What number of occasions have you ever unintentionally taken a toll street and not using a tag? Or traveled to part of the nation the place the toll system is completely different than the one for which you already paid up?
As the daddy of 4 competitive-tennis-playing daughters, Fareed Zein spent years driving “from California to Florida,” he says. All through these years, he and his spouse racked up toll violation after toll violation. “I assumed, there’s acquired to be a better approach,” he remembers.
Thankfully, Zein wasn’t simply any sports activities dad with 1000’s of miles on his automotive. The College of Texas grad put in 26 years growing IT methods at Shell. He retired from that position in 2015, which allowed him to spend extra time on the street along with his youngest daughter, now taking part in for UT Austin. In 2019, he used his expertise experience to start out Unytag, an organization centered on making it simpler to drive across the nation because the Zein household had so many occasions.
Unytag is a system that enables customers to trash their a number of toll tags in favor of only one RFID (radio-frequency identification) sticker and an app. The app, which Zein says is at the moment in its testing part, shall be accessible on each IOS and Android telephones within the second half of the yr.
“A telephone is a tool everybody has these days, proper?” says Zein. “Identical to you utilize your telephone to pay for a latte at Starbucks, we’re going to simplify the way you pay tolls.”
One other great thing about the Unytag system is that — moderately than depositing a set quantity as customers do for many toll methods — it’s pay-as-you-go. Funds are withdrawn by Unytag simply as they’re wanted. And it really works for each toll tag within the nation, with plans to increase globally.
Although Zein introduced technical chops to Unytag, he nonetheless needed to study to be a founder. He credit his time taking part within the Founder Institute’s pre-seed accelerator with serving to him to launch from the bottom up.
“From there, I made a decision I wanted to start out constructing the infrastructure that I wanted,” Zein remembers.
Subsequent, he labored with the Texas Enterprise Labs accelerator and was named a finalist on the 2022 Houston Innovation Awards Gala. Most just lately, Unytag gained final November’s Houston Startup Showcase, with a prize of $10,000 from The Ion and $20,000 in authorized companies from Ion associate Baker Botts.
“That was a reasonably large confidence builder that we’re getting in the appropriate course in addition to a good way to start out the yr for us,” Zein says.
Alternatives like these are a simply a few of what Zein says makes him proud to be a “Houston born and raised” firm. Along with his prolonged community constructed over 32 years residing within the Houston space, Zein says, he’s had many alternatives for development that he won’t have discovered elsewhere. Two of his present crew members had been colleagues at Shell.
“Having an ecosystem that helps innovation is precisely what we would have liked,” he provides. “We’re very happy with the way forward for tech startups in Houston with The Ion and the Innovation District, the place we proceed to develop. We’re able to create the following success story.”
Fareed Zein has racked up his fair proportion of toll payments — and he designed a greater approach. Picture courtesy of Unytag
