About NextStop

We’re building the calm version of student transportation.

Started in 2024 by three parents and a former school transportation director. Based in Boulder, Colorado. Pilot-funded by founders and a small group of education-aligned investors. No plans to ever sell ads against student data — or any other data.

01 — The origin

Three founders, all standing at the same curb.

The first version of NextStop was a group text. Three parents on the same street, swapping “bus is here” messages every morning so the rest of the block could stop refreshing.

The bus already knew where it was. It had a GPS, a driver, a route, a roster. That information existed in the school’s transportation system — just nowhere a parent could reach it. The gap between what the school knew and what the parent knew, every morning, was the whole product.

We spent the first six months talking to school transportation directors. We learned that the gap was even wider than we thought: it wasn’t just between the school and the parent. It was between the school and the school. Front-office staff didn’t have the data either — not in any form they could read on a screen at 7:34 AM.

NextStop is what we built to close that gap. The first version went live in a single elementary school in fall 2025. We’re now in twelve. We expect to be in two hundred within two school years.

02 — What we believe

Four ideas that shape every product decision.

Calm beats clever.

A nervous parent at 6:55 AM does not want a delightful surprise. They want a number, and they want it to be right. Every product decision starts here.

Privacy is the architecture, not the policy.

You can’t bolt FERPA onto an open product. Closed enrollment, relationship-derived access, US-only residency — these are how the software is built, not how it’s described.

The school is the customer. The parent is the user.

We sell to schools and districts. We serve parents. When those two pull in different directions — which is rare — we tell both groups before we decide.

The bus drives the product.

If a feature doesn’t help a real bus get a real child to a real school more calmly, we don’t build it. We say no to a lot of things.

03 — Founders & leadership

The fourteen people building this.

The rest of the team is on the careers page. Here are the four founders and our head of district partnerships.

Daniela Rivera

Co-founder & CEO

Previously head of safety at a national after-school network. Mother of two riders.

Sam Okonkwo

Co-founder & CTO

Built real-time location infrastructure for a logistics company you’ve heard of. Father of two.

Mariam Chen

Co-founder & Head of Trust

Former privacy counsel at a major K–12 SIS vendor. Co-authored two of the policies you’re reading.

James Friel

Co-founder & Head of Schools

22 years in school transportation, last as director for a 40-school district in the Midwest.

Priya Anand

Head of District Partnerships

15 years in K–12 procurement and EdTech rollouts. Runs every pilot from kickoff to month three.

04 — Backed by

A small group of investors who understand schools.

We’re intentionally not over-raised. We’ve taken funding from operators — not generalists — who’ve built K–12 software before and know the cadence of an academic year.

Reach Capital
Series Seed lead, May 2025
Owl Ventures
Series Seed participant
A.Capital
Pre-seed lead, June 2024
Operators & angels
Former founders & execs from PowerSchool, ClassDojo, Common Sense Media, and a half-dozen districts.

05 — Open roles

Six open roles. All remote, US time zones.

Senior product engineer
Engineering · React Native + TypeScript on the parent & driver apps.
Open →
Staff backend engineer
Engineering · Real-time GPS pipeline, Spring Boot + Postgres.
Open →
Implementation lead
Schools · Run pilots end-to-end. K–12 background required.
Open →
Designer, parent app
Design · iOS & Android. Calm-design portfolio essential.
Open →
District partnerships, East
Schools · Sales to public-school districts. Northeast / Mid-Atlantic.
Open →
Security engineer
Engineering · FERPA, SOC 2, application security.
Open →

No role that fits? jobs@getnextstop.app · we read every email.