Five Mobility Startups We Can’t Shut Up About

Whether it’s Uber suffering another slew of scandals or the news reporting more and more exploding hoverboards, it can be tough to escape some of the sillier headlines in response to advances in mobility. But even these low points can’t eclipse all of the incredible startups ensuring that we’ll be moving from A to B in speedier, sexier and more splendidly sci-fi ways than ever before. From pizza delivery robots in Germany to giant medical drones in Africa, the mobility sector is getting very, very, ambitious these days — and we’re stoked to see the results. Let’s take a look.

MOIA

Volkswagen’s answer to Uber

It’s clear by now that ridesharing has conquered the globe — and traditional automakers have taken notice. Few, however, have responded as proactively as Volkswagen, thanks to its newest startup project MOIA, a hyper-efficient taxi service and car line. Tech Crunch reports that just like Uber and Lyft, you will also be able book and pay for rides on their fleet of cars via an app. Eco-conscious urbanites and cash-strapped millennials alike are likely to rejoice when the ridesharing service first enters operation in Hamburg this year.

Zipline

Using Drones to Save lives

We often associate drones with intense military action, or those dinky recreational toys that get attacked by eagles. What’s talked about far less, however, are the drones that are actively saving lives. San Francisco startup Zipline is proving that when it comes to delivery drones, the frontier is not tiny robots delivering your dad’s power tools in North America, but much larger machines carrying medical supplies across Africa. According to Wired, the company (which started its African delivery service in Rwanda) is rolling out a fleet of large delivery drones this year. These cargo drones, sometimes comically referred to as flying donkeys, will transport medical supplies to over 1000 hospitals in Tanzania. This is a literal lifesaver in places where poor infrastructure can make more traditional delivery methods slower and much more expensive. With plans for expansion, its seems more likely than not that the the eastern half of the world’s second largest continent may eventually be better connected by drone than by road.

Starship Technologies

Bringing you Robot Pizza Delivery

Starship Technologies has been working on autonomous delivery bots since 2014, but things reached another level when it was announced that the Estonian startup was partnering with Domino’s Pizza on delivery bots last year. In contrast to Amazon’s plans to deliver products by drone, these star commanders think that there is plenty of room on the ground for their fleet of robots to bring you up to five steaming hot pizzas at once. Wired reports that these bots are smart enough elegantly navigate around pedestrians while still keeping a brisk four mph and built to cover short distances where it’s not cost-effective to deploy larger, more traditional vehicles. Also, we don’t know what’s with Hamburg lately, but the first successful robot pizza delivery went down there last year. It also seems like Starship Technologies isn’t likely to be satisfied with just pizza. Wired reports that thanks in part to investment from companies like Mercedes, it appears that the company is all set to go where no delivery startup has gone before, making last mile delivery in packed city-centres far more effortless than via car.

Deezer Nextbike

Rentable bikes with your phone

If there’s one thing that the hellish landscape of thousands of discarded bikeshare bicycles in China taught the startup community, the consequences of over-supply can make bikesharing startups a risky business. That being said, there are certainly some solid success stories to be found in the world of bikesharing. Anybody who has recently been by a busy street corner in Berlin has probably walked by more than a few Deezer nextbikes. With a built-in autolock that can be freed using just your phone, the nextbike sharing service is for just about anyone in need of quick and easy access to a city-ready bicycle. Brilliantly, the company also has a service team that makes sure that their bikes don’t end up clustering in just a few areas of town — keeping distribution pretty even accross neighborhoods. Faster, cheaper and easier to access than your standard bike rental service (you can essentially drop it off wherever you want), according to Handelsblatt Global, this Leipzig startup already has 5,000 bikes in Berlin alone.

Free2Move

Collect Your carsharing apps

From bikes, to scooters, to carsharing accounts, it’s an overwhelming endeavor to keep track of the armada of portals that allow you to cruise around cities in style. But one company might have just found the perfect solution to change this forever. Available for Apple and Android, Free2Move puts every vehicle sharing option onto one map, so you no longer have to switch between apps to find the closest and most convenient vehicle for you. As described in the German publication Automobilwoche you can make bookings via Free2Move’s user-friendly app. Constantly at work to integrate more and more providers into the service, Free2Move is ideal for anyone on the go — or even just someone in need of less clutter on their phone. In a world where consumers appear to have an endlessly-growing menu of options, it’s a pleasure to see a service not just suggesting, but consolidating what’s already on the transportation menu.

Written by Jesse Van Mouwerik/images by Rosalba Porpora

This month’s theme is SPEED. We can’t stop thinking about autonomous vehicles, how we’ll navigate the cities of tomorrow and how drones will change the delivery process forever.