How did Optibus take the top spot in Calcalist’s annual startup ranking?

“We are really honored to get the number one place, my understanding is that voting is done by top VCs in Israel,” explained Optibus Co-Founder and CEO Amos Haggiag. Joining CTech to discuss the ranking, Haggiag admits that it caught the company completely by surprise.

“Optibus is growing very rapidly in the past few years, both in terms of new cities added to the platform, which translates to revenues, traction overall, funding, and so on. I think VC firms around the world both in Israel and globally see that… we knew we were doing well, but we didn't expect to be number one,” he continued. “It was a nice gift to get in the morning of Independence Day in Israel. It is great to see all the hard work that the 300+ employees in Optibus are doing and being recognized by the industry.”

Optibus is a platform for planning and running public transport systems. It works with city and transit operators in more than 1000 cities around the world and plans to expand into regions that don’t have robust systems in place, such as countries in Africa and Asia.

“There is a huge trend in the world right now of bringing electric transportation into the public transit systems and we are the engine behind the optimization of the electric transportation,” Haggiag said when asked about plans for the future. “We really are focused around real-time operation and overall growth of more reach, and so on. So, lots of work.”

You can watch the entire exchange in the video above.