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Ride-Hailing & Robotaxi 🚙🚕
Momenta prepares for Hong Kong IPO, targeting a raise of $750M at a $9 billion valuation. The company to begin trading Wednesday, July 8th. Funds will be used for R&D (60% of funds) and to facilitate robotaxi expansion (20%), in places such as Abu Dhabi and Munich. Momenta’s ADAS customers include BYD, SAIC and Mercedes.
Blablacar, world’s leading carpooling solution, with a presence in 21 countries, announces expansion to 20 additional countries, double the geo footprint - at once. The focus is on emerging markets - LATAM, Southeast Asia, North Africa and Eastern Europe. Blabla’s largest markets today are India and Brazil. Nicolas Brusson, Blabla’s CEO, writes about the use of AI in international expansion: “A decade ago, expanding into 20 countries simultaneously would have been an operational nightmare. Today, AI has changed the game for us. It manages localization across dozens of new languages, adapts marketing assets to each market, and helps us build trusted, reliable communities in entirely new cultures with speed and quality.”
Bolt announces that it will NOT launch in London; the company previously announced a plan expansion with Pony.ai. Per Bolt: “London is not on the list for this year… to actually deploy and get started, I think if you were to ask Waymo, Uber and others, they would need to wait a long time to get the permits”. Bolt recently started a pilot in Luxembourg, with Stellantis and Pony.ai.
While the London permit regime is taking a bit more time than initially communicated by the government, there might be other reasons at play. First, it could be that Pony.ai is experiencing challenges in the UK, due to national security reasons. Secondly, the London ecosystem is very busy - Uber + Wayve & Uber + Baidu, Waymo, and Lyft +Baidu - are all gearing up to launch in London; it would then make sense to focus elsewhere. TBC.
Finding potholes by Waymo and Waze. In Austin, potholes were previously unknown to the city, and while there is no ‘severity’ rank, the data supports the city .
Take Me, a UK minicab (taxi) group acquiring fellow companies across the country, in a new acquisition. Note the mention of iCabbi and Cab9 in the LinkedIn post - the UK market is in high gear, following Veezu’s (another M&A growth taxi group, largest in the country) acquisition of Cab9. Both Take Me and Veezu are/were iCabbi customers, Veezu not for long.
Uber expands in Frankfurt, partnering with a local taxi company. In Germany, Uber has over 10,000 taxi drivers connected to the Uber platform. In Boston, a pilot connects taxis to demand from Uber and Bolt.
Waymo is registering companies in Europe.
#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 🚍🚌
Video of how Liftango simulates changes to the transit network. .
Comfortdelgro acquires London-based Coach operator P&J Ellis.
Last week I updated the 2026 event list - 64 events behind us; 38 to go.
Micromobility 🚲🛴
Lime goes public on the Nasdaq at a ±$1.7 billion valuation, raising $174M in the process. The company started trading Wednesday, July 1st, at $25 per share; at end-of-trade Friday, share price was… $25. We’ve seen mobility companies go public and crash, so this counts as an achievement.
HelloRide expands Singapore fleet by 5k vehicles to 25,000 now and launches a new membership model.
Deutsche Bahn expands its MaaS capabilities - adding a new fully integrated shared mobility service - Dott - into the DB Navigator journey planner.
Greece is moving forward with scooter regulation - which include banning riders under 17, mandating third-party insurance and sharply increasing fines.
The city of Braga, Portugal, suspends shared scooters, following a series of accidents.
The heat wave as an added constraint to fleet management & rebalancing - by SWITCH - Street WITCHer.
Delivery - bikes to cars, bots & drones 🍽🧺
Elroy Air, Autonomous cargo drone make, to go public via a $1 billion post-deal valuation SPAC.
Neolix to start public-road sandbox testing in Malaysia. Competitor Zelostech has also been granted the same approval. Also Neolix looking to deploy in Europe, targeting retail and logistics operators seeking autonomous last-mile delivery solutions. Earlier this year Neolix announced a partnership with Portugal’s Salvador Caetano Group.
Zomato introduces 'Food Reimbursements', automating the way companies handle business meal expenses. An enterprise dashboard will allow companies to set meal budgets, leading to automatic approval, replacing the common expense claim process.
Drone landscape, by Eduardo Rojas.
AV Freight, Industrial & Logistics 🚛🚜
NexDash Autonomy GmbH receives its first electric truck from Mercedes-Benz. The company, which raised $7.5M to date, focuses on retrofitting diesel trucks to electric and operating those on its platform.
A deep dive article into autonomous freight covers the opportunities (service economics, empty miles), challenges (safety, cost of uncertainty) and existing deployments.
I love meeting new people and learning about innovation in mobility. Let’s get-to-know / catch up.
In other news 📰
Tesla’s sales jump - the company delivered 480,000 vehicles in Q2, a 25% YoY increase. Tesla's recovery in Europe was aided by a surge in fuel prices, government EV incentives, faster electrification of corporate fleets, and easing of the consumer backlash over CEO Elon Musk's far-right politics last year. Ford rehires 350 engineers, after artificial intelligence and automated systems failed to deliver the desired quality level. Lucid continues to ‘simplify’ the company under the new CEO; the CFO has been let go. Almost the entire C-suite is being replaced.
According to Polanyi's Paradox, “We know more than we can tell". In autonomous vehicles, that means that they lack the tacit social knowledge of a human driver, that helps us navigate both everyday and unique scenarios, such as slightly crossing a white line to keep the traffic running or communicating with other humans in busy situations. There is (for now) a limit for what we can teach the machine to do. An article by Josep Laborda.
People 🧑🤝🧑
Anna Watt is the new Head of Data @ West Midlands Combined Authority.
Antony Goozee is the new CEO Europe @ Custom Denning.
Frank Reig is the new CEO @ Voltera.
Surbhi Rakheja is the new General Manager - International Conferences @ Global Mass Transit.
Congrats and good luck!
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