What problem is Avrios solving?
Companies need cars to move people around. Service technicians need to bring their tools with them. Salespeople need to visit clients. For middle and upper management, cars are a benefit. The problem is keeping track of a company’s cars. Many firms still do this with either Excel sheets or even ring binders. Either way, the information is never up to date, which makes reporting very cumbersome. Can you imagine that many companies can’t tell you exactly how much cars they own? One of our new clients actually had 280 vehicles instead of the 250 he thought he had. If you consider that the running costs per car and year exceed 10’000 Francs, it’s a frightening level of chaos out there.

What solution does Avrios propose for this problem?
We’ve built a platform on which all the necessary data is gathered. All the documentation you need, insurance papers, leasing contracts, current expenses and more are digitally stored in one place. This gives companies the clear overview they’ve lacked so far. And once they have this overview, they can start to optimize and pay less for the same, for example by buying cars in bulk and negotiating better terms. We have anonymized data on more than 90’000 cars in our database. We can tell a company immediately if it overpays for a leasing contract or if a car has a much too high fuel consumption. We can also give recommendations if companies want to make their fleet more environmentally friendly.

What is the vision Avrios is pursuing?
We want to give companies a tool to manage their employees’ mobility. Among the novelties are electric cars, electric bikes, e-scooters and alternatives to outright ownership like carsharing or subscription models for short or long term duration. The goal is to offer the modes of transportation that make sense for a given job profile. For someone in the middle of the city that might look different than for someone driving around visiting clients all the time. Taking usage into account is a very different mindset than just having a hierarchical car policy detailing which employee has the right to which car model.

That’s a broad vision. How much of it is possible with the product you’re offering today?
We share this vision with some of our clients and are implementing it step by step. Our dashboard today is still focused on effortlessly managing a vehicle fleet because that is the pain point of our clients. But we’ve already integrated a software module for corporate carsharing.

How will the advent of autonomous vehicles change the outlook for Avrios?
For Avrios, they will be part of the revenue pool like any other form of transportation. Autonomous cars still need contracts and repairs. But for companies, they will be a boost for productivity. On average, people spend as much as 30% of their working time driving their car. They’ll be spending this time making calls or doing business in the future.

How many companies are already using electric cars?
In Germany, 80% of companies don’t use electric cars. Overall, the share of electric cars among company cars is 1%. But this number has almost tripled in two years. There are some companies that have a very high share of electric cars in their fleet, logistics firms with electric forklifts for example, or companies with a specific mission, like a construction firm focusing on solar energy.

You mentioned other mobility forms. Why would companies offer e-bikes to their employees?
We’ve seen companies offering bikes or e-bikes to employees for several reasons, including health or getting around in the city center. One company, an engineering firm located outside a city, even offers quad bikes as company cars. That’s being creative in the war for talents and establishing a certain company culture. Of course, these vehicles are expensive and not for everyone. But there are good reasons to offer mobility to all of the employees, not just the 25% that, on average, get a company car.

So far we spoke about what Avrios does for its clients. How do you do it?
Our software aggregates data. We have embedded countless rules and automatic steps to do that. We’re using artificial intelligence to read out information in paper contracts, no matter what layout they use. On top of that, we’ve programmed decades of fleet management knowledge into our software.

Fleet management doesn’t sound like an exciting market.
In Europe alone, there are 450’000 companies that collectively own 13.5 million company cars and spend 163 billion on them every year. We think these numbers are quite exciting.