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Ride-Hailing & Robotaxi 🚙🚕

Bolt posts its 1st ever profit in 2025! Congrats to the team. 

To put things in perspective, Uber generated $52 billion in revenue. Also - don’t expect the company to post net profits in 2026 - after losing a legal battle, Bolt finds herself owing the UK tax authorities £190M. Profits will be something to look for again in 2027. 

CaoCao partners with May Mobility for European expansion. CaoCao, a Chinese ride-hailing company, is controlled by Geely; May Mobility is a US-based autonomous tech company, active in the US and Japan (Toyota invested in May Mobility). This move makes perfect sense: ride-hailing markets are saturated, making any new market entry very challenging and extremely costly; but expansion via robotaxi is in its early days, allowing an opportunity for new ride-hailing players to enter new markets. Expect London to be their 1st market. 

Green SM (GSM) is launching across Denmark, Sweden, Norway and the Netherlands. A part of VinGroup, GSM is an all-electric ride-hailing / taxi service currently active in Vietnam, Indonesia, Laos, and the Philippines. GSM has also just launched in Kazakhstan. 

Uber and Waymo part ways in Phoenix, ending a three year partnership in the city. Uber says it plans to bring new autonomous vehicles to Phoenix, but did not reveal which. You can still book Waymo via Uber in Austin and Atlanta. Don’t look surprised - Waymo and Uber have always been direct competitors, competing over top line revenue. 

ComfortDelGro begins public rides on its Zig driverless shuttles in Punggol, Singapore. The shuttle, powered by Pony.ai,  runs on weekdays (safety drivers included) over a 25 min route. Check out this link on how the service works. Note that Grab and WeRide operate in the same district. 

Waymo expands to Manchester, with TaskUs paving the way. Waymo opens up registration in Nashville; up until now a waiting list held riders back. Waymo opens German office, in Munich. No timeline or cities announced yet, but jobs ads for test drivers and vehicle trainers are live. It turns out the company started registration in late April. 

TADA gets ready for an autonomous launch in Singapore - with WeRide. 

Tesla settles a FSD lawsuit from 2023 and is investigated by the NHTSA for a vehicle ramming into a house killing a woman last week. The driver claimed the car was in Autopilot; Tesla publicly claims the driver overrode self drive by accelerating to 73 mph (117 km/h) in a residential area. Is claiming the car was autonomously driven a new way to escape responsibility? TBC. 

Aseon Labs raise $10M to develop individual parking pods that can be scattered throughout cities to inspect, clean, and charge robotaxis

Lyft announces that on its network it will only deploy autonomous cars with a multi-sensor approach: cameras + radar + LiDAR, no camera-only, citing safety. But there are no such vehicles other than Tesla. 

Zoox implements a series of design and product changes to its vehicle; this version will be the production ready version of the vehicle, which Zoox plans to produce at mass scale.  Zoox is still waiting for regulators to approve its vehicles for commercial use. 

In Nepal, Uber’s market entry has intensified competition, leading local Pathao to introduce a fare-bargaining model, similar to InDrive’s, which is also active in the country. Come July 1st in Indonesia, Grab and GoTo will begin applying the 8% commission cap requested by the government. Yandex Go launches in Istanbul, Turkey, its 6th city. 

InDrive celebrates 13. Happy birthday! Fast forward to today, InDrive operates 1,065 cities across 48 countries, with over 400 million app downloads with a superapp proposition including Intercity, Freight, Delivery, Groceries, inDrive Money and Ads.

#movingpeople is a part of Mobility Business - a consultancy focused on Innovation, Growth and Autonomy in the Mobility industry.

Autonomous Shuttles, DRT & Bus-Based Mobility 🚍🚌

2getthere’s new chapter - new investment & ownership, North American focus and a new website to show for it. 2getthere, autonomous shutters, once a ZF company, was acquired back in January by Sai Green Mobility from India. 

In Ethiopia, Kabba Transport, a tech-driven commuter company, marks 850,000 trips. Read here more about the company’s operating logic and plans to transform public transport to the digital era. 

Routematic partners with Green SM (a Vingroup company) for electric vehicles. 

We still have a half year of events ahead of us.

Micromobility 🚲🛴

Lime targets $1.66 billion valuation for their IPO, planned for this week, under the ticker “LIME”. Existing shareholders will retain circa 89% ownership. The company is expected to generate circa $174M in cash, which will go toward repaying a $114.2M loan; and post-IPO Lime will secure a $200M revolving credit facility from JP Morgan. 

A good time to be reminded of some key Lime stats: 

Luup introduces geo-based stop function, applied to certain streets where scooters aren’t permitted. 

Delivery - bikes to cars, bots & drones 🍽🧺

China issues draft rules to regulate subsidies by food delivery platforms, ‌citing price wars and "irrational competition". The government has been trying to curb the price war for over a year, so far without success. 

Also Chinese regulators request Lalamove comply with local operating laws - to stop using algorithms to cut freight prices to unreasonably low levels and protect drivers’ right by returning alleged unreasonable charges. 

Grid.online, Czech shared infrastructure for elastic last-mile parcel delivery, raises €4M. Funds will be used to expand internationally, Poland first. 

Acodyne raises €2.5M to advance unmanned eVTOL cargo aircraft for heavy-payload logistics

I love meeting new people and learning about innovation in mobility. Let’s get-to-know / catch up.

In other news 📰

FINN, car subscription, raises €140M and turns into a unicorn. Today, FINN serves more than 50,000 car subscribers in Germany and generates €300M+ ARR.

Slate Auto price will start at $24,950. Lucid cuts 18% of its workforce, roughly 1,500 people, as the new CEO comes in. 

Not mobility related, but this is one of the best marketing campaigns I’ve seen:

People 🧑‍🤝‍🧑

Aleksi Tepponen is the new Lead Test Engineer @ MOTOR Ai. 

Ben Hubbard is the new Editor @ The Driverless Digest. 

Ersan Öztürk is the new Chief Executive Officer @ Oto.net. 

Giovanni Pintor is the new Product Manager @ CYVL. 

Martin Carr is the new Sales Manager @ Haulmont Technology Limited. 

Scott Bridgman is the new Head of Operators @ CitySwift. 

Simon Brown is the new Senior Director & Global Head of Franchise Growth @ Hertz. 

Congrats and good luck!

Thank you for reading #movingpeople. If you like what you're reading, please share it with your friends and colleagues so they can benefit from it too.