Vay, a startup that offers car-sharing services remotely from Berlin and Las Vegas, is expanding into commercial and B2B services, buoyed by recent deals with French carmaker Peugeot and Belgium-based Poppy.
Vay is not a traditional ride-sharing or carsharing startup, and it doesn’t even operate a robotaxi service. Yet when a customer in Las Vegas or Berlin opens the Vay app and calls for a car, it arrives with no one in the driver’s seat.
Founded in 2019 and raising about $110 million to date, the Berlin-based startup has developed a remote-operation technology that allows employees sitting in their offices to drive empty vehicles to customers. When the Vay vehicle arrives, the customer jumps in and takes manual control of the vehicle. The customer drives themselves to their destination. Once complete, the remote operator takes back control of the vehicle.
The new B2B division is a bet on what co-founder and CEO Thomas von der Ohe believes is the future of mobility, he told TechCrunch.
“This is what we envision the future of vehicles will look like,” he said. “You can simply click a button and have your van, truck or personal vehicle teledrive.”
Von der Ohe estimates that within five to 10 years, every type of vehicle running on a production line will be able to be remotely operated, as the remote driving technology is so inexpensive in terms of capital expenditure, leveraging the ADAS cameras already installed in the vehicle.
This is where Vay hopes to gain deals and market share. Led by a task force within the company’s business development team led by Chief Business Officer Justin Spratt, the expansion aims to become a sort of AWS for fleets. That means Vay will provide a teledriving platform for automakers, car sharing and rental companies, trucking, luxury/teleshoppering, delivery, and logistics.
The company already has two contracts in place. Earlier this year, Vay announced a partnership with Peugeot to test how teledriving technology would work on its E-308 electric van. Vay is also exploring use cases in the high-end OEM market. The company says this could include teleshopping, where vehicle owners can comfortably be teledriven to a social event before being driven home.
Vay has also signed a deal with Belgian car-sharing company Poppy to test teleops technology in its vehicles. Von der Ohe said other high-profile customers will be announced soon.
From von der Ohe’s perspective, Vay is creating a new mobility category designed for customers who want flexibility and want to avoid the hassle of parking their cars. It’s a niche market, but von der Ohe argues the startup has gained some traction.
Vay launched a pair of Kia Niro EVs in Las Vegas earlier this year. Since then, the startup has expanded to 15 vehicles and expanded its operations to include about 25% of Las Vegas, including parts of North Las Vegas and Spring Hill. Vay has completed 3,000 trips in Las Vegas since its launch in January 2024 and is growing 20% month over month. According to von der Ohe, Vay has seen positive results enough to invest in a larger fleet, with plans to have 100 vehicles in the next six to nine months.
Pricing was a key driver of these results. Von der Ohe said Vay guarantees that driverless rides will cost half the price of rides offered by Uber and Lyft. That price guarantee has helped attract repeat customers, many of whom are locals and commuters. But those competitive prices have cut into the bottom line.
Von der Ohe said the company could achieve profitability through expansion, especially without thousands of vehicles. He also said it could adjust pricing to achieve profitability sooner, but there are no plans to do so now.
“We’d like to maintain that we’re 50 percent cheaper than ride-hailing services, but if we decide to focus everything on profitability, we don’t have to,” he said. “We believe that even if we’re just 20 percent or 30 percent cheaper than the next best alternative, that’s a good enough value proposition for the customer.”
