The Microsoft ScaleUp program is designed for Series A startups and offers access to sales, marketing and technical support. Eligible startups partake in the immersive program at one of our seven global locations followed by ongoing support from a dedicated team of success managers. One of the ScaleUp locations is Microsoft ScaleUp Berlin, where a dedicated team around Managing Director Iskender Dirik twice a year supports a batch of up to 10 startups with coaching, training and technical support. In this blog series we will introduce one of the participating startups from our third batch each Tuesday and Thursday.
Bestmile empowers mobility providers to deploy, manage and optimize autonomous and conventional driven vehicle fleets. Its cloud platform enables the intelligent operation and optimization of autonomous mobility services, managing fixed-route and on-demand services, regardless of the vehicle brand or type – or as Bestmile CEO Raphaël Gindrat explains it to his grandparents: “Bestmile was founded because the first autonomous vehicles were designed to safely navigate a route, but not to communicate with each other to provide an efficient service. Bestmile software is like an air traffic control tower for vehicles—safely dispatching vehicles to the right places at the right times.”
The startup was founded in 2014 by Raphaël Gindrat and Anne Mellano and has global offices in San Francisco (USA) and Lausanne (Switzerland). A major challenge for them, and for most startups before the start of the ScaleUp program, was to get access to bigger deals with bigger companies in order to scale the company. “Microsoft ScaleUp is helping us build an enterprise-class business infrastructure that can leverage Microsoft’s technology and relationships to get introduced to these bigger deals and bigger customers,” says Gindrat.
Watch the video interview with Bestmile CEO Raphaël Gindrat to learn more about the startup:
Bestmile’s on-demand autonomous mobility services platform is being used daily in city centers on four continents on both pedestrian areas and open roads. In 2018, the World Economic Forum appointed the company with 60 employees as “Technology Pioneer”. “Our next steps are to sharpen our positioning and marketing in a way that will allow us to differentiate, generate new business, and build a strong brand,” says Gindrat.
