BusRight Inc., a startup that’s using artificial intelligence to ensure that school buses get students safely to their classes on time, said today it has raised $30 million in funding.

Volition Capital was the sole investor named in the round.

The startup is on a mission to transform what is the largest mass transit system in the U.S., namely school buses, which are notorious for running late and sometimes never arriving at all.

The school bus industry has stubbornly resisted digital transformation, despite operating at massive scale. According to BusRight, the U.S. K-12 education system relies on more than 13,000 small transportation companies to shuttle more than 20 million students to school each day. But those operators struggle to do this effectively because of a “crippling” shortage of drivers that’s compounded by a high level of absenteeism.

BusRight said the average school bus fleet has a 15% to 30% shortfall of drivers needed to run all of their routes. As a result, last-minute route cancellations have become a common, nightmarish headache for parents, resulting in schools having to deal with a deluge of frantic calls each day.

The startup is using AI to solve this problem. By unifying routing, navigation, student ridership visibility and parent communication into a single platform, it enables school bus operators to dynamically create new routes based on driver availability. Bus companies can see how many drivers they have each day, then create routes for each one that accommodate every student who needs to go to school, in less than 60 seconds, the company said.

Most bus companies continue to use paper-based route maps, and changing them to accommodate driver absences has been all but impossible given timing constraints. After all, the kids need to get to school before classes start, which means there’s very little margin for error.

BusRight says it also takes student safety very seriously. Each child who uses its school buses can be tracked by their parents on a smartphone application from the moment they step on the bus, until they reach their destination. This reassures moms and dads that their kids have actually made it to school and haven’t gone somewhere else.

The startup claims it can help school districts to save some serious money, too. Gregory Mott, superintendent of Poughkeepsie City School District, said the district saved $989,000 on costs associated with transportation within one year of using BusRight’s platform.

Today’s round is another proof-point that AI technology can be of assistance in virtually all walks of life, including the unglamorous but essential task of ensuring that kids get to school on time, said Holger Mueller of Constellation Research. “BusRight has identified a major problem that tech has not yet been able to solve, and will try to inject a heavy dose of AI into a traditionally technophobic school bus industry,” he said. “The benefits look compelling enough that even the most resistant bus companies won’t be able to ignore it easily. Everyone should hope it succeeds and ensures that our kids can safely make it both to school, and back home again.”

Going forward, BusRight plans to double down on its AI capabilities. One idea it’s pursuing is a 24/7 AI agent that will be on hand to respond to parent’s questions about bus routes, so they’ll know exactly when the bus is going to arrive and when it will reach its destination. It’s also looking to develop more precise, “hyper-local” mapping intelligence capabilities and NFC communications chips to further enhance student safety.

Images: BusRight