Covid has been the latest obstacle to business growth encountered by the startup Vadecity, focused on developing smart solutions to improve sustainable micromobility in cities. But its founder and CEO Marta Recasens decided to take advantage of the months of confinement and mobility restrictions to lead, with her team of six people, the design of a new product: a Smart Totem with 5G technology.
This innovation, which is being presented these days at the IoT Solutions World Congress fair, is a new high-security Internet platform, for which Vadecity has collaborated with Zariot and Vodafone. "We allocated the income we were obtaining in these two years, which have been very difficult, to product development, instead of the growth of our network of bicycle and scooter parking lots. It was not the time," explains Recasens.
The great contribution of the Smart Totem will be "the secure connection with unlimited data with a 5G network in any outdoor space. Let's imagine what it will be like to be able to work with a laptop in any city park by connecting it directly to the network with the most latency we have available," she adds. In addition, the Smart Totem will provide information on the state of pollution, temperature, water quality, traffic flows, pedestrian flows... "Data that will facilitate the lives of citizens in the urban environment" and of local administrations "if they manage this data well," she specifies.
Although this will not be its only application. In fact, this information panel has also been created with the aim of completing the Vadebike sustainable parking network ---suitable for both bicycles and scooters--- that Vadecity began installing five years ago.
"The Smart Totem will improve citizens' connection, but it will be an indispensable tool for their mobility because it will incorporate information about the parking network, with which we manage to cover the user's last mile," says Marta Recasens.
Vadebike is already operational in Barcelona, with 600 spaces installed and a forecast of reaching about a thousand, and in Sant Cugat. In the coming months it will be in L'Hospitalet de Llobregat and Madrid and by the end of the year in Valencia and Malaga.
In three years, Vadecity expects to manage a network of parking spaces with 13,000 spots, either on the surface or inside office buildings, private or public parking lots, hotels, universities… among others. With this, turnover will reach 13 million euros.
"In addition, three weeks ago we obtained European patents to expand the parking network in Europe," explains Recasens, adding that, in parallel, they have obtained 2.6 million euros in European funds. "70% are non-repayable funds and to cover the rest, in June, we will open a crowdfunding round with the Fellow Funders platform, to raise one million euros," adds Recasens.