ioki, market leader for on-demand platform solutions in the DACH region, looks back on a successful 2021. The mobility start-up of Deutsche Bahn (DB) recorded strong growth in the number of its on-demand services last year and reached the threshold of one million passengers carried on the platform in 2021.
“2021 was a very successful year for us. We were able to launch 25 new on-demand services in Germany and abroad together with our partners and increase the number of passengers by over 150 percent,” sums up Michael Barillère-Scholz, co-founder and CEO of ioki. “Our vision of integrating digital services into existing public transport and our holistic software-as-a-service approach are making an important contribution to improving local transport in Germany and Europe.”
Digital public transport of the future: data-based and demand-driven
The positive figures prove the successful growth strategy of ioki and its vision of data-based, efficient, demand-driven mobility. In the last twelve months, the international development team has been able to integrate numerous new features into the platform. Among others, these include an interface to display the direct booking and handling of on-demand journeys in depth via a MaaS app and a “+1 passenger” booking function. In addition to the launch of the largest on-demand service in Germany with an innovative booking app in the Rhine-Main region, the lighthouse projects include the EVA-Shuttle funding project, in which autonomous and on-demand services were combined for the first time. Moreover, new services with ioki software were launched in European countries such as Switzerland, France and Spain.
In the area of mobility analytics, the study on the quality of public transport services raised awareness for the German local transport infrastructure. According to the analysis, on-demand services could create an attractive and additional local transport offer for more than 25 million Germans. In the past year, ioki’s Mobility Analytics team has carried out 30 profound analyses of the current mobility and supply situation for cities, municipalities and transport companies to derive efficient cross-modal mobility concepts.
In 2022, the tech company will continue to focus on the digitalisation of public transport: “For us, a future-proof public transport system is a digital and data-based local transport system that improves the quality of life for citizens – driver-based or autonomous. We see the greatest potential for ridepooling and automated public transport services in rural and suburban regions in particular,” says Michael Barillère-Scholz. The Frankfurt-based company is already represented in twelve federal and seven European countries and plans to expand further in 2022 to continue its mission of more mobility with less traffic with digitalised public transport.
In this way, ioki supports DB’s goal of better connecting passengers to climate-friendly rail with an attractive and flexible local transport service. Within the last three years, DB has expanded the existing scheduled bus service with around 330 flexible services on German streets and has already carried seven million passengers.
ioki milestones 2021:
- February: Deutsche Bahn subsidiary ioki cooperates with the international AI platform Optibus
- April: Milestone in automated public transport: Passenger operation for self-driving shuttles on demand launched in Karlsruhe
- May: ioki and Mobimeo cooperate for the first time on the further development of the multimodal KVV.mobil app
- July: Germany’s largest on-demand service with innovative booking app launched
- September: Autonomous driving in public transport: ioki joins EU Commission funding project
- October: 1 million passengers carried // ioki study on public mobility in Germany: on-demand services strengthen rail, mobility transition and climate protection
- November: Innovative on-demand project ioki Hamburg is extended
- December: Launch of the first on-demand operation in France
