A seed round of €3.5 million led by Assembly Ventures and Rethink Ventures, with participation from Futury Capital and business angel Jens Krüger, Chief Product Architect at Workday, has just been announced for the Berlin-based budget-friendly corporate mobility platform RYDES.
Some current investors are the Lufthansa Group, Forward31, Porsche Digital’s business builder, Arabella Venture Capital, and other angel investors. The new financing will be used by RYDES to expand outside of Germany and further improve its mobility platform.
By streamlining corporate mobility management, RYDES helps businesses save money, time, and effort. The impacts of the COVID pandemic and growing awareness of the effects of climate change are causing a change in how people travel worldwide. Instead of standard business cars, more and more employees are choosing flexible, personalized, and sustainable mobility budgets. Regarding multi-modal employee mobility, Europe is at the forefront, and European governments are accelerating adoption by subsidizing rail and public transportation for both employees and their companies, respectively.
The Berlin-based business RYDES, founded in 2002, is taking advantage of this potential by developing the first employee mobility budget platform that offers seamless access to all modes of transportation. With RYDES, businesses can eliminate the need for their staff to pay in advance and submit the charges for ride-hailing, automobile subscriptions, or public transportation individually by giving them a monthly budget they may use flexibly using the RYDES app.
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Businesses save time, money, and administrative effort since their HR, payroll, and tax systems are automated. On the other hand, employees are free to select their mode of transportation whenever they like, including shared mobility, public transportation, hired bikes or cars, and gasoline or charge cards for their vehicles. Furthermore, RYDES is the only supplier on the market to automatically offset the carbon footprint that results for businesses through approved climate protection measures.
The co-founder and CEO of RYDES, René Braun, said:
“If you want to draw in and retain motivated employees, you must provide enticing and adaptable mobility options. The first corporate mobility budget platform that satisfies these criteria is RYDES. From shared mobility to renting or leasing bikes and vehicles, fuel and charge cards, and public transportation, we provide many options. The conclusion of our seed fundraising round is a significant step in our ambition to establish ourselves as the go-to resource for all employee mobility requirements and to offer employers an appealing, simple platform solution.”
According to Assembly Ventures Partner Jessica Robinson:
“Governments across Europe are taking initiatives to encourage multi-modal mobility and incentivize its use, including offering subsidies for both employees and employers to use rail and public transportation. In the upcoming years, other regions will find enormous value in the lessons learned here. By integrating several services for multimodal use cases through their interaction with corporate HR systems, RYDES is approaching this opportunity with an incredibly clever strategy. This company is a game-changer because of its real-time capacity to collect extensive information on taxes, carbon footprint reporting, and individual mobility alternatives.”
