Getting around shapes access to everyday life thats why tibs is here
About TIBS
TIBS is a transport information and safety platform built around everyday commuter experiences.
We enable commuters to report incidents in real time, view nearby transport issues, rate vehicles, routes, and operators, and access clear insights into transport behavior.
Inside tibs
Who we are
In Nairobi, millions rely on buses and matatus to get to work each day. Still, every trip begins with uncertainty: no clear history of the vehicle and no reliable sense of what to expect.
TIBS exists to reduce that uncertainty.
Our goal is to give commuters simple, actionable information so they can make informed decisions and travel safely from point A to B.
How we do it
We do this by turning passenger experiences into real-time, usable signals. In one tap, users can rate a ride, understand a vehicle, and share what happened.
As visibility improves, decisions change. Over time, that shifts behavior across the system.
Our story
TIBS started from working closely with real transport environments.
We analyzed how people move, how vehicles operate, and how decisions are made, and one thing became clear - there was no shared data layer between passengers.
The surrounding system wasn't designed to solve this. Oversight exists, and SACCOs manage operations, but there's no real-time ingestion or distribution mechanism for passenger-generated signals. Data exists, but it's fragmented, unstructured, and non-transferable. Each experience is isolated, with no aggregation into a usable system state.
This exposed a clear gap.
What if passenger experiences could be captured as structured inputs, processed in real time, and exposed as a shared, queryable layer?
That became the foundation.
Tibs Today
A timeline of what we've done and how we are empowering local volunteers to take part in surveys that help improve both the transport system and the platform.
Jan 2026
Conception and research
Conception and research phase. We focused on understanding the transport problem clearly, mapping the information gaps commuters face, and defining the early direction for the platform.
Feb 2026
VDC launch and volunteer fieldwork
We built the VDC and onboarded local contributors to collect structured route and vehicle data, logging 13+ hours of fieldwork across 6 routes and 4 roads, mapping and validating 110 bus stops and stages, identifying 191 routes, and capturing data on 324 vehicles.
Mar 2026
Manyanga Travellers launch and live testing
We launched Manyanga Travellers and moved into active field testing with 3 contributors across 7 assignments, covering 6 routes and 4 roads.
This phase produced 28 survey sessions (~13 hours), 885 location samples, 3 vehicle import batches, and 76 captured vehicles, establishing a live test bed for contributor onboarding, route coverage, movement sampling, and structured transport data collection.