Waypoint Transit

What do they actually do

Waypoint Transit is a tech-enabled consulting service that produces transportation and urban-planning studies for city governments and transit agencies. Instead of a self-serve SaaS dashboard, they deliver reports, interactive maps, tables/charts, and recommendations across study types like active-transportation plans, corridor studies, bus-stop plans, and Vision Zero analyses (company site; YC profile).

A typical engagement: a customer shares PDFs, spreadsheets, GIS exports, or a corridor/area of interest; Waypoint ingests and unifies data; runs computer-vision/ML on imagery and map documents to extract features such as curbs, sidewalks, crosswalks, and bus stops; then generates interactive GIS layers linked back to original source pages, plus tables, charts, and a written report. Public materials highlight PDF-to-GIS conversion as an entry offering and show cloud-hosted vision inference used to map curbs/sidewalks and power analyses like daylighting prioritization (company site; LinkedIn; Roboflow case study).

Today they operate like a faster, lower-cost alternative to traditional planning consultants by automating repetitive tasks such as digitizing plan lines, extracting features from imagery, merging data sources, producing charts/tables, and drafting report text. Their messaging emphasizes speed and cost savings versus the status quo for municipal teams, with traceability to source documents to support funding and design decisions (YC profile; company site; LinkedIn).

Who are their target customer(s)

• City transportation planner / project manager: Needs corridor, bike, and safety studies to justify projects but faces slow, expensive consultant timelines and fragmented PDFs instead of a single, editable GIS source (YC; company site).
• Transit agency planner or operations analyst: Must evaluate bus stops, routes, and sidewalk/curb conditions without up-to-date inventories, making audits and prioritization manual and time-consuming (company site; Roboflow).
• State or regional DOT project lead: Needs defensible cost/benefit and prioritization analyses to unlock funding and meet standards, but procurement and consultant schedules stretch projects and inflate costs (YC; company site).
• City GIS/data manager or IT staff: Spends time reconciling PDFs, spreadsheets, and public imagery into usable map layers for multiple teams, resulting in repetitive one-off work and low traceability (company site; LinkedIn).
• Grant writer / safety program coordinator: Needs clear, source-traceable reports and visuals to win grants and justify quick safety fixes, but current study production is slow and often lacks the traceability funders require (YC; company site).

How would they acquire their first 10, 50, and 100 customers

• First 10: Do high-touch outreach to planners, transit analysts, and GIS staff in nearby or networked municipalities and run a short paid pilot that converts one PDF into an interactive GIS layer with a brief, actionable report before the demo (company site; LinkedIn; YC).
• First 50: Package repeatable study types (bike corridors, bus-stop inventories, Vision Zero) into fixed-scope offerings and sell cohort pilots through MPOs and regional partners to sign multiple cities at once, using early case studies and technical validation to shorten procurement (Roboflow; YC).
• First 100: List on state/local procurement rolls, include grant-ready report templates so grant writers can buy directly, and partner with local consulting firms to resell/implement. Offer a lightweight self-serve PDF→GIS conversion for smaller cities and a partner program to scale distribution (company site; YC).

What is the rough total addressable market

Top-down context:

Waypoint cites that U.S. local and state governments spend roughly $50B/year on planning; Waypoint’s initial focus is a subset: transportation and safety planning studies where automation can replace manual consultant tasks (YC).

Bottom-up calculation:

Using accessible buyer counts: ~408 MPOs, 50 state DOTs, and ~850 urban transit providers (UZA reporters) are core repeat purchasers. If each buys one study annually at $100k–$250k, TAM is roughly $130M–$325M; adding several hundred larger municipalities purchasing one $100k study pushes the near-term TAM toward ~$180M–$375M (Wikipedia on MPOs; FTA on NTD UZA reporters ~850).

Assumptions:

• Price per automated study/package averages $100k–$250k depending on scope (e.g., corridor plan, bus-stop inventory, Vision Zero analysis).
• One comparable study purchase per buyer per year across MPOs, state DOTs, and UZA transit providers; a few hundred larger municipalities also purchase one study annually.
• Focus is U.S. transportation planning buyers; excludes international markets and non-transport domains in the near term.

Who are some of their notable competitors

• Kimley-Horn: Large civil/transportation engineering and planning consultant frequently hired by cities and DOTs for corridor plans, safety studies, and design.
• Fehr & Peers: Transportation planning specialist focused on mobility, safety, and corridor planning for public agencies.
• Alta Planning + Design: Consultancy focused on active transportation, Vision Zero, and complete streets, often delivering the same study types Waypoint targets.
• AECOM: Global infrastructure firm offering end-to-end planning and engineering services, a default choice for many large agencies and complex studies.
• StreetLight Data (Jacobs): Mobility analytics platform used by agencies and consultants for origin-destination and traffic analyses that feed into planning studies.