Pedal to the metal: How Veo powers actionable insights with Google Cloud

Veo is a micromobility company on a mission to end car dependency by making clean transportation more accessible to all. We provide millions of shared bike and scooter rides to more than 50 cities across North America, and we’re just getting started.

Accessibility drives everything we do, from the types of electric vehicles in our fleet to the membership programs we develop to meet our riders’ unique needs. The more options we provide, the more people will be able to get out of their cars and into the bike lane.

Our business might seem simple on the surface, but the nuances to run it efficiently are complex. We need to embrace and leverage our data to execute moving toward a sustainable future — and we’re doing exactly that with help from Google Cloud.

Overcoming roadblocks to unified data with Looker

While the specifics of our business objectives evolve from year to year, we consistently focus on three themes: enhancing user experience, driving growth in revenue and vehicle fleet size, and optimizing overall efficiency. We want the Veo platform to be sticky, which means increasing rider retention, boosting the number of active users and available vehicles, and expanding our services in existing and new regions.

To achieve these goals, we use the troves of data at our disposal, which includes streaming IoT, transactional, and geospatial data as well as ride history, customer sentiment, and more. But to make impactful decisions, we needed more in-depth insights than our current business intelligence solution could provide. We began to look for a solution that offered more robust data modeling, unlimited extensibility, and the ability to provide more reliable, accurate data. That’s when we found Looker, Google Cloud’s business intelligence platform, which allows us to access, analyze, and act on the latest version of our data and deliver trusted data experiences.

However, Looker was just the first step of our journey. We quickly realized that to reach our full potential in a sustainable, scalable, and cost-effective way, we would also need to build a data warehouse on Google Cloud.

Driving accessible transportation forward with BigQuery

As part of the Google Cloud ecosystem, BigQuery offered the seamless integration and robust capabilities we needed to move on from our previous data warehouse. With a lean in-house team, we knew that handling the migration on our own would be burdensome and take resources away from other high-impact projects.

We turned to Google Cloud Professional Services and Bytecode, a Google Cloud partner, for hands-on support during migration. With these extra development and management resources on our side, we completed the process in less than three months. BigQuery is now at the center of our data strategy, working in harmony with the rest of our application ecosystem to get us closer to our ideal state of maturity.

Switching to BigQuery has transformed our ability to access, understand, and use data at Veo. With its direct integration into other Google Cloud solutions, we get greater accessibility and faster insights, unlocking significant impact and enablement across our organization. Even non-technical team members feel comfortable using BigQuery to run ad-hoc analyses themselves, freeing up time for our analytics team to work on high-value projects.

In addition to its analytical warehouse capabilities, BigQuery powers faster and more efficient deployment of ML models in production. Combined with Vertex AI, Google Cloud’s fully managed, unified AI development platform for building and using generative AI, BigQuery has become the heart of our machine learning operations by making it easy for teams to create, deploy, and manage models at scale.

Now enabled with fast, accessible analysis, we can identify and resolve the root cause of issues as they occur, boosting customer satisfaction to new, sustained highs. With BigQuery, we’ve also reduced our total cost of ownership and our data processing costs by 30% compared to our previous solution.

Moving toward a sustainable future

As we look to the future of data, we’ll continue to embrace Google Cloud capabilities, such as generative AI and ML, to reach our growth objectives. Whether providing stronger support for our non-technical users or improving predictive modeling, we recognize the power of AI to streamline our operations and product strategy. We also plan to leverage advanced sentiment analysis and vector search to better understand ride ratings, complaints, and reviews to further optimize our service.

At Veo, our approach to data is guided by our unwavering focus on accessibility. Just as we strive to make clean transportation available to everyone, we want to democratize data across our teams so that everyone can access the high-fidelity insights they need to do their jobs. With its scalable infrastructure, ease of use, and cross-functional capabilities, BigQuery has empowered us to make informed decisions for our business and our customers. 

Watch the on-demand webcast to learn more about Veo’s data migration journey to BigQuery and how it enabled the company to accelerate data-driven innovation and enhance operational efficiency. Ready to get started with BigQuery? Learn more here, or sign up for a free trial.