School-run fumes led to a $50m electric bus business
Duncan McIntyre noticed a bus tailpipe level with his son's face. Eight years on, Highland Electric Fleets runs buses in more than 100 US cities and, on the company's figures, turns over $45m to $50m a year.
McIntyre's oldest child was in second grade when he worked out that the school bus tailpipe sat at roughly the height of his son's face.
"These kids are standing there all over this country in the morning, and again in the afternoon, breathing those exhaust fumes," he told Entrepreneur.
Most American school buses still burn diesel. The World Health Organization classifies diesel exhaust as a known human carcinogen, and children's developing lungs are more vulnerable, according to World Resources Institute data.
McIntyre had a background in energy, emissions technology and financing. He founded Highland Electric Fleets in Massachusetts in 2018 on the view that the hardware and manufacturing to electrify a fleet already existed.
The first sale took about eighteen months. It went to the city of Beverly, Massachusetts. Until then he funded the company himself.
Then came the part most founders skip in the retelling. Buses are expensive, and Highland buys them.
"The business that we're in is hugely capital-intensive, so anyone who's successful [needs] a real strategy around raising capital," McIntyre said. Equity money funds the platform; separate project-level financing buys the equipment.
The company announced a $150m equity investment from Aiga Capital Partners in December to fund national expansion. That sits alongside roughly $200m in construction debt and tax-advantaged financing from long-term partners.
Highland reports current annual revenue of $45m to $50m and says it has roughly doubled year on year for several years. McIntyre says it will double again in 2027 and describes Highland as the largest provider in the sector.
The customers are not uniform. Fleets range from 300 buses carrying more than $100m of equipment down to contracts of two or three vehicles, across urban, rural, affluent and underserved districts.
Nor does Highland sell a big bang. It advises districts to replace diesel vehicles as they come up for retirement rather than swapping a whole fleet at once.
The work is mostly everything that is not the bus: training council staff to operate and maintain the vehicles, and designing, permitting and building electrified depots. McIntyre says the company may sink $5m to $10m of equipment into the ground at a single site, built to run for 25 to 30 years.
Highland finances all of it and is paid by the mile. The commercial promise is that a district pays at or below what the equivalent diesel fleet would have cost, helped by the absence of oil changes and particulate filters.
That is the part a founder should take away. McIntyre did not sell a product to buyers with no budget; he removed the purchase decision entirely and took the capital risk onto his own balance sheet.
It also explains the pace. A project once took eighteen months to get running. McIntyre says it now takes about six. The company is looking at fleets in 200 cities and is set to sponsor the 2028 Olympics.