Anyone who wants to establish the future of mobility in Europe must rely on other financing mechanisms. And above all, simplify them so that money can flow more quickly.
Europe would like to be at the forefront of the future of mobility. But it’s one of those truths that is kindly ignored in every mobility keynote: the innovation is there, the financing isn’t. At least not in the form that this industry needs. Because “Future of Mobility” is rarely software. It’s almost always infrastructure. And infrastructure dies not because of a lack of ideas, but because of authorities and hesitant and nervous investors.
Anyone building a mobility startup today usually builds on at least one of these three cost drivers: hardware, operations, regulation. And each of these drivers is a VC problem – because venture capital is geared towards rapid scaling, high gross margins and predictable exits. Instead, mobility delivers: high upfront costs, long payback, political-regulatory dependencies.
There is a lack of patience
Take Aberdeen-based Trojan Energy. The company wanted to solve a practical problem: charging on the side of the road, integrated into the sidewalk. After eight years, Trojan was no longer able to secure the financing necessary to advance its long-term growth plans. The company ultimately had to file for bankruptcy, but the technology was bought up. The Scottish company’s problem was primarily due to the slow rollout because official approvals took up too much time.
Or let’s look at Germany: HeyCharge from Munich is currently receiving EIC Accelerator funding (2.5 million euros) to scale offline charging in underground car parks. What is remarkable is less the technology than the signal: Even for a comparatively “small” charging setup, public risk buffers are needed because the costs depend on installation costs, certification, pilots and long sales cycles.
The same mechanism can be seen in micromobility. Dott is just reporting profitability on an adjusted EBITDA basis for the first time, but the path to get there reads like a capital structure textbook: market exits, tough cost cuts, restructuring and financing that is no longer “just VC”. Dott is visibly working with debt components and refinancing because fleet building and city deals are capital intensive. Even if the model works, capital eats away at romance.
And then there is the category in which Europe speaks loudest about the future and is most brutally overtaken by capital costs: Urban Air Mobility. Volocopter ended up in bankruptcy proceedings; At Lilium, the basic problem was already openly stated in 2024: high capital requirements until certification, hardly any sales, politically contested funding logic. These are not “bad founders”. These are industrialization projects with a startup label but financed with instruments built for apps and e-commerce.
Financing with the wrong idea
The point is: we throw too many mobility startups into the same funding funnel, even though they have different capital requirements. Anyone who builds charging infrastructure, fleets, sharing networks or future technologies not only needs equity, but also a mixture of forms: project financing, secured loans, leasing structures, public money, corporate CVC as an anchor and, above all, investors who accept infrastructure returns and do not rely on a profit after three years.
The inconvenient truth at the moment is: The mobility revolution will not fail because Europe has no ideas. It fails because Europe too often tries to finance infrastructure with the capital model of social media. And as long as we don’t change that, we will continue to read the same headline – just with different names: “promising startup”, “pilot successful”, “follow-up financing missing”. In that order.