Osborne Clarke advises mobility budget platform RYDES on seed funding

Osborne Clarke has advised Rydes, the provider of a mobility budget platform for employees, on its EUR 3.5 million seed funding round.

Public transport, rented bicycles or cars, one's own vehicle: Instead of always committing exclusively to a single means of transport, more and more people prefer mobility that can be flexibly designed. To enable companies to meet this need as an employee benefit, the Berlin-based start-up Rydes has developed a solution: a platform through which companies provide their employees with a monthly mobility budget, which they can then spend flexibly on the mobility offer of their choice – such as car subscriptions, monthly tickets or petrol. Thanks to the fully automated integration into the company's own HR, payroll and tax systems, companies save administrative effort, time and money. 

The start-up, which was launched in 2018 in the Lufthansa Innovation Hub and later spun off by Martin Miodownik and René Braun, has now successfully completed a seed financing round of EUR 3.5 million. The round was led by Assembly Ventures and Rethink Ventures. Existing investors Lufthansa Group, Forward31 (the company builder of Porsche Digital) and Arabella Venture Capital as well as angel investors Christoph Bornschein (CEO of TLGG), Johannes Reck (CEO of GetYourGuide) and Travelperk founder Javier Suarez also participated. Futury Capital and business angel Jens Krüger have also joined. 
Rydes will use the new funding to further develop its mobility platform and expand into additional markets.

The team advising Rydes, led by Robin Eyben, consisted of Robert Marx, Dana Alpar (all Corporate/VC), Dr Lina Böcker (IT) and Susanna Lorenz (Employment).