The U.S. highway-funding model is broken. The gas tax froze. The Highway Trust Fund is effectively insolvent. Every state DOT is now under pressure to find new revenue, new equity, and new programmability — without rebuilding any roads. Carma is the software platform that replaces the legacy roadside stack. A Road Usage Operating System that turns every tolling, transit, parking, and HOV program into a single programmable surface. Five U.S. networks already run on it. We're now raising our Series C.
Every state DOT is now staring at the same problem at the same time. The legacy answer — more gantries, more concrete, more bespoke vendor projects — doesn't compose. Carma's bet is that the answer is a software platform, not a construction program.
U.S. federal gas tax: unchanged since 1993. EV adoption is gutting the per-gallon base further. The funding mechanism that built and maintained the Interstate system has effectively stopped working.
The Highway Trust Fund has needed Congressional bailouts every authorisation cycle since 2008. Every state DOT now needs a new revenue mechanism that isn't tied to a 1950s-era tax base.
The agencies that are figuring it out — VMT pilots, HOT lanes, equity surcharges, off-peak credits — are all reaching for the same thing: a system where pricing can be re-programmed without re-pouring concrete. That's what Carma is.
Every U.S. transportation network — tolling, transit, parking, HOV — runs on its own proprietary stack, its own roadside hardware, its own back-office, its own discount logic. The result is fifteen-year reconciliation cycles, billions in vendor overhead, and no programmable surface for the agencies that actually need to use these systems.
Carma replaces that stack with a software platform — one identity layer, one settlement rail, one pricing engine, all served over real-time JSON APIs — composing across modes, programs, and regions. We let agencies move beyond fixed tolling into programmable pricing: a living system that re-configures every time policy changes, not a new vendor project every time a rule changes.
The wallet on the driver's phone is the front-end. The Road Usage Operating System underneath it is the actual product.
Roads don't need to be rebuilt. They just need a wallet. Carma · canonical thesis
VMT and road-usage pricing are coming as federal and state mandates over the next ten years. Our strategy is to be already-embedded inside every target agency before that wave hits — so when policy lands, the agency reaches for the platform they already trust, not an RFP.
Start with one well-scoped program — HOV verification on an existing toll network, a VMT bank pilot, a corporate sustainability program. Three-week deployments. Existing roadside hardware. No procurement of new gantries.
Verified accuracy, recovered revenue, defensible audit trail, equity outcomes the agency can report to its board, its legislature, and its federal funders. Government trust earned through execution, not through capital.
Same identity, same API, same audit trail — now extended into transit fare equity, parking discount eligibility, managed-lane settlement, RUC pilots. Integration depth compounds. Each new program is faster and cheaper than the last.
By the time the agency is ready for a state-level VMT mandate, Carma is already the system of record for verified mileage, verified occupancy, and verified eligibility across every existing program. The mandate becomes a switch, not an RFP.
The numbers below come from production deployments in active state agency programs — validated by the agencies themselves, not by Carma. The agencies pay for them; the agencies report on them.
State-validated transaction-level accuracy across the live tolling deployments.
Reduction in disputed and fraudulent transactions vs. the prior all-hardware stack.
Fastest agency go-live from contract signature to live program — no new pavement, no roadside hardware.
Typical integration on existing roadside infrastructure (gantries, ALPR), end-to-end with the agency's back-office.
Live in production, live as GoMoneyMiles, live as the One Car Challenge, complete with state-validated results, and procured for service commencement. Each program proves a different verb of the platform — HOV verification, dynamic tolling, VMT-based rewards, mileage banking, managed-lane integration, corporate sustainability — and together they prove the operating system.
No competitor in the U.S. transportation sector has shipped against this thesis as long, as broadly, or with as much IP protection. The moat compounds with every program — and the alternatives are well-funded losers in the same race.
Smartphone-based ridesharing, occupancy verification, road user charging, mobility-as-a-service. Most recent issue: US 12,620,310 (May 2026). The portfolio runs across two patent families and continues to grow — multiple applications are pending.
The technique that makes smartphone HOV verification work — continuous coordinated proximity monitoring in a shared transport network — is anchored by a granted U.S. patent. The technique cannot be reimplemented by a faster-moving competitor without entering our IP zone.
First smartphone trip verified in 2008 — the year the App Store launched. The longest-standing smartphone-mobility company in the United States. The category has only become more valuable as the funding model has unwound.
Every program live with an agency makes the next program faster, cheaper, and more defensible. The agency knows the team, the APIs, the audit trail. By program four, the alternative isn't a competitor — it's a six-month re-procurement against a known-good vendor.
Live integrations with the tier-1 vendors and agencies that already own the U.S. transportation stack — TransCore, Cintra, NTTA, WSDOT, HNTB, SBCTA, LA Metro, LA DOTD. Each new agency conversation starts with a known-good vendor relationship already in place.
Founded by Sean O'Sullivan (Avego → Carma). Backed strategically and financially by the venture firm he founded. Long-term relationship — eighteen years of patient capital and continuity of vision.
The fundamental economic reason a state DOT or MPO signs Carma is that our platform expands their operating margin. Less hardware to maintain. Less image-review labour. Faster reconciliation. Higher revenue capture on partial-plate reads. Lower fraud. Lower customer-service cost. Higher program participation.
Carma is not selling new spending. We're selling less of the spending the agency already has — plus the optionality to layer new programs (equity, climate, congestion) on top of the saved baseline. That is a very different sales motion from selling roadside hardware.
The result: agencies that move from "evaluating Carma" to "scaling Carma" tend to keep expanding scope within a 12-month window. Every new program saves more than it costs to deploy.
Expand the agency's margin. Carma · why we win
Onboard the next wave of U.S. tolling agencies onto the HOV-verification API. Expand the SBCTA VMT Bank pattern into adjacent MPOs. Sign the first corporate verticals since the 2017 Toyota pilot, building on the enterprise pattern it established. Convert active conversations into live contracts.
Make the wallet's identity / status / discount layer the substrate every U.S. transportation program runs on. Verified veteran, verified low-income, verified employer pass — issued once, applied everywhere. Cross-agency interoperability becomes the default, not the exception.
Federal and state VMT / RUC mandates are coming. Be already-embedded in every target agency before they arrive. Selective international expansion into the markets where smartphone-native is the obvious answer (UK, Austria, Ireland, Canada). Position for strategic acquisition by a signal-controller manufacturer, a tolling integrator, or a sustainability-platform incumbent.
Carma is currently engaging a small group of strategic and financial investors for our Series C round. The round funds the scaling of the live network — additional U.S. tolling agencies, two more corporate verticals, and the identity-layer platform that compounds the moat ahead of the federal VMT mandate wave.
What we typically share in a first call:
