GlobeSherpa

GlobeSherpa, founded in Portland, Oregon, in 2010 by Nat Parker and Michael Gray, specialized in mobile ticketing and payment solutions for the urban transportation sector. The company was established to provide a secure, mobile platform that allowed transit systems to adopt open payments and mobile fare collection with minimal new infrastructure.

CEO Nat Parker's background includes time with the Sierra Club, the Peace Corps in Senegal, and a tech-focused investment bank, experiences that informed the company's focus on creating integrated, convenient transit solutions. CTO Michael Gray brought extensive experience in enterprise and mobile software development for major corporations. The duo identified a need to streamline the public transit experience, developing a platform to let commuters use their smartphones for ticketing, saving both riders and transit authorities money.

GlobeSherpa’s core business was providing white-labeled mobile applications to public transit agencies and parking management companies. Its primary clients were public transit authorities in major U.S. cities like Portland, San Francisco, and Chicago. The company generated revenue by developing and maintaining these customized mobile ticketing apps, such as the successful TriMet Tickets app in Portland, which saw significant user adoption.

The company's main offering was the TransitSherpa platform, a suite of software solutions that enabled features like mobile ticket purchasing and validation. A key benefit was simplifying the commute by eliminating the need for physical tickets. The platform also aimed to solve the "first and last mile" problem by integrating with other urban transportation options like bikeshare and on-demand car services.

In a significant milestone, GlobeSherpa was acquired by RideScout in June 2015. This move was strategic, aimed at combining RideScout's transportation aggregation service with GlobeSherpa's mobile payment technology. Subsequently, in April 2016, both GlobeSherpa and RideScout were merged by parent company Daimler to form moovel North America, with Nat Parker appointed as its CEO. GlobeSherpa's technology became the foundation for the moovel transit platform, continuing its evolution within a larger mobility ecosystem.

Keywords: mobile ticketing, transit payments, public transportation software, fare collection, urban mobility, Nat Parker, Michael Gray, moovel, RideScout, TriMet, transit app, smart cities, mobility as a service, transit technology, transportation payment, parking management apps, open payment transit, last mile transportation, Daimler