Josep Sanjuas, Victor Lopez and I founded Iomob in April 2018 with cautious optimism that we could combine our significant experience in entrepreneurship, smart cities and smart mobility, software development and algorithmics to build a next generation Mobility as a Service company.

Inspired by the pioneering work of MaaS Global from Finland who has focused on building the world’s largest B2C Mobility as a Service (MaaS) platform, we formed to build the world’s largest and most impactful platform for B2B/B2G MaaS. That is, while MaaS Global has built their own brand, Whim, to offer subscription packages of mobility services direct to mobility users (currently throughout Europe and parts of Asia), Iomob aimed from day one to build a next generation platform to support other transport and travel operators, and eventually any company or organization who wants to offer seamless mobility experiences combing the whole range of mobility services (public transit, intercity rail, micromobility, taxis and ridehailing, carsharing and carpooling and more) to their own users or employees.

To understand why Iomob is different from other B2B/B2G MaaS players, you need to first understand our ethos and grand vision. Iomob itself stands for the Internet of Mobility (IoM).  Connecting different devices to the internet to enable more efficiency in smart cities, for example, known as the Internet of Things (IoT) generated more than $200 billion (USD) in revenue worldwide in 2018 and by 2026, that number is projected to reach $1.3 trillion USD by 2026.

So what exactly is the Internet of Mobility?  Instead of things, Iomob focuses on connecting any mobility device.  The grand vision we have at Iomob is that by 2030, any mobility device can be connected to the IoM and if connected, it can be discovered, routed and combined for multimodal journeys, booked/unlocked and paid for by any user of any app anywhere in the world.

We have now been at it for more than two years and while we are never satisfied with the pace of progress, we certainly have come a long way from our virtual garage.  Our team has grown significantly and not just in Barcelona but in other parts of Spain, plus Lisbon and London.  We have raised capital from important investors in Asia, Europe and the US.  But most importantly we have continuously innovated our product and are (finally) preparing to deploy our stack at scale.  Our technology includes our own multimodal routing algorithms, our own shared mobility API which supports rapid integration of new mobility services, native SDKs for insertion into existing client apps and even a white label app for clients who do not have an app already.

We tested our first intercity and intracity MaaS capabilities close to home with Renfe, the Spanish national rail operator and worked with Ford and the City of Pittsburgh to explore the viability of MaaS in that market and since then have worked with Wellington, New Zealand, Skanetrafiken (Sweden) and the national Swedish Energy Agency and are now working with London North Eastern Railway (LNER) to help them offer door-to-door mobility throughout the UK.

To enable these deployments throughout Europe and the world, Iomob has secured commercial partners to integrate a number of important regional and global mobility providers and aggregators into our platform including Cabify, Tier, Voi, Karhoo, The Good Seat, Super Pedestrian (Link), Spin and dozens more.

To achieve our most ambitious global Internet of Mobility goals, we need to collaborate with the global ecosystem to enable plug and play mobility services to be accessed by any user of any app.  This vision got a boost recently when a consortium Iomob is part of won a competitive European Union Horizon 2020 bid worth 2 million euros to help build a “Mobility Data Marketplace”.  Our partners on this project include Seat (part of the Volkswagen Group), the metropolitan transport authority (ATM) of Barcelona, Factual Consulting and others.

While I am proud of what we have achieved so far, Iomob has a decade to go to reach our 2030 goals of enabling a global Internet of Mobility.  Today we launch our new website to help our current and future partners better understand what we do, why we do it, who we do it for and where we are headed.

Boyd Cohen, CEO, Iomob