Thanks to the collaboration between EIT Urban Mobility and the Moove Lab, Bout, a Finnish start-up specialising in nautical mobility, settles in Paris to tackle the French market.
Founded in 2018, Bout is a platform that connects people looking for boat trips and those who offer them through an app (Mobility-as-a-Service). The platform makes it possible to centralise the fragmented market of water taxis and large boats into a single service; simplifying the purchase process on the customer side and increasing the efficiency of sales and operations on the service provider side.
During 2023, Bout will offer its service to towns located along the Seine, a river which connects Troyes, Paris, Rouen and Le Havre. By using the Seine as a circulation channel, the objective is to improve the mobility of people based in the cities bordered by this river, centralising the local offer of river transportation.
By settling in Paris, Bout is targeting an important river market which is still little exploited while having high numbers of tourists and inhabitants to tap in. For Peik Lehtonen, co-founder of Bout: “Paris has an excellent balance between tourists, citizens, underused waterways and service providers. Many river towns have wonderful services, but they are hard to find. By using modern technologies and a central platform, our goal is to help service providers find customers and sell their services through one single app.”
The expansion of Bout to France takes place within the framework of the collaboration between EIT Urban Mobility and the Moove Lab (reference accelerator for mobility start-ups located at Station F in Paris).
For Peter Vest, Senior Investment and Portfolio Manager EIT Urban Mobility: “The Nordic countries are famous for their beautiful archipelagos. With its origin in Helsinki, Bout is a good example of what this type of environment can bring in terms of river innovation. Within EIT Urban Mobility, we see great potential for mobility by water, which makes it possible to transport people and goods in busy urban environments, such as rivers, lakes and ports.”
Bout is also preparing the ground for nautical mobility in the run-up to the 2024 Olympic Games. Utilising water mobility can allow traffic to flow more smoothly in Paris and have people avoid being subject to traffic jams.
Discover more about Bout.
