Smart Mobility Investment Strategies: What to Expect in the Upcoming Years

Are you a smart mobility startup looking for funds? When approaching a funding round, it's key to understand what investors are interested in and their strategies. From tech focus to result focus, from mere funding to partnerships, from proprietary tech to interoperability. Investor strategies have changed. So the market reality is relatively tough. And I mean that both from a funding rounds perspective, with fewer funding rounds happening consistently year and year for the last few years, and also from an uncertain economic climate perspective and obviously from a geopolitical landscape perspective and so, as you can imagine, we have adapted our allocation strategy in a few ways. You just heard Denise Xifara, who leads the investment strategy at EIT Urban Mobility, a European Commission-backed initiative that funds and boosts innovation in mobility across Europe. The organization has been recognized as the most active investor in Europe's mobility startup ecosystem, and since 2020 has deployed €26 million in blended finance across a portfolio of over 140 startups. They recently published a call for startups, so we spoke with Denise to discuss how investment in smart mobility is changing and what they'll be focusing on in these upcoming years. Denise, how has EIT Urban Mobility changed their funding strategies to adapt to this new reality? We have refined our capital allocation so that perhaps we might end up supporting fewer companies but provide more support per company. So we're increasing the amount of allocation that might go to each company. Up to, €2.5 million per company per transaction. We're also supporting a wider range of companies. So not just pre-seed and seed, which was the primary focus before and of course will continue to be the focus, but also perhaps a little bit of series A as well. And that is in order to not just support experimentation, which of course, we definitely want to continue to do, but also to support companies that are looking to scale. You want to invest in 8 to 10 startups a year, investing alongside other investors, private ones included. What are the types of companies or solutions that you will be focusing on? Considering you work with so many European cities. So, for example, we know that cities focus on climate targets. We know that resilience is very important to them. We know that they look for reliability and innovation that works in deployment, not just within the sort of pilot environment. All of that, of course, suggests that we look for solutions that offer efficiency across the board. So whether it's, say, micromobility or public transportation, efficiencies are very important. And of course, also from an economic and business model perspective another way to think of resilience is security. And so cybersecurity within the urban mobility sector. Of course, we'd be remiss not to talk about artificial intelligence. And there's many other very interesting technological breakthroughs as well, for example, around hydrogen technology. Battery technology. And by the way, we don't shy away from CapEx heavy value propositions. But being able to be asset light does offer advantages. You've had other funding programs. So how is this new one different for startups? What have you changed to adapt to them to their needs? With the intent essentially to better bridge the funding gap between pilots and commercial scale, allow for companies to have a longer runway in order to have the time to build meaningful partnerships with cities and operators and other commercial partners and their clients, especially as we mentioned in a market that is a lot tougher from a funding perspective and also to allow ourselves to be able to, I guess, dedicate the effort required to be a true value add partner. EIT’s new funding strategy reflects a broader shift we're seeing across the smart mobility ecosystem. Some investors, especially corporate and public-backed ones, are moving beyond funding towards partnerships that help startups navigate regulated, capital intensive markets. We're also seeing less fear around hardware and more focus on solutions that can scale in the real world. For founders, this means that success today isn't just about innovation, it's about execution, resilience and choosing the right partners.