Bestmile secure new funding round
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Congratulations to Venture Leaders alumnus Bestmile, who have today announced a $11 million funding round. We spoke to founder Raphael Gindrat about how he plans to use the money, how he got started and what part Venturelab played in his success.
Tell us a bit about yourself and about Bestmile, what background do the founders have?We both come from EPFL with a master's degree in Civil Engineering with specialisation in transportation. We started to work with autonomous vehicles in 2012 when EPFL bought the very first prototype available in Europe. We saw an opportunity as some companies were quite close to having vehicles ready for commercialisation, but none of them had a platform allowing autonomous vehicles to be managed and operated like a transportation system (fixed route or on-demand)
Bestmile is primarily a software producer, but obviously autonomous vehicles require not only artificial intelligence, but also the physical vehicles – how did your fleet of vehicles come about?
We don’t have a fleet! Our only goal is to provide our Mobility Services Platform to our customers: the mobility providers who are in charge of operating services (Like CarPostal in Sion). But it’s true that we have to build partnerships with people providing the vehicles as the embedded software and our cloud platform have to be mutually compatible.
Congratulations on your $11 m Series A funding round that you announced today! Where did you find the investors?
Investors were part of 3 groups:
• New investors like Road Ventures (Switzerland, leading the round), ADP Group (France), Mobility.fund (Germany)
• Existing VC who already invested a few months ago: Partech Ventures, Airbus Ventures, Serena Capital
• A few Seed investors (Business angels) participating again
$11 m sounds like an awful lot of money! What will you use it for and how long do you anticipate it will be until you need to raise further funds?
We have a 24 month plan ahead of us. As our industry is moving fast, we have to be aggressive. We are for example planning on scaling our team from 45 to 80 people globally while opening satellite offices in several places around the globe. Today we have a presence in Lausanne and San Francisco, but we have to have a presence in more key cities, for example in Asia
You have taken part in Venture Leaders twice (to the US in 2015 and China last year), did these two programs help you with this latest investment round?
Not directly, but these trips were really important for us, but for example the one in the US in 2015 helped us to have big ambitions and speed up our scaling in the USA. Today, we have a 8 people team in SF and we are still planning for growth over the next few months.
You have done extensive testing of your prototype with real users at EPFL over the past few years – what lessons did you learn? Were EPFL hesitant to have autonomous vehicles on their campus?
No! EPFL was very supportive and hosted 2 european projects in 2014 and 2015. Withtout that, Bestmile would not be the Bestmile of today! It was a unique occasion for us to develop, test and deploy the first version of our technology while creating good visibility and credibility in the industry.
In your opinion, how long will it be until we see autonomous vehicles on our roads as part of everyday life? What is the biggest hurdle?
It’s coming fast, way faster than people think. We will see the first give deployment of robotaxi services already in 2018 and 2019, mostly for big pilot project. Companies like Waymo (Google), General Motors or Aptive will be the one deploying that. Then, the biggining of the commercial phase of such robotaxi services will be around 2020. As a first step, it’s going to be a few cities around the globe, but it’s going to be real life operations. The main scaling is expected between 2020 and 2025
What made you decide to go into the market for public transport rather than private vehicles?
Because the main goal of autonomous vehicles is to be used as part of the transportation system where the fleet of vehicles is shared and efficiently managed by a platform like ours. If we just replace existing vehicles with private autonomous vehicles, we will not solve any of the issues we see in cities, issues like traffic and congestion. Also, vehicles with level 4 and 5 automation will still be expensive and will have a lot of constraints when it comes to maintenance for example. A transportation company can manage that, not a private individual. Last but not least, by saving the cost of the current driver, taking a robotaxi service will (even every day) be cheap, much cheaper than owning your own car