Dec 1, 2020
Contrarian Ventures Leads an Investment in a Mobility Data Platform Startup Vianova
Seed round investment of €1.8m led by Contrarian Ventures and RATP Capital Innovation to help cities build their post-Covid transport systems
Investment into Vianova
Cities are becoming more populated each year, driving the demand for mobility services. In the past few years, cities saw an unprecedented rise of new urban mobility solutions, such as e-scooters and last-mile delivery services reshaping urban mobility. During Covid-19, France alone has created an additional 1,000 km of temporary bike lanes to manage an inflow of new cyclists.
However, this brought up a challenge of enhancing public and sustainable mobility to avoid unnecessary congestion of space in cities. World Economic Forum itself stated that “a mix of public, crowd-sourced and private-operator mobility data provides municipalities with an overarching view never before available which can inform future agile policy, planning and investment decisions.” Cities, operators and citizens should collaborate to facilitate access to a low-carbon, frictionless mobility available for everyone.
Vianova, two-year-old, Paris-based mobility and curbside management start-up was founded to tackle exactly this problem. It sees shared micro-mobility as part of the response to delivering mobility and social distancing in cities. The company has just raised €1.8m in Seed funding to scale its operations and to optimise mobility services in different cities across Europe as well as to expand further in adjacent markets.
Contrarian Ventures led the round alongside RATP Capital Innovation which is a part of RATP Group, the largest public transport operator in France. The Seed round is the first institutional financing for the company. Contrarian Ventures Partner Tomas Kemtys will join Vianova’s Board of Directors.
“After meeting the team in Paris more than a year ago and seeing the company’s tremendous progress over the ensuing months, we are very excited to announce our investment into Vianova. The company has essentially created an “air traffic control room” that enables much better integration and collaboration between cities and mobility operators. The pandemic has only accelerated the multiple trends around sustainable mobility and Vianova will play the key role in bringing them to reality” says Tomas Kemtys, a Partner at Contrarian Ventures.
Proprietary Platform and Its Capabilities
Vianova’s core business is to manage and regulate mobility in the city by digitizing traffic management and control. The platform helps to dissect and digest vast amounts of complex mobility data and provides analytics on usage, distribution, the popularity of services and even can examine user patterns. Thus, the platform allows the cities and mobility operators to securely share data, improve and create better policies. It also reinforces urban planning, which massively increases cost-efficiency and sustainability in the long-term.
Vianova data platform provides a “control tower” solution for the circulation of goods within the city, through real-time monitoring of freight and logistics vehicles. The movements of these vehicles can be linked to the loading / delivery spaces available on the road as well.
Some of the platform’s features are:
Control Room and Orchestration:
- Real-time vehicle locations and operators’ deployments;
- Hazard alerts and service requests to operators.
Mobility Insights:
- Usage patterns, origin/destination matrix, interdependence across modes;
- Most used parking areas, most used roads.
Policies and Compliance:
- Creation and issuance of geofenced policies (parking, speed, etc.);
- Compliance reports, automatic alerts and bilateral communication.
Curbside Management:
- Digitised and dynamic curb mapping and allocation;
- Real-time information on regulations and curb availability.
Since early 2019 Vianova has integrated with more than 20 mobility operators like Bird and Voi, and with more than 10 cities in Europe such as Brussels, Helsinki, Zürich and Faro. The platform supervises 50,000 vehicles and over 2 million trips per month with 100 million data points per single day!
Vianova’s Team and Its Vision of the Future of Mobility
“The rapid development of urban mobility is challenging cities in the way they organise public space. Our city partners now consider data as an essential tool of their governance, and our close collaboration on this subject has led to the development of increasingly advanced use cases” commented Thibault Castagne, co-founder & CEO of Vianova. “Mobility operators also understand the major role that cities can play in their development and success. Over the past few months, our work to bring these two worlds closer together has been extremely exciting.”
Vianova is led by three co-founders: Thibault Castagne (CEO), Thibaud Febvre (COO) and Frédéric Robinet (CTO). The team currently consists of 12 employees that come from a variety of backgrounds in data, mapping and mobility at some of the world’s top tech companies and startups.
The true potential of the platform is that in the future it can be used on many different scales, from regional governments to small localised areas like airports, university campuses or even shopping malls.
As the world is slowly trying to emerge from the current world crisis, it must rethink the way we view and use urban transport. Cities are slowly realizing that to meet carbon emission and health and safety standards, they have to better understand and engage with mobility operators.
We strongly believe that Vianova will be the key technological company that will accelerate the transition to a more sustainable and efficient transportation in our cities and we can’t be more excited to be a part of their journey!
About Vianova:
Vianova is a data platform that helps cities better integrate and manage shared, connected, electric and autonomous transport solutions in the urban space, enabling better use of city infrastructure, and promoting safer and more sustainable mobility.
