PandaGo, Europe’s first electric vehicle rental platform for companies, has closed €4.7 million funding round led by Kiko Ventures. Other funds like Big Sur Ventures, which already invested in the pre-seed stage, and JME Ventures have also participated.
PandaGo is currently operating in Spain and plans to expand into France and Italy in the coming months. The investment raised will be used to hire top talent, implement new platform developments aimed at improving customer experience, and invest strategically in marketing and sales to help thousands of businesses easily electrify their fleet.
Mariano Galán, CEO & Co-founder of PandaGo, says: “Companies can have the biggest impact on the creation of sustainable cities. And they are willing to take on this challenge but find it difficult to find, hire and manage fleets of electric vehicles. Our platform solves problems such as the complexity of managing multiple rental providers, and the limited supply of electric vehicles”.
Green pandas
Founded in 2021 by Francisco Acosta, Andrés Soler and Mariano Galán, PandaGo aims to help create sustainable cities by making it easy for companies to adopt electric mobility solutions for their business and employees. The company includes a marketplace with a wide catalog of electric vehicles in flexible rental, together with a self-developed software platform (SaaS) that makes it very easy to operate multi-vehicle or multi-supplier fleets, and a service layer that allows companies to contract their fleet as a turnkey managed service.
According to PandaGo, moving to sustainable mobility is necessary and inevitable (by 2023 all cities with more than 50,000 inhabitants will have Low Emission Zones, featuring driving restrictions for petrol and diesel vehicles). Moreover, businesses are set to be the primary agents of change towards zero emissions: according to Statista, an estimated 2 million light commercial vehicles will be needed in Europe by 2025 to serve 50 billion deliveries between eCommerce, groceries and food delivery.
Additionally, there are all the service sectors that need to move people and goods in order to carry out their activities: commercial fleets, installation and maintenance, security, etc. Furthermore, European companies have the opportunity to promote sustainable private mobility for their more than 190 million employees, for example through private fleet sharing or flexible salary schemes. “As for SMEs, we provide them with tailor-made electric vehicle rental offers and contract them through an easy-to-use digital platform, providing a great service behind the scenes”, adds Galán.
The solution has attracted leading companies in their sectors committed to sustainability, such as Glovo, AraVinc, and Bureau Veritas, among others. PandaGo has used its software platform to help them electrify their fleet and manage it in a simple and efficient way without having to dedicate their own resources to do so. Having been in operation for little more than a year, it has gained the trust of more than 80 customers in 30 cities, surpassing the 1,000 vehicles contracted milestone. Its operation has already prevented the emission of more than 800 tonnes of CO2.