Our Company
We’re empowering cities to manage the future of mobility
Our Story
Our founders met at UC Berkeley in 2012 as research scientists where they built open source software that powered forecasts for the San Francisco Bay Area Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) to predict and plan the next 30 years of travel. New services like Uber and Lyft were beginning to emerge in San Francisco. Back then, our founders believed that cities should have data and information to plan for a rapidly-changing transportation landscape, and they dedicated their careers to gathering new data and information that could help cities evaluate the impacts of shared mobility and steer them towards societal goals.
In 2017, after building data and software solutions in the service of public agencies at Synthicity, UrbanSim, moovel, and Stanford, Dr. Regina Clewlow and Dr. Fletcher Foti co-founded Populus to empower cities with access to new data to plan for the future of mobility. Both had earned their PhDs in transportation and urban planning from MIT and UC Berkeley, and have a combined 30+ years of experience delivering digital solutions to public agencies.
In early 2018, Populus launched our first platform, Mobility Manager, to support cities’ abilities to securely access data from shared bikes, cars, and the rapidly-expanding new service that had arrived - electric scooters. Today, over 100 cities and the world’s leading mobility operators uniquely trust Populus to deliver the data and information that can help them deliver a safe, equitable, and sustainable transportation future.
Our Founders
Regina Clewlow, Ph.D.
Co-Founder, Chief Executive Officer
Dr. Clewlow is a leading expert on shared mobility, autonomous vehicles, and harnessing big data to simulate the future of regional and global transportation systems. She has served in research and lecturer roles at Stanford, UC Davis, and UC Berkeley. Following her academic career, Regina served as the Director of Business Development & Strategy at moovel, Daimler automotive's mobility services arm. She has been honored as an MIT Energy Fellow, EPA STAR Fellow, DOT Eisenhower Transportation Fellow, and Mass Transit 40 Under 40. She holds a Ph.D. in transportation and energy systems from MIT, and a B.S. in computer science from Cornell.
Fletcher Foti, Ph.D.
Co-Founder, Chief Data Scientist
Dr. Foti is a leading urban scientist who has been at the forefront of simulating the future of cities. After completing his Ph.D. in city planning, he co-founded and led the data science team at Synthicity, a UC Berkeley software spin-off that simulated alternative urban futures for transportation planners, architects, and real estate that was acquired by Autodesk. He holds a B.S. in computer science from Princeton University. Between his undergraduate work and Ph.D., he was a senior software engineer at Netrics, a startup acquired by Tibco.