Good morning, Broadsheet readers! New research finds that women are often judged negatively for making connections with higher-ups, Stanford researchers believe they’ve uncovered why women are more prone to autoimmune diseases, and there’s a new unicorn on the block. Have a relaxing weekend.
– Picking up. In a tough market for startups, we’re hearing more about unicorns shutting down than new ones joining the herd. But a female-founded company joined the ranks of the unicorns this week with an unusual business: school buses.
Zum, founded and led by CEO Ritu Narayan, raised a $140 million Series E round, with a new valuation of $1.3 billion. The round was led by Singapore-based investment firm GIC, with participation from Sequoia and Softbank.
Narayan came up with the idea for a school bus startup a decade ago, inspired by her struggle getting her kids to and from school while she worked at eBay. “This problem is generational, it’s beyond me,” she says she realized. “I need to do something about it.”
What started as a way to improve pick-up and drop-off for parents evolved into a complex business involving AI, electric vehicles, and public-private partnerships with school districts.
The Oracle alum, 50, grew up in India and moved to the U.S. at 25. She identified student transportation as a $50 billion industry—”the largest mass transit system in the U.S.”—serving 27 million students that had “never been disrupted before.” “This industry has not changed in 80 years,” she says.
Zum’s tech-enabled school bus fleets give parents insight into children’s whereabouts via an app and allow buses to be used for purposes other than morning and afternoon transit, rather than sitting empty the rest of the day. Zum aims for the buses to “connect back to the grid” to provide energy when not in use. The startup relies on AI to “optimize routes.” Narayan says Zum reduced the number of school buses in San Francisco from 236 to 193 and reduced commute time for students.
Narayan didn’t have experience in EVs before building Zum, but she realized that the school bus is “the ideal asset to be electrified.” “It’s the largest battery on wheels,” she explains. “It’s four-to-six times the EV car battery, and it has a very predictable commute pattern. It travels locally and it’s not utilized in peak demand for energy during the evening or summer.”
Currently, the Bay Area-based company has about 2,000 employees and provides transportation for 4,000 schools in the U.S.
Narayan advises other founders looking for their unicorn idea in a bleak market to “always to solve a real customer pain point.” That’s how she founded her company—although almost five years in she made the tough call to switch its business model. “I was very tied to my personal story. That was my founding story,” she says. “But I knew the right thing to do for the company was to evolve.”
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
@_emmahinchliffe
The Broadsheet is Fortune’s newsletter for and about the world’s most powerful women. Today’s edition was curated by Joseph Abrams. Subscribe here.
ALSO IN THE HEADLINES
- Lost network. New research found that women are often judged negatively by coworkers when they develop strong connections with their higher-ups, but men aren’t. Building such networks is instrumental for personal success and an essential step in bringing more women into the C-suite, but women who do so risk losing coworkers' respect and experiencing a downgrade in status. Wall Street Journal
- Problems with an X. Stanford University researchers believe that the X chromosome, present twice in women but only once in men, is the reason women are at a significantly increased risk of developing autoimmune diseases like rheumatoid arthritis and multiple sclerosis. The research states that a type of RNA produced by a woman’s X chromosomes creates proteins that could make the immune system attack itself if genetic predisposition or other factors are present. Fortune
- Fallen angels. Women in the U.K. are frustrated with a new British law that requires a minimum income of £170,000 ($216,413) to be an angel investor, a threshold that disproportionately disqualifies women. Because women-led businesses are more likely to receive funding from women investors, the new floor—70% higher than before—could squeeze female-founded startups. Bloomberg
- A stadium of their own. The first stadium in the country built exclusively for a women’s soccer team—and one of the few in the world for just women athletes—is less than two months away from its grand opening. The CPKC stadium in Kansas City, Mo., which will be home to the Kansas City Current women's soccer team, is set to open on March 16 with a capacity of 11,500 and a total price tag of $117 million. Washington Post
- Running on EVs. Cathie Wood's investment firm ARK Invest predicted a coming surge in the sluggish electric vehicle market on Wednesday, just days after the ARK ETF picked up more than $141 million worth of Tesla stock. The firm pointed to the declining price of electric vehicle batteries to back up the prediction, which also forecasts a crash in the market for traditional cars. Fortune
MOVERS AND SHAKERS: Minute Media appointed Jenna Klein to global vice president of brand and athlete strategy at The Players' Tribune.
ON MY RADAR
How Barstool Sports' CEO built a $250 million media company Fortune
Students reported her for a lesson on race. Then she taught it again Washington Post
Ovaries are an enigma that could unlock human lifespan Financial Times
PARTING WORDS
"It isn't just a nice thing that I'm doing, I think it's also a really smart investment."
—Aurora James, creator of the Fifteen Percent Pledge, which challenges businesses to purchase 15% of their products from Black-owned businesses. Four years after it was created, the pledge has brought $14 billion in revenue to Black-owned companies.
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