All over Europe, entrepreneurs are working on innovative solutions to cope with urban mobility challenges. However, circumstances differ across the continent resulting in unequal number and quality of funding opportunities for locally emerging businesses.

Through the Regional Innovation Scheme (RIS), EIT tackles such disparities by spreading its activities more evenly. More precisely, the RIS region defines a group of countries with a low performing innovation capacity. Despite the talent and entrepreneurial mindset available in such countries, change and innovation in the RIS region tend to slow down due to the conservative and risk avoiding policy making, as well as the drawbacks of engaging in an entrepreneurial career and the limited mechanisms to support start-ups.

By setting up a dedicated budget to invest in start-ups incorporated in RIS countries, EIT Urban Mobility is now contributing to the faster development of their innovation ecosystems and, more importantly, to the fundraising process of their local start-ups. As an impact investor, EIT Urban Mobility fosters positive social and environmental change across Europe, which among other things translates into paying special attention to those vulnerable innovation ecosystems.

To date, EIT Urban Mobility has invested in more than 20 start-ups from the RIS region like Mosaic from Czech Republic, Meight from Portugal, and Deeptraffic from Greece, and keeps looking for the most prominent entrepreneurs to disrupt the European mobility industry in those countries. If your company is incorporated in a RIS country seeking for capital, we highly encourage you to apply to our open investments call!

Check out EIT Urban Mobility’s investments landing page for more information or apply directly through the AwardsForce platform.

Urban Radar, a French based start-up supported by EIT Urban Mobility,  was selected to run a pilot project on curb management and urban logistics in Barcelona, one of the leading European smart cities. Urban Radar’s platform fits in Barcelona’s strategy by enabling communities and city managers to take an accessible data-centric approach.  Thanks to this solution, carbon emissions, pollution, and congestion will be reduced, thereby contributing to more sustainable mobility of people and goods.

Following EIT Urban Mobility’s mission to improve mobility to make cities more liveable places, Urban Radar’s pilot proposal focuses on enabling sectoral collaborations and tailoring tools to improve the way city logistics is currently understood, coordinated, and regulated. The coordinated work with the city of Barcelona has delivered insights on how the current network of loading zones (AreaDUM- Area of Urban Distribution of Goods) is utilised, and what policies and changes could be made to the network to better address the needs of citizens and industry.

On the pilot project, Raül Feliu, Business Creation Manager at EIT Urban Mobility, explained that this project is at the core of EIT Urban Mobility’s mission to create more liveable urban spaces by tackling the logistics and curb management challenges faced by the city of Barcelona and by many other European cities.

According to Philippe Rapin, CEO of Urban Radar, this pilot is a win-win. “Our technology can combine multiple data sets to build measurable impact solutions in a quick, affordable, and secure way together with the city of Barcelona”.

The pilot project is one of the first steps on Barcelona’s mission towards a new governance model in urban logistics, founded on public-private collaborations and the digitalisation of logistics activity and loading zones.

Àngel López, Director of Mobility Strategies at the city of Barcelona considers the project a key turning point to better manage the last-mile logistics and the continuous flow of vehicles and packages across districts. This collaboration between Barcelona, Urban Radar, and EIT Urban Mobility will positively impact citizens’ life by lowering congestion, improving air quality and promoting more sustainable urban logistics.

We are happy to announce that we reached a significant milestone by improving the integration of shared mobility services in the city of Milan thanks to the platform created by the startup Vianova.

EIT Urban Mobility supported the implementation of this platform to help Milan’s streets to be safer and more efficient. This is a good example of how EIT Urban Mobility contributes to making urban spaces more liveable for the benefit of European citizens.

The EIT Urban Mobility’s business acceleration services enabled Vianova to strengthen its connection with AMAT, a mobility and environment agency owned by the municipality of Milan, and to investigate the possibility to pilot the Vianova technology in Milan. In October 2020, EIT Urban Mobility invested € 45.000 in Vianova to implement a pilot in Milan together with AMAT.

The data platform developed by Vianova consists of a digital layer between cities and connected transportation services, enabling better integration and collaboration between the two. It will now be fully scaled to supervise shared mobility services in Milan, such as e-scooters, bikes, mopeds and shared cars. While doing this, Vianova will also provide digitisation of all regulations of AMAT and it will work on the development of an audit feature to verify operators’ compliance.

The pilot has already kicked-off and it will run throughout 2021, including the platform customisation to the needs of the city of Milan and the integration with the city’s shared mobility operators.  

‘’Thanks to the collaboration with Vianova, the city of Milan will be able to equip itself with a useful tool to better monitor the demand for shared mobility and plan specific interventions to ramp up the mobility offer with new services. This will allow to achieve the goals of EIT Urban Mobility to integrate user-centric mobility services and products and give a significant boost to the market growth’’, stated Valentino Sevino, Director of Mobility Planing and Monitoring Area at AMAT.

BACKGROUND

About Vianova

Vianova, a French start-up based in Paris and founded in 2018, is one of the leading European data platform providers for enabling cities to manage connected, shared and autonomous mobility in the urban public realm. Some facts: 15 major European cities are using Vianova; 25 mobility operators integrated; € 500 000 revenue generated in 2020; 70 000 vehicles supervised/day; 2M rides/month; 100M data points ingested/day.

Vianova has been part of several of programmes supported by EIT Urban Mobility: it was granted with € 15 000 for technology and market validation under the EIT Urban Mobility Accelerator programme running from July to December 2020, followed by its participation in the GoGlobal programme, which promotes start-ups’ global outreach by connecting start-ups to the EIT Urban Mobility network and ecosystem. 

About AMAT

AMAT (Agenzia Mobilità Ambiente e Territorio) is a wholly owned agency by the Municipality of Milan that focuses on mobility, environment and territory. Since 2000, AMAT has been providing services in support of municipal functions in the fields of planning, programming, design, management, monitoring and control related to the mobility, transport and public space activities in the City of Milan.

Contacts / useful links:

www.vianova.io; Thibault Castagne, co-founder of Vianova: thibault.castagne@vianova.io 

www.amat-mi.it; Valentino Sevino, Director of Mobility Planning and Monitoring Area Director at AMAT: valentino.sevino@amat-mi.it