Karos, a carpooling app, has won the UK final of the EIT Digital Idea Challenge.
Second and third prize were awarded to a website that lets fans decide where concerts take place (ADDACT) and a travel guide that uses augmented reality (ZonzoFox).
Karos is a mobile app aimed to make your daily commute easier. The company says it is the first of its kind to be aimed at large companies and helps businesses attract employees as well as maximise their valuable time by making their daily travel more efficient. It saves money, time, and dramatically reduces the carbon footprint of both users and their employers.
Paul Jenkins, chair of the judging panel said: “We were looking for exciting ideas that had a clear market niche, potential for growth, good plan for building the business up and an inspiring management team.
“We’ve seen lots of car sharing ideas over the past few years aimed at consumers, Karos is the first that targets businesses and this could be a huge market. Companies want to attract the best employees and make their journey to work easier whilst reducing their carbon footprint.”
Olivier Binet, co-founder of Karos said: “We wondered why existing carpooling services didn’t work for short, daily, commutes and realised that we could harness developments in big data and predictive algorithms to create an app that would understand your daily behaviour and offer tailored carpooling options.
“It’s available free of charge to anyone who wants to use it but we are working with large companies to adopt this for their employees – giving a large group of people all travelling to and from the same place which is ideal for making Karos really effective.”
The Idea Challenge aims to reach out, identify and support the best digital startups in Europe, especially those that are focused on fast growth in the EU and worldwide.