Sakay.ph

Sakay.ph is a website and mobile app that helps Metro Manila commuters plan routes across the city’s fragmented public transport system, blending formal transit options like buses, jeepneys, and trains with informal modes in a single set of directions, at a time when Google Maps and similar tools handled Metro Manila’s informal transport network poorly or not at all. Its origin is genuinely collaborative and, in press coverage, described in two different ways: several sources describe it as a side project by Philip Cheang and Thomas Dy of software company By Implication, built as an entry to the Philippine Transit App Challenge, a 2013 hackathon organized by the Department of Transportation and Communications together with the Metropolitan Manila Development Authority and the Cebu City government; at least one other source separately credits a 2013 founding to Levi Ong. This entry could not fully reconcile that discrepancy and is noting it directly rather than silently picking one version.

The app’s core value proposition has stayed consistent since its hackathon origins: giving Metro Manila commuters realistic, multi-modal routing that accounts for how people actually get around the city, rather than only the formal transit lines that a conventional mapping app would show.

Sakay.ph raised US$150,000 in seed funding in a round that closed around October 2019, backed by Betatron Venture Group, a Hong Kong-based accelerator and seed investor. As of a November 2025 piece on Philippine public transport data challenges, Sakay.ph was still described as an operating platform, though the same coverage discussed ongoing challenges around maintaining accurate, current transit data over time, which is a genuine and disclosed operational challenge rather than a sign the service has shut down.

Metro Manila's public transport system mixes formal routes (buses, trains) with a large volume of informal transport (jeepneys, tricycles, UV Express vans) that conventional mapping and navigation apps have historically handled poorly, leaving commuters to figure out realistic multi-modal routes through word of mouth or trial and error.

Daily commuters in Metro Manila who need realistic, multi-modal directions that include informal transport modes, rather than only the fixed formal transit lines a conventional map app would show.

Sakay.ph was built specifically to model Metro Manila's mix of formal and informal transport together in one routing engine, an approach that grew directly out of a government-organized transit-app hackathon rather than a general-purpose mapping product later localized for the Philippines.