InDrive 💰 Krave Mart, Grab 💰 Nham24, Serve $80M and Mayten acquires MM

Coming back to writing after a long vacation - 3 editions - longest non-writing streak I ever had since starting #movingpeople circa 5 (!) years ago. Wishing you all a happy new year and for mobility & urban delivery to scale and prosper!

#movingpeople is a part of Mobility Business  - a consultancy focused on growth in mobility.

Ride-Hailing & Taxi, Buses & DRT  🚙🚐

Blusmart to raise $50M funding at $335M pre-money valuation. According to Crunchbase, so far the company raised $486M in a mix of equity and (mostly) debt. Also Blusmart expanded into Mumbai. 

Kakao Mobility’s shareholders are getting weary of the company, but complex equity agreements and currency exchange rates make exits complicated.

Little is the #3 ride-hailing app in Kenya, trailing Uber and Bolt. Little focuses on corporate clients as a way to win market share, understanding that the retail/B2C market is price-sensitive and easier for Uber and Bolt to win via heavy discounts. 

Bolt starts recruiting drivers in Vietnam. Lyft partners with Rippling, a spend management platform, to support corporate travel. Uber replaces Lyft as Delta SkyMiles partner; this ends a 8 year partnership between Delta and Lyft. Uber is giving free rides to teens who flunked their driving exam. New year in Singapore comes with increased ride-hailing platform fees.  

Namma Yatri has an interesting open data section on its website

Car Sharing/renting 🚗

 Hertz is asking EV renters if they want to buy the car instead of returning it. 

In Norway, 88.9% of new car sales were all-electric and only 3.1% of new cars were petrol or diesel only. Who buys ICE in Norway? Rental companies, to provide to tourists with no EV experience. At the end of 2024, 28.6% of cars on-road in Norway were all-electric. 

Japanese Sumitomo Mitsui Auto Service acquires a minority stake in Singapore car-share company Tribecar. 

Kyte partners with Expedia to offer rentals via Expedia’s brands. 

Micromobility 🚲🛴

Mayten acquires media and event platform Micromobility Industries. Mayten is a custom software and hardware tech company working with mobility operators; which acquired Cogo, a shared mobility aggregation app, a year ago; and runs the OTD newsletter. Micromobility is at a low point right now, but Prabin Joel Jones, Mayten’s founder/CEO, believes that profitability and scale are soon to happen. This latest acquisition will allow Jones to amplify that sentiment. 

Barcelona awards bicisharing, its shared bicycle service. 7 operators were chosen (with 1 more company to fix rejects within 10 days and join, or have its quota distributed to the seven): Donkey Republic, Ridemovi, Cooltra, Bolt, Lime, Bird & Voi. Each company will operate only 497 bikes, which raises questions about future profitability. Also Barcelona cracks down on e-scooters, limiting speed to 25 km/h (15 mph) and introducing helmet fees. 

Contigo Mobility (CoMo) expands to the UK with an electric motorcycle ridesharing service. Marti introduces dynamic pricing in Turkey. 

Delivery 🍽🧺

Serve Robotics raise $80M via direct offering, a month after raising $86M. This brings the total amount raised by Serve in the past 12 months to $247M. With the money Serve intends to increase its fleet size from 100 to 2,000 robots by the end of 2025 and extend its runway through 2026. 

InDrive invests an undisclosed sum in Pakistan’s grocery delivery platform Krave Mart. This is a step in making InDrive a “superapp”, offering grocery deliveries next to ride-hailing. 

Grab acquires a stake in Cambodia’s Nham24, a local food-delivery and e-commerce platform. For now, both apps will continue to operate independently. 

The Grubhub sale to Wonder is now completed. 

Swiggy launches Snacc, a standalone app for rapid delivery of quick bites, beverages, and meals, distributed via a dark store model. Up to now all services - including rapid delivery Instamart - were serviced out of the Swiggy main app.

Zedify, UK's largest cargo bike logistics company, is “exploring options to secure new funding on an accelerated basis”.

Autonomous & remote-driving 🤖℡

Vay expands in Las Vegas, increasing its fleet to 100 vehicles and preparing the launch of B2B operations. In 2024, the company had over 6,000 user trips, i.e. roughly 16.5 trips per day, or 33 teleoperated trips per day. 

WeRide deploys an autonomous shuttle at Zurich Airport. The shuttle will serve airport employees from the employee entrance to the maintenance area. 

May Mobility reveals electric autonomous minibus made in partnership with European electric bus manufacturer Tecnobus; so far the company focused its fleet of 40 Toyota Sienna minivans. The new minibus, expected to go on-road in H1/2026, can fit up to 30 passengers. 

Tesla wants Austin to be its 1st robotaxi deployment city. Pony.ai seeks to begin robotaxi operations in Hong-Kong. In November Baidu received pilot license to operate in the territory until December 2029, and now Pony.ai wants to follow. IM Motors, a SAIC unit, gets an L4 autonomous driving road test license. Test riding Zoox. From March 2025, Switzerland will accept autonomous vehicles applications for pilots in highways, on predefined routes and involving automated parking. 

Embotech partners with Terberg and APM Terminals to launch 30 electric automated terminal trucks in Rotterdam. 

McKinsey on the financials of robotaxis (of Shared AVs). Per McKinsey, the cost per vehicle mile traveled stands at $8.18, and can be brought down to $1.3 by 2035, given operations scaling and efficiencies gained. My take: in the short next-few-years term, robotaxis is going to be a losing business. 

Philip Koopman on “The Greenwashing of Robotaxis”. From safety to accessibility to congestion, and emissions - robotaxi alone are hardly the answer. Someone has to clean the cars - on the AV fleet logistics. 

Flying cars 🚁

The past few weeks have seen Lilium enter administration and then got its operating assets acquired by an investor consortium on xmas eve; Vertical Aerospace got funded at a valuation that is roughly 35% of the price it had a year before; and Volocopter filed insolvency and is looking for investors. Not a good time for the European eVTOL industry. 

OEMs 🛺⚡️

Scout Motors wants to reconnect cars - regular old door handles, optional gas-powered range extenders and buttons, not touchscreens. 

Cargoroo, a Dutch electric cargo bike manufacturer and operator, goes into insolvency. Arthur Burnin with a bit more context. 

BYD invests in drone maker DJI’s automotive subsidiary, in order to improve its assisted driving offering.  

The fall of EV startup Fisker: A comprehensive timeline.

In other news 📰

Congestion pricing starts in New York City. A long read here covers everything (and more) you could want to know about it. Now we wait for the results - did congestion decrease, and if so, where to. 

Hindenburg Research on Carvana, a $44bn UB online car dealer, titled: “A Father-Son Accounting Grift For The Ages”. 

Toyota completes the first phase of Woven City, its vision of the future of mobility. Soon 360 Toyota and Toyota-related staff and family will move into Woven City. 

TuSimple completes rebranding as CreateAI, shift to gaming tech. I guess they weren’t able to save it.

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

People 🧑‍🤝‍🧑

A new year brings with it many new changes - congrats and good luck to all!

Axel Drouadaine is the new Head of Strategy & Transformation Projects @ Transdev. 

Charles Wren is the new VP Product & Operations @ Deliveroo. 

Einav Brosh is the new RnD Project Manager @ Autofleet. 

Eyal Avidov is the new Chief Executive Officer @ CAR2ME. 

Jan Střecha  is the new Head of Marketing & Foreign Operations @ Rekola Bikesharing. 

Jannis Rinschen is the new Head of Go to Market - Region Europe @ Bosch Mobility Platform & Solutions. 

Joe McAllister is the new Director, Talent Acquisition @ Wolt. 

Katie O'Sullivan is the new Transportation Planning Director @ ICF. 

Kim Jaehyun is a new Member Board of Directors @ Splyt. 

Luke Haddington was promoted to Senior Consultant @ Steer. 

Luke Ryan is the new UK Commercial Director @ Zeelo.

Matthew Mould is the new Sales Director @ DrivenBus. 

Michael Flaster is the new VP of Partner Engineering & Support Operations @ Via. 

Nadav Yetinson is the new Head of Research @ Drive TLV. 

Paul Drummond is the new Business Strategy Director and Chief Product Officer, Transport & Mobility @ Worldline. 

Paul Hollick is the new Chief Executive Officer @ Lightfoot.

Rob Henley is the new transport Planning Manager (Surface Access) @ Bristol Airport. 

Stacey Pilosoph is the new Talent Acquisition Partner @ Autofleet. 

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