Gett CEO Dave Waiser: We currently serve over 25% of Fortune 500 firms

What is Gett? 

I founded the company in 2010 and we started in Israel as a ride-hailing company. Very quickly, we became a market leader and profitable, and we have grown profitably since then. But more importantly, for the longest part of our journey, we’ve been servicing B2B clients. And what we found is that those clients had many vendors but no platform to manage this entire spend. So we started to develop a solution that does exactly this. 

We managed to aggregate all different transportation vendors on one single platform – so you can imagine anything from taxis to limos being in one single platform. And we managed the entire spend for the companies. Once we had this unique tech, approximately around 2017, we shifted all our resources and focus into this much bigger business model. We went from being a local operator to becoming a global software vendor. By now, more than two-thirds of our revenue is coming from B2B and we have more than 25% of Fortune 500 companies as our clients. 

When it comes to ground transportation, how is it corporate side different from the consumer side from an operational perspective?

You as a consumer, most of your rides happen with a certain location of a city and you might need only one vendor. Once you own a company, you will have anywhere between 20-60 vendors. And your problem becomes radically different. It’s not about which particular vendor is good or bad, it’s about how you manage this entire spend. How do you place those orders and collect the invoice aggregated in one system? Analytics, security, reporting, etc are all important things when you have more than one vendor. 

For corporates, the mantra is standardization and control. We help companies manage and provide standardization across the entire portfolio of vendors. 

How do you expect the work-from-home and hybrid work environments to impact the business?

The COVID situation changed ground transportation forever. Companies realized that the vendors that they had in the past are not reliable enough today. The pickup times today are not as good as they have been in the past. 

So companies came forward asking how they can upgrade their infrastructure including ground transportation to fully support its remote workforce globally. They needed to modernize the infrastructure, needed more vendors to service more locations and needed an aggregator to provide better pickup times and reliability. And this is exactly what Gett has been doing for the past 10 years. 

And regardless of those changes, companies are always looking for savings. So we can help exactly on this across all this spectrum. 

ALSO READ Equillium CEO Bruce Steel: We are among the few evaluated in first-line GVHD treatment

You have announced a SPAC merger with Rosecliff Acquisition Corp, which is expected to close early next year. Tell us a bit about the rationale behind the SPAC listing.

B2B is a category that both institutional and retail investors like. Second is that the market opportunity is really right now. It might sound counterintuitive, but after COVID, companies like Gett are going to be the biggest beneficiaries as companies coming back to office discover the lack of reliability of past vendors. 

We have the first-mover advantage, as we have a large portfolio of great companies already. So we want to move it as fast as possible and SPAC was a good solution for that. 

Gett, Uber, Lyft, etc were founded around the same time – between 2010 to 2012. While the other ride-hailing companies are struggling to make profits, you have created a profitable business model. How did that happen?

In digital world, there is a big difference between the operator and software-based spend management companies like Gett. When you are a mobile operator, you have all that cost to run the marketplace. Two-thirds of the $100 billion spend goes to corporate fleets and taxis, and not to ride-hailers. So the market is bigger and there are many more fleet vendors. 

It’s difficult to make money when you need to run the operational network on your own. The difference is that we are aggregating operators, and they are those who execute the transaction. Our value is in managing the spend and standard. And this is a very different business model.  

ALSO READ mPhase Technologies CEO Anshu Bhatnagar: Our core focus will be on EV charging

Are you looking to expand your operations to any new markets? 

Yes. For us to expand to newer markets is a relatively simple task. Unlike operators who need to invest a lot of money, time, and resources, we actually partner with the vendors, enable them to connect to the platform and enjoy the corporate demand at full price. 

By now, we have already aggregated over 2,000 different vendors. The reason why our partners are connecting to the B2B marketplace that we created is that they get high-quality demand at full price. So for them, we are a free acquisition channel. 

We currently operate in the US, UK, Russia and Isreal. And we are about t to launch in many more countries in Europe this year including Germany, Spain, Italy, and France.