4MATIV
How a Mission-Driven Transportation Company Uses NationGraph to Find More Opportunities to Serve
School districts make partnership decisions all the time. When an operation is hard to staff, hard to standardize, or requires specialized expertise, leaders routinely bring in outside support—sometimes to run the work, sometimes to augment it, often in a hybrid model. Food service is a good example: districts may self-operate, contract management, or use vendors to keep meals reliably served even when hiring is tough.
Student transportation is at least as operationally demanding, and often less flexible.
Whether run in-house, outsourced, or somewhere in between, transportation is a complex safety- and mission-critical network. Districts have to maintain fleets and maintenance, routing and bell times, compliance and incident response, parent communications, and recruiting and retaining qualified drivers. And unlike food service, there aren’t many viable “workarounds” when staffing falls short. If a route doesn’t have a driver, students don’t get to school on time (or at all).
"Not to downplay challenges in food service, but you can probably find someone to make spaghetti," says Terry McDonough, President of 4MATIV. "You cannot necessarily find someone to manage a complex transportation network. And yet districts take on that risk every single day."
When it goes wrong, it makes headlines: Louisville's Jefferson County school system suffered from a poorly executed software rollout and new routing scheme that delayed school for nearly a week. When Boston Public Schools faced wildcat strikes and ballooning budgets, it took an emergency intervention to stabilize the system. These aren't isolated incidents; they're symptoms of a structural problem affecting school districts of every size across the country.
For the students caught in the middle, a failed bus route doesn't just mean an inconvenience. It means a missed day of learning. 4MATIV helps solve complex school transportation challenges, and NationGraph helps the team learn where to focus.
Born in a Crisis, 4MATIV Solves the Challenges of Small Charters and Large Districts
4MATIV wasn't born in a boardroom. It was born in the chaos of a real transportation crisis.
Carl Allen, 4MATIV's founder and CEO, was a data analytics hire at Boston Public Schools when the district's transportation system began unraveling there with service failures, massive budget overruns, and drivers who simply wouldn't show up.
Today, 4MATIV serves districts ranging from small charter schools with a few hundred students to some of the largest systems in the country, including Houston ISD, Prince George’s County, Prince William County, and Nashville Public Schools.
For a charter school or small district without a dedicated transportation team, 4MATIV steps in to handle everything: vendor sourcing and management, route design, contract negotiation, invoice auditing, parent and administrator communications, and ongoing route adjustments throughout the year – from split custody schedules to seasonal sports transportation.
For larger districts like Prince William County and Houston ISD, 4MATIV takes on targeted slices of the operation. In Prince William, they support routing and provide family contact center support. In Houston, they handle all routing and transit pass management, working directly with the regional metro agency.
Taking the 4MATIV Mission to More Schools with NationGraph
"We're a for-profit company," McDonough says, "but we've all spent time in the social sector and our mission is very much in alignment with our schools. Our goal is to reduce your overall expense and to cover our fees with part of the gains – so districts aren't spending enormous amounts on something that could be done far more optimally, and they can redirect those dollars to what matters most."
4MATIV's challenge isn't a lack of demand – it's a lack of capacity to find and engage the thousands of districts that need help. With a lean go-to-market team of just one AE, two SDRs, and a part-time marketing resource, the company was built on word of mouth and the personal networks of its founders. That model worked to establish credibility, but it couldn't scale.
NationGraph’s Signals feature has fundamentally changed how 4MATIV identifies potential clients. By using AI to monitor school board meetings, budget discussions, and procurement activity across thousands of districts nationwide, the platform surfaces real-time indicators of transportation pain – budget shortfalls, service complaints, contract expirations — that 4MATIV's small team could never track manually.
"NationGraph Signals have been amazing," says McDonough. "Being able to go into an individual Signal, look at the board meeting timestamp, read the context, and decide in minutes whether it's worth a call – that's game-changing. A year ago, I was building tools in Claude and ChatGPT trying to scrape board minutes myself. I was getting tons of hallucinations. This has made a world of difference."
The impact has been concrete: 4MATIV used NationGraph to find and close multiple six-figure deals in just three months.
Discovering Markets They Never Knew Existed
Perhaps the most unexpected benefit has been NationGraph's ability to reveal regional patterns that weren't on 4MATIV's radar. The company had been focused on core states — Texas, Minnesota, Florida, Nevada, Arizona — based on existing footholds and favorable policy environments. NationGraph opened up the map.
"We didn't realize so many districts were struggling with budget constraints and complex transportation issues," McDonough recalls. "We saw news about the State of New Hampshire and were able to tap our team in Boston to understand the vendor landscape and funding trends there and figure out how to serve that state."
Competitive Intelligence Without the FOIA Requests
4MATIV also uses NationGraph's Workspace to identify districts that are likely overspending with existing vendors. Rather than filing time-consuming public records requests, McDonough can search for districts working with specific transportation providers and build a preliminary picture of their spend.
"I want to know everyone who works with three particular vendors – because I know they're probably spending way too much money," he says. "Now I can pull those districts without doing FOIA requests. I can get a sense of what they've procured and build a case before I ever pick up the phone."
Expanding Without Growing
4MATIV’s team uses NationGraph to identify contacts, refine their outreach target list, focus on the highest potential opportunities, and gain a deeper understanding of their target accounts.
The platform's ability to surface verified contacts at the district level – COOs, superintendents, directors of transportation – addresses what McDonough describes as the sector's core data challenge: "There's high turnover, so you always have to verify whether someone's still in the role."
The 4MATIV Technologies team finds their focus with Signals, which flag news, council meeting minutes, and other sources of information that point to a need for 4MATIV’s solution. “We’ve closed deals originated via Signals, discovered regional purchasing trends, and more effectively segmented prospects based on revealed buying behaviors”, shared McDonough.
Looking ahead, McDonough sees even greater potential as the platform adds new capabilities – particularly tools that give leadership visibility into what the full team is tracking, so they can prioritize and coordinate outreach more effectively
"Our pipeline target set has grown a lot since we started using NationGraph," McDonough says. "It's finding us opportunities we wouldn't have known about, in places we weren't looking, with intelligence we couldn't have gathered ourselves. For a team our size, that's everything."
4MATIV is a school transportation company that combines deep education sector expertise with technology-enabled operations to help districts reduce costs, improve service, and ensure every student has reliable access to learning. Learn more at 4mativ.org.
NationGraph is an AI-powered intelligence platform that connects the companies serving public sector with the cities, counties, state agencies, schools and special districts that most need their solutions. Learn more at nationgraph.com.