a clearer picture of what works before making a commitment.

We are also sharing what we have learned through practical guides and resources for writing transport tenders. They sit alongside our news and articles on operations, technology and the wider industry. The experience our customers helped us gain now helps other teams ask better questions.

Our new logo and corporate identity mark this next chapter. The website and newsletter are available in English, Spanish, Italian and Catalan. Italian matters particularly to us after years of working with local authorities, operators and partners there: you can read about the work in Italian and speak to our team in Italian, too.

The company we want to keep becoming

We care that no journey is left untaken. That purpose keeps us focused on the people behind every service: the planner making a limited budget work, the driver helping a rider aboard, and the rider who needs a reliable way to get home.

We are growing again, on the foundations you helped us lay. To the customers and partners who stayed with us, pushed us and trusted us with the next challenge: you gave us our wings. Your work belongs at the centre of our story.

Come and meet the Shotl you helped us build. Explore the new website, find a place that reminds you of yours, and contact us to tell us what you would like to make possible next.