Cogo gathers all shared rides in one app as long as they are human- or electric powered. With Cogo you can find shared electric scooters, cars, bikes and mopeds from over 200 operators in 500 cities worldwide. Our goal is to make it easier to use shared mobility and simplify the user experience. We recently launched the worlds most comprehensive price comparison tool for shared mobility where we enable our users to compare price and travel time across all operators and the different vehicle types in one simple search.
Cogo is free to download to both iPhone and Android and is available in 10 different languages.
Q: Tell us about yourself?
I’m from Sweden but have lived in Copenhagen for the past 7 years now. I’ve studied business, strategic management and entrepreneurship at Lund University and at University of Adelaide. While I was studying I launched a couple of start-ups and I later joined momondo as they was gonna scale internationally.
This is where I met my two co-founders, Bibi and Martin. After working for many years on simplifying travel booking, we have now set out to do the same in the current megatrend of shared mobility. We want to accelerate the adoption of shared mobility by making it more accessible and transparent for everybody, because in the long run that will reduce traffic congestion and CO2 emissions in our cities.
Q: What is the inspiration behind your business?
I noticed the increased popularity of shared mobility around 2017 and I couldn’t shake off the feeling that I wanted to be part of it as I could see shared mobility as a feasible solution to the problems that traffic, and mainly gasoline cars, are causing today. I thought long and hard on how I could bring value into the industry and eventually, I realised that I had to have over 10 different apps to move around in Copenhagen. This was a very broken experience for me, and I couldn’t find an app that gathered all shared rides into one. No one had solved this problem yet, so I started working on it.
There are now hundreds of mobility operators in Europe, where users are forced to download and sign-up to dozens of different services just to get a ride closeby and this fragmented market is slowing down the adoption of this promising shared mobility. This is what we want to fix, we want to make it easy to use shared mobility and simplify the user experience.
Q: What is your magic sauce?
Cogo is designed with the user in mind, creating a beautiful and fun user experience. We are also 100% committed to provide a transparent overview of all available rides, we want to help our users make smart decisions for their specific needs. That’s why we for instance launched the worlds most comprehensive price comparison tool, enabling users to compare price and travel time across all operators and vehicle types in one simple search.
Cogo is also reliable and available in over 500 cities worldwide and we include over 200 mobility operators, so wherever there are shared mobility on the streets you should be able to use Cogo! Finally, but very important – we are working for a better tomorrow so we only include human or electric powered rides.
Q: Where do you see your company going in 5 years?
By then we should be the market leader in Europe and hopefully gaining market share outside of EU as well. Our goal is to become the #1 shared mobility app with a great product and amazing features that make city-life easier. We’re already seeing early traction in countries all over the world, while we primarily focus on Sweden, Italy and Spain we have had users from more than 80 countries in the past month alone.
I hope that we succeed so that we can improve the cities we live in by moving people from private cars to reduce the traffic congestion and CO2-emissions. We’re also very focused on creating the best workplace with happy and energized employees that are passionate about the challenges that we’re up against.
Q: What has been your biggest setback so far?
The covid pandemic was of course a big hit as people stopped traveling and was more or less confined to their homes. The global mobility market dropped 60% over night. But since we were just starting out and still developing the product it helped us to get more time to refine and update the product before we really started market it to our users.
Q: What is the next big challenge for your business?
We’re now working on new exciting features in the app, such as facilitated unlock and locking of rides and payment solutions directly in the Cogo app. This is something that our users have asked about from day 1, and I believe this will help get even more users to park their own car at home to use more shared and environmentally friendly solutions instead.
Q: How do people get involved/buy into your vision?
We want to make it easier for people to use shared mobility and in order to achieve that we need to work closely with shared mobility operators around the world to help drive this change. It wont happen over night, but together we can make it happen!
