Market Opportunity or Last Gasp? Pioneering MaaS Start-Up ‘Pivots’ to Stay in Business

MaaS Global | Pasi Salminen

Pioneering mobility-as-a-service start-up MaaS Global plans to drop its B2C business model and will instead try to license its Whim platform and expertise to non-transport companies that want to launch MaaS to their customers, Mobility Payments has learned.

MaaS Global founder and CEO Sampo Hietanen told Mobility Payments this week that he’s confident the market “pivot” can save his cash-strapped company, which earlier this month had to lay off around half of the employees at its Finnish headquarters, as Mobility Payments reported. He said he’ll be able to disclose a deal within the next few days.

Hietanen said he sees a market opportunity for licensing Whim and the company’s MaaS know-how to companies in such sectors as real estate and insurance, along with telecoms and other corporates that have a connection to mobility and which might be interested in launching a MaaS app to their customers.

“I personally think that the markets will evolve toward you buying your mobility packages together with your rent,” Hietanen told Mobility Payments. “It’s quite an obvious one because the benefits are so huge. You can start adding revenues from it, but then (also) get to actual usage and lowering the need for parking spaces, which are not profitable most of the time for real estate developers.”

Insurance companies are another category of companies that would be interested, Hietanen said he believes.

“Insurance companies are naturally close to mobility because of motor (vehicle) insurance and everything related to that,” he said. “Many of them have already gone closer to such services. They have a huge user base, and they’re used to these kinds of monthly billing.”

Under its reorganization plan, MaaS Global will continue its flagship MaaS service in Helsinki and its consumer-facing Whim app there. But the service will become a “test lab.”

Business “partners” in other countries will be able to pull data and knowledge from this operation in Helsinki as they roll out their own MaaS platforms with Whim or a white-label version of the app, Hietanen said, adding that MaaS Global would be willing to form joint ventures with companies that want to use Whim to roll out MaaS.

“We want to partner with someone who comes into the game with us who actually has assets to make it more efficient,” he said. “A big part of the whole MaaS business lies on the user acquisition, and do you have enough money for that.”

He said local companies and other players “have their captive markets,” meaning they probably have a lot of potential users, or they have “other types of assets” they can use to “make the investment efficient.”

While Hietanen could not name any companies planning to license Whim or form a joint venture with MaaS Global to roll out MaaS, he said at least one deal is in the works and would be released soon. One source said he believed the “partner” would be an insurance company.

And he points to a precedent for the business model–a contract MaaS Global announced in 2019 with large Tokyo-based real estate developer Mitsui Fudosan, which sells and manages retail space, hotels, condominiums and apartments. In December 2021 the developer announced it would start a “real estate mobility-as-a-service (MaaS) service,” called &MOVE, using the Whim app.

The service would provide mobility options to customers who want to travel to or depart from the firm’s retail developments, hotels and condominiums, allowing them to plan, book and pay for rides with taxis, car-share, bike-share and shuttle providers.

The Mitsui Fudosan MaaS app remains a pilot, however.

And a memo of understanding MaaS Global announced in the spring with France-based Capitello Move to provide a “green mobility platform” for organizations and events, such as next year’s Rugby World Cup in France, still lacks partners to launch the platform.

MaaS Global’s business model up until now of setting up and selling subscription packages directly to consumers was always a difficult proposition. And any pivot may have come too late.

So observers might see the start-up’s latest move to find non-transport companies that want to launch their own MaaS apps by licensing Whim as sort of a last gasp for what was once a company at the vanguard of a promising technology.

As Mobility Payments has reported, Hietanen is facing a serious cash crunch. This forced the layoffs in Finland and also the closing last month of MaaS Global’s Brazilian operation and the Quicko trip-planning app it had acquired only six months earlier. Quicko’s demise resulted in the termination of around 60 employees, as Mobility Payments reported.

MaaS Global operations in other countries, such as Belgium, Switzerland, Austria and Japan–outside of the Mitsui Fudosan pilot–are expected to close, as well, unless the start-up can find local partners.

Hietanen, however, argues that demand remains strong for MaaS, despite many market observers already giving up on the technology.

“Many are writing it off,” he acknowledged. “Of course, I talk (about MaaS) probably the most in the industry. There are two sides of the movement. Most of the write-offs are because of the complex nature of it. That it’s really hard to make the integrations and really hard to make the tech.”

At the same time, he said MaaS backers are observing what Hietanen calls a “new wave of industrials,” which see MaaS from a different perspective.

“(They say) this could actually be a thing, for us, whether it supports their core business, or they see that it’s a likely continuation of their business. So there’s a new wave of investment.”  

And what MaaS Global can bring to the table, besides the Whim technology itself, is how to run a MaaS app. “This is something where we can proudly say that, ‘hey, we’ve gone the furthest. We know how to do it, so we can derisk it for those that want to get into it.’ ”

But with the layoffs, observers doubt that MaaS Global will have the staff to properly maintain and update its Whim platform. And with the start-up’s venture capital drying up and the company fast running out of cash, Hietanen will have little time to demonstrate that his market pivot is working.   

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