Ridecell: Mobility That Drives Disruption into Innovative Reality of Auto-Industry

Innovations are intervening in how we travel; from self-driven cars, electric vehicles to ride/car sharing everything is coming into action. This not only creates business opportunities rather evolves our societies and regular landscapes for advanced future. Disruptive innovation underpinned with automotive mobility solutions enables businesses to empower customers with next-gen cruise control. Ridecell is one such company which is a new mobility cloud provider to power all types of new mobility.

With Ridecell, customers are able to power carsharing and ride-hailing services as well as autonomous ride-hailing services. Ridecell also has the Auro autonomous platform for autonomous driving. This platform is optimized for today's near-term use cases for autonomous driving with Level 4 low-speed use cases.

Bedrock of Success

Ridecell was founded in 2009 as a company designed to help you get a "ride" with your "cell"-phone. It's been focused on new mobility since its inception. In the times since the company was founded, the team has run a ridesharing service in San Francisco with 2500 drivers and have been powering more than 20 company's new mobility needs. In 2015, Ridecell extended its platform to accommodate carsharing, in addition, to ride-hailing and has the world's only platform that lets operators run carsharing and ride-hailing sharing a single fleet of vehicles.

Dynamic Leadership

The company is led by Aarjav Trivedi, Founder & CEO. Aarjav founded the company in 2009 with the vision of finding a way to utilize all of the empty space in vehicles and turning that into transportation for people. He founded the company in Atlanta but moved it to Silicon Valley once the company realized that to grow and be a part of the venture community, San Francisco would be a preferable location. Aarjav consistently sees the future of new mobility and was recognized by TU Automotive as the automotive influencer of the year.

Spearheading Company's Industrial Contribution

Autonomous driving is disruptive, but on its own, without new mobility, it could be categorized as a next-generation cruise control. Combined with new mobility, it will become the pillar of the transformation of society from vehicle ownership to using shared mobility. Ridecell has focused on building an on-demand transportation platform that will scale from driven to driverless to help companies achieve a successful shared mobility platform. The company's Auro autonomous tech can be used for near-term use cases to support car-sharing. Carsharing use cases include using autonomous tech to reposition vehicles at night to locations where they will be in high demand for customers in the morning. Additionally, they could be used to valet deliver a car to a driver, and then valet park the car while letting the customer drive themselves while using the car.

Utilizing Potentials of Disruptive Technology

Aarjav feels if one explores mobility-as-a-service, big data analytics/artificial intelligence in carsharing involves making the operations run much smoother and more affordable. With big data, the team knows precisely where demand for vehicles will be and can reposition the fleet to best meet that demand. The company also can use it for prognostics and predictive maintenance for the vehicles preventing unwanted vehicle downtime. Big data analytics for transportation will be used at a macro level to optimize public transit and, multi-modal travel, and carpooling to help increase the density of people in vehicles. If Ridecell continues to put only one person in one car, the company will end up with traffic Armageddon. Big data will allow us to efficiently combine people in vehicles who share similar destinations. Increasing the density of people in vehicles, and overall reducing the carbon footprint of travel.

Refining Innovation Parameters

Ridecell is the only company that offers a single platform to launch both carsharing and ridesharing. With multiservice mobility offerings, service providers are seeing significantly higher utilization rates than with standalone carsharing or ridesharing offerings, leading to lower operational costs and higher profits. Ridecell is also the only new mobility platform that helps customers scale from driven to driverless mobility services through its autonomous ride-hailing offering.

Ridecell also has a slew of strategic partners who are investors in the company's B round of funding. The company is working with Penske, Cox Automotive, DENSO, DB, and Mitsui. In partnerships with these companies, Ridecell is working to develop an ecosystem of services to help scale new mobility operations. The company is working with Tier 1 suppliers including DENSO and auto OEMs to develop carsharing ready vehicles that can be ordered from the car manufacturer ready to be deployed into a carsharing fleet.

Valuable Achievements

Ridecell has won awards from Red Herring, SXSW, TU Automotive and LA Automobility recognizing Ridecell as one of the top innovative new mobility companies. The company has worked with lighthouse customers such as BMW, Renault, VW, and AAA.  Strategy Analytics and SBD automotive both recognize Ridecell as the leading new mobility company.

Overcoming Challenging Hurdles

Customer education: Most Ridecell customers have no previous experience running a mobility service business and hence need to be educated on Ridecell's key differentiation of multiservice platform. Multiservice allows customers to run ridesharing, carsharing, and hybrid services on a single integrated platform and via a single app, resulting in significantly higher utilization rates and hence profitability than standalone offerings. But until customers actually launch and start seeing their service business grow (and utilization increase), they have a hard time understanding the value that multiservice offers.

Building an end-to-end ecosystem: Running a successful mobility service is much more than designing and supporting an app. It involves a complex ecosystem of many types of partners, from payment and insurance companies to vehicle connectivity and maintenance service providers. Since new mobility is an emerging industry, Ridecell has had to invest in developing its own ecosystem of partners to ensure operational simplicity and profitability for its customers.

Future on Mobility

Aarjav believes the convenience of the app and the on-demand economy has given rise to an era of new mobility services such as ridesharing and carsharing. But the biggest driver of change in the coming future will be when autonomous driving combines with mobility. Autonomous vehicles will change the cost structure of ridesharing dramatically. Industry analysts predict that the cost could drop from the $1.50/mile cost today for these services to 25 cents/mile or even less. Personal car ownership will begin to decrease with people choosing to pay for their transportation as they consume it.

Today, the new mobility market is highly consolidated, with just a few providers. In the future, the company expects mobility-as-a-service to follow a path similar to mature transportation-as-a-service industries—such as air travel or public transport, offering different kinds of vehicles and even different services within the vehicles. The Ridecell New Mobility Cloud provides a complete solution to empower companies to participate in this new age of transportation by helping them launch and manage profitable new mobility services and is the only new mobility platform that helps customers scales from driven to driverless mobility services.