We showed up to NEMTAC Transform 2026 in Orlando with a booth, a camera, and a few hundred stuffed deer. Bambi left with the Innovation in NEMT Award for the second year in a row, and roughly 400 fewer fawns. A good week.
The Non-Emergency Medical Transportation Accreditation Commission (NEMTAC) presents the award once a year. Bambi also won it in 2025 (here's that story), which makes this one back-to-back.
The trophy is nice, but the inscription is better. It honors "a team whose creative problem-solving and cutting-edge technological advancements are driving measurable, real-world improvements and profoundly transforming our industry." Notice what it doesn't say: paid ads, fancy giveaways, the biggest booth. Measurable, real-world improvements happen in a dispatch office at 4 AM, when a driver calls in sick and 10 passengers still need to get to dialysis.
So the best part of the ceremony wasn't the trophy. It was Bambi customers leaving their tables to join us on stage. NEMTAC gave us the award. The providers earned it with us.
What the award actually recognizes
Some NEMT companies have a few vehicles and a phone. Others run 100 or 200 vehicles across multiple brokers, counties, and contracts. They aren't short on hustle. They're short on software actually built for NEMT.
Bambi is AI-powered dispatch, scheduling, and billing software that automates the trip assignment, driver routing, and broker workflows that operations of every size have historically run by phone, spreadsheet, and memory. A two-van operation runs it out of the box. A multi-state fleet runs it at scale, with the reporting and controls a bigger back office needs. Same platform, same simplicity.
"We didn't build a single thing into Bambi that an owner, operator, or driver didn't ask for first, usually by telling us exactly what was broken in their day," said Nirav Chheda, Bambi's CEO and Co-Founder. "Listen, build, ship, repeat."
Hear it from the herd
We spent Transform filming short interviews, and 16 operators, brokers, insurers, and manufacturers stood still long enough. Several of them run on Bambi every day.
"I can say that our efficiency is at least 30% greater," said John Rinaldi of Greencab in Ohio about switching to Bambi.
Lakisha Bullock of Right Hand Transportation Services in Indiana brought her sister on as a dispatcher this year. Training on Bambi took a day. "I didn't even train her a lot on it. She just kind of figured it out," she said. "It does everything it says it's going to do, and we don't have any problems. The drivers love it." Then she yelled "Run Bambi Run" into the camera, which is how you know she's one of the herd.
Growth stories were everywhere. Customers Hossein Mokhtari and Nikola Simic stopped by, and Nikola's ReliaWheels in Ohio doubled to 30 vehicles this year. Watching operators go from surviving to scaling is why we do this.
All 16 interviews are on the NEMT Experts Podcast: 16 NEMT Leaders Reveal Industry Secrets, Live from NEMTAC Transform 2026. If you were on camera in Orlando, go find yourself.
The problems we're still chasing
Three problems keep us up at night.
Broker portals vs. dispatch screens. Too many trips still get rekeyed by hand, and every rekey is a missed pickup waiting to happen. Direct broker integrations are the least glamorous work we do, and they matter most. Congratulations to Provide A Ride, directly integrated with Bambi, on this year's Broker or Payer Partner award.
Onboarding, in both directions. If a small operator's new dispatcher can't run her first shift the same day, we built it wrong. A 200-vehicle fleet worries that a switch means weeks of downtime and retraining. Our job is to make the switch boring for both.
Credentialing and compliance. Every county, agency, and broker has its own rulebook, and operators carry all of them in their heads. Software should carry that load, and we're partnering coast to coast to take it off their plate.
Why we love NEMTAC Transform
The NEMT industry is unusually generous. Transform lets us talk candidly with operators who tell us the truth, see competitors' innovations that push us to be better, and watch NEMTAC raise the bar on accreditation and professionalism. A standards body that makes vendors prove measurable outcomes is exactly what this industry needs.
Congratulations to the other 2026 Transform Award winners: Tom Sikkema (Leadership and Advocacy), Provide A Ride (Broker or Payer Partner), 360 Quality Care (Accredited Partner), and M7 (NEMT Provider).
What's next
Bambi crossed four million completed trips this summer and is trusted by 800+ fleets, from single-van startups to operations running hundreds of trips a day. We're also rated a Leader in NEMT software on SourceForge, straight from real customer reviews.
If you run NEMT and something in your dispatch day still makes you want to throw your laptop, tell us. That's where our roadmap comes from. And if you spot a stuffed deer on a dashboard between now and NEMTAC 2027, you know where it came from.
Run Bambi Run.
