MotionTools raised a seed round to accelerate the expansion of its global cloud platform for transportation businesses

MotionTools recently closed a seed funding round led by Matthias Schrader at a 10 MEUR pre-money valuation to accelerate its mission of democratising access to transportation technology. The funds will finance the next stage of development and distribution of the company’s end-to-end cloud platform for transportation businesses.

MotionTools is the first technology platform that provides transportation companies of any kind with all the software needed to build differentiated transportation services in their local markets. While MotionTools offers over 10 standard templates for various types of transportation business cases like vehicle-sharing, ride-hailing and last-mile delivery services, the focus of the highly flexible platform is to empower its customers to build their own solutions.

Patrick Arle, Founder & CEO of MotionTools, explains what changed in 2020 and why MotionTools decided to raise funds after 3 years of bootstrapping: “In 2020 we had two major events coming together. On the one hand, we reached the point where our technology became truly scalable. We can now literally launch a new customer overnight, meaning that we can generate all the technology needed to operate a transportation service at the tap of a few buttons. On the other hand, due to Covid-19 we have seen a boom in delivery services and a renaissance of personal mobility facilitating innovations in the vehicle-sharing market. Ultimately the crisis helped us to identify our market and deliver the right product. When you get to this point, then all you want to do is to push things forward. For us, this meant to get external capital and accelerate our mission.”‍

MotionTools was founded in 2017 with the initial idea to be a one-stop-shop for building new transportation businesses for corporates. Driven by the motivation to help its customers to experiment, fail and succeed in a more sustainable way, MotionTools quickly identified the opportunity to build a ready-to-use software platform in the cloud specialised on moving things or people from A to B.

Founding Partner & COO of MotionTools, Marian-Maximilian Martens, adds “Based on our experience in building new ventures from scratch, we wanted to solve a key problem for our customers: easy and affordable access to highly-customisable transportation software. We‘ve made great progress building our platform in 2020 that now allows us to build and deploy these software solutions fully-automated and at the lowest marginal cost. The funding and experience our investors bring to the table will now help us to leverage this unfair technological advantage and become a leading platform in transportation technology.

‍So far, 25 startups, SMBs and corporates in more than 10 countries utilise the MotionTools platform to run and scale transportation services in areas such as on-demand delivery, ride-hailing and vehicle sharing.

The funds will allow MotionTools to focus on fully implementing its self-service strategy. In this way the MotionTools platform will be able to offer a frictionless transition from free trial to an operative launch to customized setups that empower local operators to stand out and thrive in the increasingly competitive transportation market.

Highly acknowledged “Pope of Digital” (MOPO) Matthias Schrader, shares the motivation behind his involvement: “Shopify has empowered over 1m of merchants to sell online. Getting access to robust, user-friendly and affordable technology is a gamechanger for smaller companies. I am looking forward to supporting a similar success story in the transportation industry”. Schrader adds that he is excited about the idea of independent operators all over the world, providing valuable alternatives to mega transportation brands such as Uber, Didi and Grab.

‍About MotionTools
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MotionTools is a technology provider focused on empowering a large variety of companies all over the world to build better transportation services. It was founded in 2017 and is serving large corporate customers such as BMW or EWE as well as local operators such as Kurier24 or innovative startups such as VanOnGo.

The company‘s technology platform offers all the software needed to operate a transportation business. This includes mobile & web apps for customers and suppliers, integration with payment systems & growth tools as well as invoicing & accounting features. Besides a wide variety of standard solutions that work “out of the box”, MotionTools enables developers to build their own custom solutions based on the platform’s components.

The genuine purpose behind MotionTools is to advance a humane and locally-diversified market landscape by facilitating the democratisation of state-of-the-art transportation technology. Consequently, MotionTools offers instant access to its technologies via a variety of end-to-end transportation software subscriptions starting from as little as 249€/month.