Swiss start-up Bestmile has developed an orchestration platform for on-demand mobility providers that steers every vehicle in a fleet in real time. The focus is on the control of autonomous vehicles.

Bestmile’s cloud-based mobility services solution features its Fleet Orchestration Platform, native professional and public applications, and API-enabled integration with third-party systems.

Autonomous and electrified mobility will make our cities safer and cleaner but will require shared services and intelligent orchestration, and this will make mobility more efficient and comfortable than driving your own car. The challenge lies not so much in developing these technologies, but in creating services that really excite travellers, cities and mobility providers.

—Anne Mellano, traffic engineer and founder of the fleet orchestration platform Bestmile

The start-up company offers providers of self-propelled and passenger-operated vehicles a solution for procurement, route planning, matching of vehicles and passengers and vehicle maintenance management.

This is about more than just getting people from A to B. It is actually an extremely complex undertaking. It’s about instructing each vehicle—and these can number into the hundreds or thousands—in real time.

—Anne Mellano

The vehicles are networked via a cloud system so that neither hardware nor software has to be installed. The cloud software is individually adapted to the needs of each individual mobility provider and ensures that the right vehicle is sent to the right place at the right time.

The start-up was founded in 2014 by Anne Mellano and Raphaël Gindrat as a spin-off of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), one of the leading centers in Switzerland in the field of technological research. The two led one of the first pilot tests for autonomous mobility in Europe, where six self-propelled shuttles drove people around the EPFL campus. This enabled Mellano and Gindrat to gain valuable experience.

At around the same time, peer-to-peer ride-hailing services flooded cities with cars but lost money and angered people because the systems were maintained inefficiently.

This confirmed the need for orchestration to enable efficient dispatching, ride matching and routing. For vehicles with and without drivers.

—Anne Mellano

With the successful pilot test at the EPFL, Bestmile received a great deal of attention and funding early on and was already fully booked with orders in its first year. Today, the company employs 60 people at its headquarters in Lausanne, Switzerland, and in San Francisco, and works with customers around the world.

These include public and private mobility service providers with autonomous and non-autonomous vehicles, including some of the largest European public transport companies such as Keolis and Swiss Federal Railways SBB, private ride-hailing and taxi companies, as well as transport network operators and OEMs. They all already rely on improved and automated processes, but Bestmile’s focus is not only on the current business model, but on what customers need when autonomous vehicles come onto the market.