Swyft Cities Introduction

(November 15, 2024)

MEET OUR DELIVERY PARTNERS SWYFT CITIES

Swyft Cities to deliver Whoosh^® projects to key regions.

 

“...seeing the technology, known today as Whoosh^®, for the first time and measuring how it stacked up in the market — it was just obvious to me that it had the potential to make a big change for the industry. I knew I had to be onboard right away." - Jeral Poskey, Swyft Cities CEO

We're excited to introduce the team at Swyft Cities as our first distributor and implementation partner of Whoosh^®. We’ve known and worked closely with the leaders of the company for many years. We first met Swyft Cities CEO Jeral Poskey and Co-Founder Clay Griggs back when Jeral was a Transportation Executive for Google leading a project team that included Clay. Their team was searching for solutions to parking and transportation challenges for Google real estate.

Jeral explained the details of his team's early efforts during our Whoosh public launch event in September, "Our team was originally from Google's transportation and real estate program and the goal was to build out bigger and better campuses for our corporate real estate needs. While working toward those goals, we identified traffic as the big obstacle. You simply could not build what we wanted due to traffic."

"The project we started was called 'Project Swyft' and it was originally designed to identify and purchase a transportation solution that was already available. There are so many new ideas in technology and transportation — flying cars, tunnels, autonomous shuttles — we thought surely one of those would be the answer. And we're at Google, the original inventors of autonomous cars, but we saw that none of it was going to solve our problem. The traffic on the ground was too bad, we needed to create something new."

"Our strategy was always to evaluate three competing ideas - we already had two. For the third, we took a chance on Holmes Solutions who were showcasing a switchable cable system — nobody had ever made a switchable cable system work, so we said 'fine' and threw them into the mix. After just a few months into the project, we saw the progress Holmes Solutions was making on their technology and realized it was going to be incredible. We eliminated the other two ideas and went all in."

The novel combination of elements that set Whoosh apart in the market sparked the flames for Jeral and his team to be early movers and partners with the technology. "Being at Google, my team had the opportunity to evaluate nearly every emerging transportation technology out there. So, seeing their technology, known today as Whoosh, for the first time and measuring how it stacked up in the market — it was just obvious to me that it had the potential to make a big change for the industry. I knew I had to be onboard right away." Jeral was so passionate about the opportunity he left Google with key members of his team and founded Swyft Cities. Jeral and his team secured the first license for Whoosh, becoming a delivery partner for the system.

The Swyft Cities team has been making tremendous strides to help bring Whoosh into the market. Back in 2022, Jeral and his team won the TechCrunch Sessions: Mobility Pitch-Off presenting an early preview of Whoosh and piquing interest in advance of our major market introduction to the new transportation solution. "The interest we've seen in Whoosh is huge. We're in discussions with multiple cities in the US who are actively looking to move ahead with Whoosh as a transportation solution." One of many great tools that Swyft Cities brings to the table is their "Digital Twin" software package. That software allows the Swyft Cities team to build a virtual reality model of a Whoosh installation for a prospective location. All of the key Whoosh kit-of-parts infrastructure for a network can be placed into a model, allowing future Whoosh installations to come to life for project planners to experience and interact with.

As a Delivery Partner for Whoosh, Swyft Cities currently holds the license for multiple regions, including North America and the Middle East. We encourage prospective project planners and developers to connect with Swyft Cities to explore adding Whoosh as a transportation solution for their locations.