European urban mobility startup SWITCH leverages AI to optimise shared transport infrastructure
Europe’s urban shared mobility sector faces escalating challenges in managing a complex and rapidly evolving transport ecosystem. The proliferation of shared e-scooters, bikes, cars, on-demand delivery fleets, and the increasing demands of EV-charging infrastructure are converging with shifting commuting behaviours and tightening regulations. This complexity has rendered traditional planning and operational methods inefficient, leaving operators reliant on fragmented data sources, manual decision-making, and guesswork, and city authorities struggling to align infrastructure development with real urban dynamics.
Italian startup SWITCH (Street Witch) stands out as a promising solution provider aiming to transform urban mobility through advanced artificial intelligence. Founded in early 2020, SWITCH evolved from a consumer app focused on car sharing in Rome to an AI-driven platform built for fleet operators and city planners. According to SWITCH’s Chief Marketing Officer, Simone Ridolfi, the firm pivoted during the COVID-19 pandemic from a user-facing app to developing AI tools that address operators’ pressing challenges in real time, forecasting demand with precision and optimising fleet deployment to reduce inefficiencies.
SWITCH’s technology suite includes Urbiverse, a synthetic data and simulation engine designed for “what-if” analyses such as fleet sizing and infrastructure planning, including parking hubs and EV-charging points. Their Urban CoPilot platform provides operational optimisation with demand forecasting and fleet rebalancing, while the SWITCH AI Agent integrates planning and operations by connecting real-time data with autonomous decision-making capabilities. The startup’s approach leverages the vast trove of open city data, on street layouts, traffic flows, parking, and events, to generate highly nuanced demand predictions that outperform traditional historical-data models and gut instincts.
Ridolfi notes that most shared mobility providers place vehicles based on simplistic heuristics, like concentrating scooters in city centres, leading to inefficiencies and underutilisation. SWITCH’s AI-driven tools enable a more balanced distribution aligned with predicted demand, yielding an average 25% boost in operational efficiency. This allows operators to anticipate future weeks’ or months’ demand patterns, optimise vehicle purchasing and placement, implement pricing or discount strategies, and even make informed market entry decisions.
For example, SWITCH assisted a micromobility operator evaluating entry into a Norwegian city by creating a comprehensive dashboard estimating potential demand, competition, and profitability. The insight led the client to abandon plans, avoiding costly risks. SWITCH’s Urbiverse platform also accurately modelled a launch for Milan’s Wayla, delivering 92% accuracy in projections of fleet size, ride volume, and profitability, a stark contrast to traditional guesswork.
City governments benefit notably from SWITCH’s technology for strategic mobility planning and policy design. Urbiverse helps optimise shared fleet sizes, hub placements, and EV-charging infrastructure by simulating the potential impact of different policies before implementation. Urban CoPilot complements this with predictive modelling to enhance Mobility-as-a-Service systems by ensuring vehicles are available and correctly positioned in real time. Ridolfi highlights the challenge cities face in balancing micromobility’s benefits against practical concerns, citing London’s multi-year e-scooter trial and Paris’s sudden ban on free-floating scooters as examples of uncertainty that can be mitigated with better predictive tools, enabling cities and operators to plan proactively rather than reactively.
Since its inception, SWITCH has secured approximately €946,000 in funding, including €600,000 from private investors such as EIT Mobility and Berkeley SkyDeck, and about €400,000 from public grants. The startup is also part of the NVIDIA Inception Program, illustrating growing recognition from both venture capital and the technology ecosystem. Its distinctive agentic AI platform, which automates and contextualises planning, routing, and operations in real time, has demonstrated tangible impact in partnerships with operators like Milan-based Wayla and Elerent, an Italian micromobility provider.
SWITCH’s emergence highlights the ongoing evolution of Europe’s micromobility startup scene, with other contemporaries exploring similar integrations of AI for enhanced urban transport solutions. By addressing the systemic inefficiencies of siloed data and manual processes, SWITCH sets a precedent for smarter, more sustainable urban mobility systems that serve both operators and city dwellers better.
As cities continue to grapple with the dual pressures of sustainability and urban congestion, AI-driven platforms such as SWITCH promise a crucial technological foundation for the future of shared mobility, potentially ending the era of stagnant fleets, costly misallocations, and reactive policymaking.