Project description
No empty seat – a sustainable AI-based system for transportations in the suburbs
Carpooling (sharing car journeys) allows more persons to travel in a car and prevents the need for others to have to drive to a location alone. It is environmentally friendly and sustainable, resulting in reduced air pollution, carbon emissions and traffic congestion. The French company Karos offers innovative transportation services that combine carpooling and public transportation, but it aims to multiply the benefits of this system. The EU-funded UNITE project will support Karos in developing disruptive technologies deploying artificial intelligence and intermodality and an innovative business model approach to eliminate empty car seats and create sustainable public transportation networks operating at a low cost in low-density areas. In this way, it will revolutionise cities’ transportations, significantly reducing costs and improving network extension and performance.
Objective
Karos was founded in 2014 to leverage collaborative consumption and artificial intelligence in order to revolutionize suburban areas commuting services and offer a disruptive transportation service to commuters. Karos innovativeness finds its sources in the advantages from both carpooling and public transportation: collaborative consumption for public services and a mix of social, professional and public networks. The Karos solution extends the current public transportation network with unbeatable performances: a network extension & densification by a factor of 10 and a transport cost divided by 10.
Having raised over 7.5 M€, the Company’s mission is to develop disruptive AI technologies to transform empty car seats into sustainable and low-cost-to-operate public transportation networks in low density areas. Karos solution unlocks mobility thanks to 4 main pillars: Artificial intelligence, Intermodality, an innovative business model and an approach to change Users’ mobility habits.
Unlike traditional carpooling players, KAROS is based on a public-transportation-like business model applied to carpooling activities (a multi-stream revenue generation). The solution is distributed through two product lines: Karos Territories for Local transportation Authorities, and Karos Enterprise for companies willing to improve their employees wellbeing.
The EIC accelerator will be a unique opportunity to make a next step in the system with another 3 M€ of technical development and accelerate the time-to-market in Europe with a marketing and sales plan of 3.2 M€. The UNITE project will enable KAROS to recruit 500 000 new users and sign 10 new contracts with smart cities and with over 550 large corporations in order to achieve a revenue over 100 M€ by 2024.
KAROS UNITE is a 6.3 M€ project, with a funding split between a Grant of 2.1 M€ and 3.2 M€ in equity.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
- natural sciencescomputer and information sciencesartificial intelligence
- engineering and technologycivil engineeringurban engineeringsmart cities
- social sciencessociologygovernancepublic services
- social scienceseconomics and businessbusiness and managementbusiness models
- social sciencessocial geographytransportpublic transport
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Keywords
Programme(s)
Call for proposal
(opens in new window) H2020-EIC-SMEInst-2018-2020
See other projects for this callSub call
H2020-EIC-SMEInst-2018-2020-3
Funding Scheme
SME - SME instrumentCoordinator
75002 Paris
France
The organization defined itself as SME (small and medium-sized enterprise) at the time the Grant Agreement was signed.