“Via Dolorosa” - Via Transportation’s IPO: A decade-long ride of grit, resilience, and execution

When the bell rang at the stock exchange last week, signaling Via Transportation’s debut as a $4 billion public company, the world saw what it always sees in such moments: founders smiling, investors doing mental math, outsiders reflecting on operators' equity stakes. What’s less visible is the more than decade-long roller coaster that brought Via here. This IPO is not the story of an “easy win.” It is the story of grit, resilience, and relentless execution.

I first met Daniel Ramot and Oren Shoval in 2012. From the outset, they struck me as the kind of people any investor dreams of backing. Both deeply technical—Daniel with a PhD from Stanford, Oren from the Weizmann Institute - but equally grounded in business from their time at D.E. Shaw and McKinsey. They embodied a rare duality: confident enough to believe that even humanity’s hardest problems, like urban transportation, could be solved by engineers, yet humble enough to know they would need to learn the market slowly, from the ground up.

In 2012, Via was born as a consumer service: a shared shuttle app. At the time, it was considered heresy to think anyone could challenge Uber in reimagining urban mobility. The narrative in tech was singular - there would be only one winner in this market. Despite strong results and a stellar team, Via’s first five years were less about dominating headlines and more about laying groundwork. The real inflection point came with a pivot: moving from a consumer-facing service into a platform powering public transit itself.

Reinventing Public Transit

That pivot opened a staggering opportunity. Public transit is a $500+ billion industry that touches every citizen, yet remains fragmented - operated hyper-locally, often with outdated, non-interoperable systems. From fixed-route buses to microtransit, school buses to paratransit, the inefficiency is enormous.

Via’s answer was radical at the time. Conventional investor wisdom said to build high-margin planning software and stop there. Daniel, Oren, and the team chose otherwise: listen to customers and end users, then build full-stack, end-to-end solutions. Via provided not just the software but also the payment rails, vehicles, drivers, insurance, command centers, and citizen support. That full-stack strategy, once counterintuitive, now resonates as exactly what the sector needed.

By the time of its IPO, Via’s run-rate is over $450 million in annual recurring revenue, growing north of 30% year over year. Profitability metrics have steadily improved quarter after quarter, and can probably continue doing so for the foreseeable future. All these provide the company a clear path to becoming a long-term compounder. With line of sight to $1 billion in ARR and a roadmap to $10 billion, Via is positioned to expand across the broader gov-tech stack. Few companies going public today can credibly claim that trajectory.

Israel at the Beating Heart

As an investor and an Israeli, this moment carries deep pride. While Via’s customer base is global, the company made a deliberate choice to keep its R&D and product core in Israel, where more than 500 engineers continue to power its technology. Through macroeconomic shifts, market uncertainty, and even security challenges on the ground, Via stood by its values. It did not abandon its dedicated teams but invested in them, understanding that this was the right path. That decision has yielded not only resilience but also greater motivation and loyalty to the mission.

More Than Just Another IPO

Via’s IPO comes at a turning point for tech. The pendulum is swinging away from incremental SaaS toward companies tackling humanity’s biggest challenges through hard infrastructure. Recent offerings like CoreWeave and American Bitcoin in data centers and compute, Flexport in logistics, TerraPower in energy, and General Matter in uranium enrichment signal the shift. Markets are starting to value real infrastructure over pure software—and in that context, public transportation sits squarely at the center: cleaner, cheaper, and more accessible mobility for all.

Lior Prosor is a Founding Partner at Hanaco Ventures.