#interview BestMile adds new partners to its capital to pursue its vision of autonomous, shared mobility
Back from CeBIT, where they performed their first-ever live demonstration of an autonomous shuttle, BestMile announces a new $2M investment from Partech Ventures, Serena Capital and Airbus Ventures. In parallel, the EPFL spin-off was selected for the Top 50 Digital Awards organized jointly by Google, Mac Kinsey & RocketInternet where they reached the TOP 10 B2B Scale-ups and their product innovation was recently awarded by Frost & Sullivan. Alp ICT interviewed co-founders Raphaël Gindrat and Anne Mellano about their vision and future projects.
Alp ICT: Founded in 2014 with a first pilot project in 2015, your company has grown faster than you expected in terms of project development, recognition and fundraising. What are the reasons for such success?
Raphaël Gindrat and Anne Mellano: BestMile is a pioneer in its field, launching the first automated fleet platform enabling intelligent operation and optimization of autonomous vehicle fleets. We've been managing autonomous vehicles locally for over three years (projects with CarPostal, TPF in Marly, MBC in Morges, CFF in Zoug, "SmartShuttle" in Sion, CityMobil2 in Lausanne, Civaux and Confluence in France, and several fleets being set up in Europe, the USA and Japan -ndlr) and have established solid partnerships with industry (Local Motors, Trapeze, Next Future Transportation, GoMentum Station -ndlr). After a time-consuming period of testing and developing partnerships, we finally have enough feedback to launch larger fleets.
What's more, the platform is compatible with all types of vehicles, making it ideal for mixed autonomous fleets. It can be extended to operate fleets of individual cars, and it's this flexibility that is attracting the interest of automakers.
Alp ICT: Car manufacturers seem to be actively seeking partners to develop the technology for 2020, with major events such as the Olympic Games in Japan and the World Expo in Dubai. What impact will this have on your business?
Raphaël Gindrat and Anne Mellano: We are indeed in a time of acceleration. The events you mention are dictating deployment opportunities for automakers. Most of them want to adapt their business model to be ready in 2020 for the first applications of autonomous vehicles on the market.
We can see that 2017 is a pivotal year in terms of the various projects being set up and the announcements made by carmakers. Today, fleets range from 2 to 20 vehicles, but they will develop quite rapidly with requests from private sites for up to 50 vehicles. In the next 2 to 5 years, autonomous vehicles will also emerge as part of shared mobility systems, such as cabs, in defined areas (hypercentres). The whole point of the autonomous vehicle is to exploit its flexibility to develop ride sharing. Today, public transport means collective transport; tomorrow it will be individual or semi-individual, i.e. a small vehicle shared between a few people for a more precise service.
That said, the speed of adoption and deployment will depend on public authorities, legislation and the willingness of automakers, most of whom are just waiting for the first mover to follow.
Alp ICT: Your funding round reaches $5.5M with the addition of the $2M. How will you use the funds and what are the next steps?
Raphaël Gindrat and Anne Mellano: The additional funds will be used to accelerate the international roll-out of our platform and strengthen its technology, sales and marketing resources across Europe and the USA, where the opportunities are great.
This investment will enable us to move closer to our goal of offering the best mobility management platform to a fast-growing industry, and thus bring significant added value to the market.
Last but not least, this round of financing anticipates the Series A financing of around $20M planned for this summer, which will enable us to increase our team by 30 (split between Lausanne, London and San Francisco, editor's note), to a total of 80 people.
