Mobility start-ups always have major problems finding investors. The number of financing rounds was at the lowest level of the past ten years in 2024, according to an analysis of the advice of Oliver Wyman, which is available to the manager magazine. But there is also good news: If you convince donors with mobility concepts, you can hope for larger financial injections than ever.
“It has become extremely difficult to just sell an idea,” says Oliver Wyman expert Andreas Nienhaus. “Money is currently too expensive for that.”
That was very different a few years ago: in 2021 the mobility housese reached its peak with 1367 financing rounds. Since then it has been less year after year, in 2024 it was almost half as many with 696 rounds. “There has been significantly more realism for investors,” says Steffen Rilling, who also specializes in mobility issues at Oliver Wyman. “Those who cannot at least promote profitability will be excluded.”
The experience with pure bets on mobility companies was probably too bad. Some ended in the disaster, also from a German perspective: E-scooter rental company Tier Mobility, for example, which had collected $ 200 million in 2021, disappeared as a brand in 2024, an emergency fusion with the competitor Dott had passed. Or the flight taxi start-up Volocopter, at the beginning of 2022 after a 150 million euro round with 1.5 billion euros, slipped into bankruptcy shortly before the recent turn of the year.
“Investors have cleaned up their portfolios with sometimes excessively overvalued mobility players,” says Nienhaus. This means that money is also available again. With $ 54 billion, investors were still significantly less in mobility start-ups than in the record year 2021 ($ 88 billion). With a view to the past few years, the sum was enough for second place.
If one looks at the size of the individual financing rounds, the year 2024 has so far been unsurpassed: According to the study, $ 78 million was invested on average. The donors have become clear: “You have to invest immense sums to build a decent business in the mobility sector,” said Nienhaus.
Last year, investors were very popular with networked and autonomous driving. According to the analysis, more than twice as much money flowed into corresponding projects as 2023 (+103 percent) with $ 18.2 billion. Wyman consultant Rilling also is getting more and more realism in doing so: “It doesn’t have to be the fully autonomous robotaxi. On the way there, there are many applications that are also interesting for investors. ”
Autonomous driving is in demand, Europe is hardly
In contrast, investors spent less money than in the previous year for “sustainable mobility”, including, for example, electromobility. At $ 19.6 billion, the financing in that area decreased by more than one fifth compared to 2023. Several Asian manufacturers would have collected larger sums the year before, in the meantime in North America and Europe, the study authors are causing the decline in the sales figures for electric cars.
From a regional perspective, US mobility companies were the clear winners of the past year. At $ 30.1 billion, they collected more than half of the global venture capital in the sector and $ 10 billion more than 2023. In Asia, on the other hand, investments fell by $ 5 percent to $ 17.1 billion. Europe was able to grow slightly at $ 6.9 billion compared to the previous year (+5 percent), but is far behind the global competition in absolute numbers.