On the 16th and 17th of October, the European mobility startup acceleration project IMPACT Connected Car attended Autonomy Paris. The Summit intended for professionals in the sector, gathered startups and investors interested in the landscape and future of European mobility. This event was a final one for the ICCar acceleration program. 

During Autonomy Paris, ICCar’s project partners attended the event: 

• Olivier Lenz, programmes director from FIA Region 1, responsible for the consumer protection activities of FIA in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. He supports the Automobile Clubs from the Region I headquarter in Brussels, Belgium.

• Emily Carroll, acceleration manager at ISDI Accelerator, has led the business acceleration part of IMPACT Connected Car as well as managed several other public and corporate innovation programs such as MERLIN Proptech Challenge, UNICEF neXst and currently IMPACT EdTech, a new program focused on educational technology.

Among the mentioned project partners was also David Seoane, Project Manager and consultant of IMPACT Connected Car. He has over 10 years experience on Fundraising in EU programmes, including proposal preparation, partner search and networking in INNOVATION funding programmes like H2020, INTERREG, ERASMUS+, LIFE Experience, and management in such programmes.

IMPACT Connected Car startups and partners showcased their solutions during the Autonomy Summit. On 16th of October, the first day of the event, startups Go To-U, eccocar &SafeMode were selected among 140 applicants by Funding The Movement's partners InMotion Ventures, Via ID - Mobivia, and Robert Bosch Venture Capital to present the smart #EVcharging solution. Go To-U was one of the 3 selected winners of this 2019 contest edition.

The panel in Data & Connectivity, “Shaping the future of Connected Car views from corps, investors and startups world,” took place on Thursday,17 of October. The discussion was mainly focused on the future of smart mobility and connected cars. 

The speakers were Olivier Lenz, FIA Region I Programme Director; Anna Sobczak, European Commission Policy Officer for Clusters and Emerging Industries; Ingrid Sarlandie, Plug and Play Mobility Innovation Manager and Romain Crunelle Co-CEO of Xee, connected car platform and service marketplace. They gave their insights from the corporate, startup, and policymakers points of view. 

Anna Sobczack, from the European Commission, expressed that clusters can play an important role in transferring innovation.

Also, speakers announced the 31 best startups of the programme disrupting the mobility sector.The following list is a selection of the ICCar’s portfolio: Xapix, Eccocar, 2Hire, Capricode, Better World, Spark Horizon, BeNomad, Parkbob, xMotion and Parquery. 

Ingrid Sarlandie, from Plug and Play, presented her views on the Silicon Valley and the European mobility startup ecosystem.

IMPACT Connected Car Pioneer Awards

The Pioneer Award was granted to the most promising startup from the second batch accelerated by IMPACT Connected Car. The winner was Better World, the startup from France, that was chosen based on its achievements after the project’s final review. It was rewarded with a prize of15,000€ and an opportunity to participate in Autonomy 2020 in Paris. 

Better World is an SME dedicated to collecting and analyzing customer feedback in the automotive sector, relying on proprietary Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing (NLP) algorithms.

Daniel Ritter, Co-founder & CEO of the winning startup, identified a simple challenge that their solution addresses: Carmakers who want to increase their customer-centricity need to focus on their feedback management processes and this is where Better World comes in. They enable carmakers to be customer-centric through AI-based feedback management, in a 3-step process: 

First, the feedback is collected inside the car makers’ organizations, on the web, and through the connected car; then, it is analyzed with their own AI / NLP algorithms; finally, a structured and efficient browsing experience is provided, as a result of the analyses, for the teams in the organizations, along business use-cases with measurable ROI.

The impact for carmakers is massive, as it contributes to increase their revenue base (better products and services, better advertising, better sells) and decreasing their cost base (more focused R&D, faster quality incidents detections). 

Better World offers an end-to-end feedback management solution, specifically dedicated to the automotive sector. This means that feedback is collected from sources specifically adapted to the automotive industry, especially vocal feedback. 

The natural language algorithms are tailored to the automotive-related language. Their solution is able to detect automotive products and services with accuracy (e.g. the precise generation of a given car), allowing a competitive benchmarking. 

According to Daniel Ritter, “The automotive sector is undergoing massive changes, especially towards more electrification, more autonomy, more sharing and more connectivity. This implies that car makers urgently need to define where they want to go, in that fast-changing context. We believe that it is critical to leverage the input of users in that process, which is precisely what Better World is enabling.”

During the Award Ceremony, David Seoane, as a Project Manager of IMPACT Connected Car, briefly presented the advancements of the 3 years of the project in reference. 

The winners affirmed “Our conviction is that the future of customer feedback collection is inside cars, compared to filling out manually a question survey. Imagine your car asking for your feedback (if you agreed to upfront) while you are stuck in a traffic jam. We believe this prefigures the future of automotive market research.”

The ceremony and award was presented by David Seoane. Then the awarded startup was granted a 5 minutes pitch on stage.  To finalize the event, Virgine Perron, the European Commission officer, granted the trophy ending the ceremony.