Urban Connect is thrilled to announce the partnership with Helvetia Venture Fund and Swiss Prime Site Innovation Fund in efforts to accelerate the shift toward shared, sustainable corporate mobility in Switzerland.
Helvetia is a Swiss insurance group with a global presence. The company is listed on the SIX stock exchange and headquartered in St. Gallen. The investment in Urban Connect is part of the implementation of the Helvetia 20.25 strategy, which focuses on tapping into new business models. Stefan Saeger, Principal at Helvetia Venture Fund explains the strategic decision as follows:
„Urban Connect‘s business model meets an increasingly changing need in corporate mobility at the highly interesting intersection of fleet management and sustainability, confirmed by a stellar list of corporate clients.”
Swiss Prime Site AG (SPS) is one of the leading real estate companies in Europe. In addition to its own commercial real estate portfolio, SPS owns the real estate services leader Wincasa (>70bn AUM), with which Urban Connect is conducting multiple servitization pilots to test a connected, low-carbon mobility platform at their key commercial properties. Bastian Zarske Bueno, Head Group Corporate Ventures & Innovation, describes the strategic decision to partner with Urban Connect as follows: “In the fast-growing corporate mobility market, Urban Connect enables Swiss Prime Site to offer tenant-centric mobility services on its mixed-use sites and further increase their market value. Our tenants appreciate the multimodal, sustainable offering with its attractive network effects and will be able to collect and offset data on their employee mobility sustainability emissions via the Urban Connect platform conveniently.”
The funds will go into the enhancement of the digital platform, in particular with respect to the management of large vehicle fleets, a smart parking solution, the integration of a mobility budget. Moreover, the funds will be used to further enhance data analytics tools to help companies cut emissions, total costs of mobility, and save space.
Urban Connect’s Co-Founder Judith Häberli said, “Our Mobility-as-a-Service offering helps companies build greener, smarter and healthier workplaces – and cleaner, less congested cities too! This investment helps accelerate these efforts. And we could not be happier about the quality of these investors.”
