#CatalyticDeepTech #3: Urban Mobility
Urban Mobility:
Hardware for City Streets
An operator, an engineer and an investor on what it really takes to build hardware for city streets.
From the outside, urban mobility looks like a software problem: apps, routing, fleet dashboards. Up close, it's hardware. Frames, batteries and drivetrains take a beating on city streets every single day, and a fleet only works when the machines, the maintenance and the unit economics all hold up at once. Get one of them wrong and the other two stop mattering.
That's why urban mobility was the theme of our Summer Edition. On 22 July, together with Idea Machines, we brought three people on stage who have each seen the problem from a different side.
Three sides of the same vehicle
The operator. Adam Markakis built Kineo, a subscription service for e-bikes and e-scooters, scaled it and took it all the way to an exit. He has lived the part most pitch decks skip: keeping real vehicles running on real streets, and making the numbers work while doing it.
The engineer. Dr Elias Nassiopoulos spent years in Formula 1, doing structural analysis in a world where every gram counts, then brought that engineering home to Greek electric two-wheelers: his startup GIVE built the i.lektra, billed as the first Greek e-scooter, and he has since worked at Petros Petropoulos Group. Few engineers have taken their craft from the racetrack all the way to a production line.
The investor. Our co-founding Partner George Georgiadis holds a PhD in mechanical engineering and spent years inside the Volkswagen Group before crossing over to the investor side. He has seen from the inside how a major automaker works with new technology, and what it takes for a startup to earn a place in that world.
As at every #CatalyticDeepTech, the talks were only the opening. The floor then turned into a live, open conversation with the room, over pizza and beers.
Why mobility matters to us
Robotics and mobility are core areas we invest in, and Greece has serious engineering talent in vehicles and hardware. Evenings like this are how we meet the people behind it early, often long before they have a company, let alone a round to raise.
