Impact of Sustainability in Mobility for Startups

Angela Rose
StationX
Published in
3 min readAug 12, 2021

Our team at StationX — the venture client unit for Siemens Mobility published an in-depth report on the emerging technologies of sustainable mobility. Through this report, we were motivated to uncover the current market landscape and its potential impact areas. You can find a concise wrap-up of all our findings in this article.

Harnessing sustainability in mobility

Infusing sustainability with mobility focuses on the different technologies which enable the entire mobility value chain ranging from transport, logistics, traffic, and related production capabilities to be more environmentally friendly and socially sustainable.

Current landscape

We ran natural language processing algorithms to visualize how the market landscape is currently for sustainable mobility with our partner Quid. The search resulted in the identification of 16 key market clusters that are represented in the network map below:

It is apparent to us now that the three largest current sectors in the field are:

  • Connected car data and telematics
  • Artificial intelligence and autonomous solutions
  • Hailing and on-demand mobility

We were also quick to analyze that 878 companies that strive towards sustainable mobility (captured as nodes in their respective clusters) were formed between 2010 and 2020.

Investing in Mobility’s future

With mobility sectors being disrupted and new markets emerging, it’s important to get a reality check of the most significant investments.

Since 2010, the overall investment summed up to be $30.76B and, the top 4 sustainable mobility clusters by investment received are —

  • Last-mile transportation
  • Artificial intelligence for autonomous systems
  • Hailing and on-demand solutions

Most striking observations:

  • The three most funded clusters make up for 55% of all investments. However, the same clusters only account for 27% of all the startups-companies. And, surprisingly, the largest cluster by number of startups and investment rounds — Connected Car Data and Telematics only received a collective funding of $2.2B. What this implicates is a competitive environment and lack of market value opportunities. ​
  • Bigger clusters like Car Rental, Sharing and Parking Solutions which are also new entrants to the market are most likely to be big value drivers in the near future.
  • Some of the smaller clusters including Hydrogen Technology, Material and Manufacturing will probably gain traction once they become more relevant.

There’s more from where that came from!

Pages from our detailed report on Sustainable Mobility (2021)

In conclusion…

We believe that this report is a great starting point to achieve comprehensive conversations in emerging technologies for sustainable mobility. We would further like to conduct use-case based discussions to facilitate innovative collaborations in the areas analyzed. How? StationX, on behalf of Siemens Mobility, is always on the watch for trailblazing startups to co-develop sustainable technologies and create long-lasting business impact. Let’s collaborate!

About StationX

StationX fosters partnerships between startups that offer unique technologies and Siemens Mobility’s business units. The aim is to scale together and create business impact for both sides. Know more here: Link.

--

--

Angela Rose
StationX

Student at TU Munich. Studies Management. Pursues Marketing. Wanders around Europe and uses her Instagram handle as a travel journal. GTM|Consulting|Travel