ELEVATOR PITCH
Omnimodal™ is a transportation tech company and social venture. Founded by David Thomas Moran and Nathan Selikoff in 2017, the startup is an interdisciplinary team of mobility tech experts connecting Smart Cities across all modes of transportation to the Mobility as a Service (MaaS) marketplace. Their mission simply put is to reduce commute times for everyone.
Nothing in the world is more valuable than our time. Reducing commute times, because commuting can take up so much precious time, is critical for cities to foster a high quality of life and shared economic prosperity for everyone. A recent Harvard study found that commute times are the leading indicator of someone’s ability to escape poverty. Currently, transportation infrastructure in US cities is overcapacity and underutilized across the board. On average each year, our cities experience 4.8 billion hours in traffic delays, wasting $160 billion in time and fuel.
Omnimodal’s solution to this problem our cities face is a Smart Mobility prediction engine that empowers cities and residents to make better use of their time…to make smarter, sustainable, data-driven decisions about their transportation and mobility needs. Mobilize by Omnimodal cuts commute times by deploying customized algorithms that ingest and optimize multimodal APIs and data. The Mobilize Smart Mobility prediction engine generates high quality, accurate, and interoperable real-time predictions across all modes of transportation. Mobilize integrates easily with different dashboard analytics platforms as well as existing, widely used commuter facing navigation apps (Google Maps, Apple Maps, Transit App, and Moovit).
OUR STORY
David Thomas Moran is a Complete Streets and civic tech consultant, disability advocate and documentary photographer. He studied communications and urban planning during his undergrad at Virginia Tech and has always been passionate about how mobility impacts communities. David completed his Emerging Media Master of Fine Arts (MFA) from the University of Central Florida’s (UCF) School of Visual Arts & Design in 2014 with an interdisciplinary specialization in critical GIS play, location-based urban mobile gaming, and public transit system design. David is currently a doctoral student in the Texts & Technology PhD program at the University of Central Florida where his dissertation research is focused on mobility app UX/UI, open data, and transit justice. He co-authored Central Florida’s first Health Impact Assessment (HIA) of a proposed transportation project (SR 50/Colonial Drive Bus Rapid Transit) during his doctoral internship with MetroPlan Orlando, the regional transportation planning board. He also worked as a project manager for Bike/Walk Central Florida and Operation Best Foot Forward, advocating for pedestrian and bicyclist safety.
David co-founded the Transit Interpretation Project (TrIP), a local public transit-focused art collective, in 2013 where he met Nathan Selikoff. Nathan was already experimenting with GTFS (General Transit Feed Specification) data visualizations, which has since become some of the core technology behind the Mobilize Smart Mobility prediction engine.
Nathan Selikoff is a fine artist and full-stack software developer. Inspired by the behavior of systems, science, nature, and music, Nathan combines computer code, traditional materials, fine art, and future technology to encourage new ways of thinking about the world. His award-winning artwork has been exhibited and performed in galleries and venues throughout the United States and around the world, including Art Basel in Switzerland; Bridges Math Art Conferences in South Korea, Hungary, Canada, and Finland; Snap! Space in Orlando; AXIOM Gallery in Boston; and the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art.
Since Omnimodal was founded, Nathan has become a leading industry expert on GTFS, GTFS Realtime, and Mobility Data Specification (MDS) data as well as the open-source, TheTransitClock prediction engine software. Nathan’s GTFS data visualization work was recently featured as one of the Top 8 submissions at the Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting in Washington, DC. In collaboration with Kittelson & Associates, Inc., the project visualized the optimization of the SR436/Semoran Boulevard transit corridor with Bus Rapid Transit service.
Both Nathan and David are champions of many local arts and tech events and organizations, participating in Code for Orlando, Art31, Art in Odd Places, the Transit Interpretation Project (TrIP), The Corridor Project, The Creative City Project, and the Cardboard Art Festival. They are both passionate advocates for integrating science, technology, engineering, art, and math (STEAM) to solve social problems. Omnimodal is a prime example of this, being a tech startup working to improve public transit and mobility design overall in communities. Its roots come from a public art collective (the Transit Interpretation Project, a.k.a. TrIP).
