RADIUS venture go2gether launches pilot with Vancity

Beedie School of Business alumna Alice Park, CEO and co-founder of go2gether.

Real-time carpooling app go2gether, a client of The Beedie School of Business’ social innovation venture incubator RADIUS, has secured an eight-month pilot contract with Vancity credit union.

go2gether is a social enterprise that utilizes a web application to provide an automated carpool matching service, saving users money and reducing climate impact. Through the agreement, Vancity employees will use go2gether to create carpools to work, meetings, training events, and other travel.

By utilizing go2gether’s carpooling service, Vancity employees will also engage with each other while traveling, increasing social connection among the organization’s 2,500 employees.

“Not only is Vancity go2gether’s first enterprise client, but its values and corporate mission are very much aligned with our own,” said SFU Beedie School of Business alumna Alice Park, CEO and co-founder of go2gether. “We are pleased to support Vancity’s efforts to reduce its CO₂ emissions through employee commuting.”

Park co-founded go2gether as a student at SFU’s Beedie School of Business. After graduating she participated in the SFU Venture Connection entrepreneurship incubator before joining the first RADIUS cohort in November 2013. In February 2014 go2gether announced that SFU had signed an agreement making it the venture’s first institutional client.

“Through this pilot scheme with Vancity we plan to learn more about the key factors that make this new relationship an unconditional success,” said Park. “Through those lessons, we intend to expand to serve more businesses across the lower mainland.”

Launched in spring 2013, RADIUS (RADical Ideas, Useful to Society) is an innovation lab and venture incubator at SFU’s Beedie School of Business. It seeks to change business education and launch high-impact solutions to social challenges.

“Vancity is a company that has consistently recognized excellence and innovation in purpose-based business,” said Donovan Woollard, Director of RADIUS Ventures. “Partnering with go2gether is another example of Vancity’s commitment to social business.”