At Verve Ventures, we are very interested in the future of mobility. We have invested in Trusk, believing in their new approach to last-mile delivery. Now, we are proud to announce that we are backing Otoqi (they recently rebranded from Parkopoly), a startup that addresses the overlooked operations behind carsharing and car maintenance.

Otoqi changes the way we are interacting with our cars. They are providing pre-sales and after-sales services by delivering cars to your door when you want to go on a test drive, or by picking up your car, driving it to the garage and returning it when the car service is due.
While this may seem like a nice-to-have, it is rapidly becoming essential as car dealerships are moving to the outskirts of cities. Renault and PSA managed 25 dealerships in Paris when Otoqi first started, now only 2 remain. This new level of service is not just attractive for urbanites, as the positive feedback and inbound demand from rural garages attests.

Otoqi has expanded in the car-sharing business and partnered up with Zity. Zity is a provider of electric carsharing active in Madrid and Paris. Car sharing operators have very similar pain points as garages: operations (moving, cleaning, and charging the cars) are complex. Autolib, the private-public car sharing partnership in Paris, closed in 2018 because it never turned a profit. Otoqi is the only full-stack solution that combines both technology and operations personnel and enables its customers, garages, and car-sharing providers, to focus on their core business.

We love Otoqi because their Software-as-a-Service is so simple to integrate: it is plugged (through an API) in the back-office of car-sharing operators and manages all operations (moving cars, cleaning them, charging them) or into the garages’ back-office and takes care of all operations linked to car maintenance (appointment management, getting the car, monitoring, bringing the car back to the customer).

The product works beautifully as Otoqi, even though it deals with operations, takes a tech-first full-stack approach to help car-sharers where it really matters: not on the front-end app that is used by customers but by adding essential back-end services. Their product features range from accurately predicting where and when cars will be needed to tracking sensors to detect unreported collisions and exclude bad drivers (car sharers suffer collision frequencies that are up to 100 times higher than normal rental vehicles due to the sense of unaccountability by users). Their main strength however resides in the versatility of their platform that enables advanced customization of local operating rules for each customer in a low code environment. This advanced customization is the key to fully automating fleet management functions and adapting each car sharing operations’ to on-street parameters that vary for each city.

Otoqi has built a strong community of high-quality drivers. Delivering a car to a client requires a bit more than delivering a pizza, therefore Otoqi spends time in training and recruiting its drivers. It pays: The churn among their freelance drivers is very low, and the quality of service is high, evidenced by a net promoter score above 4.5.

Finally, having identified the critical need for dedicated Electric Vehicle charging infrastructure, Otoqi has spun-off this development in new company, Bump Charge, in which it retains a minority interest and a strategic relationship. Bump’s business model is focused on the growing and specific demand for EV charging for B2B users (delivery, taxis, ride-hailing, car sharing…). They have just commissioned their first charging hub in Paris and will own over 15 by the end of 2021. Access to this network is a strategic commercial asset for Otoqi.

Otoqi’s co-founders Sébastien de Limon and Arthur Dardre have a strong vision on the future of mobility. We believe that Otoqi is the right player to dominate the car-sharing operations market in France, and private car operations across Europe. Next time you use a Zity, think of them!