Leading European mobility platform FREE NOW achieves major successes in 2020

Hamburg, 07 January 2021 - FREE NOW, the leading provider of multi mobility services, today announces major milestones in the last year. The mobility platform counts its 10 millionth user in Germany and is therefore the most used ride-hailing app in the country. This milestone is especially remarkable because Germany was the market, where FREE NOW’s success story began back in 2009, founded as mytaxi the app started digitalizing the industry.

Today, FREE NOW is one of the leading providers for multi mobility solutions across Europe. In total, all FREE NOW drivers in Europe covered a distance of 231 million kilometres last year which is like 6,000 times around the world or flying from Earth to Mars and back. In peak times, FREE NOW saw more than 700,000 ride-hailing requests per day. From 2020, the tech company offers a diverse mix of micro mobility services like e-scooters, e-bikes and e-mopeds next to its traditional ride-hailing offer. Almost one year earlier - in summer 2019 - FREE NOW introduced its private-hire vehicle service Ride. Since then, all Ride drivers combined covered nearly 77 million kilometres in the countries the service is live - which are France, UK, Germany, Portugal and Romania.

CEO of FREE NOW, Marc Berg, stated: “For us as one of the leading mobility providers across Europe, it is really impressive to see that many millions of users are benefitting from our services. In addition to our well performing and growing taxi business, we are proud that new options like Ride are accelerating. Also our recently integrated micro mobility offerings are getting enormous response and are inspiring many new customers, especially in these times where safety and distance are paramount.”

Support for health care workers

At the start of the pandemic, FREE NOW helped drivers to install separation screens, handed out face masks as well as protective gloves. In total, 38.000 FREE NOW cars are equipped with protective screens in order to reduce the risk of an infection. Furthermore, FREE NOW launched special fleet types during the first lockdown phase in various markets in order to transport medical staff for a reduced price. One of which was the Heroes service in countries like Italy, Ireland and the UK, which led up to 13% of all tours during the first lockdown in these countries. Overall, the health care workers travelled nearly 170,000 kilometres with FREE NOW.

“At FREE NOW, we believe it is our duty to support our community in critical times like these. We are proud that we were able to provide safe and affordable mobility to healthcare workers and support the general public with delivery services of school books, food and groceries” says Berg.

Expansion of countries, cities and services

FREE NOW is globally present in 15 markets and 150 cities. In September, the leading mobility provider migrated its French business, which operated under the Kapten brand before, onto the FREE NOW platform. Next to the launch in Paris, Lyon and Nice, FREE NOW also expanded its service in Romania to ten additional cities as well as to Linz in Austria and is also available nationwide in Portugal. As well in countries like Ireland, where every second person above 18 years has activated the FREE NOW app, FREE NOW is continuing to grow the passenger base. With that, all drivers in Ireland drove the equivalent of 15,000 times around the country coast. Another important milestone was achieved by FREE NOW for Business: The team welcomed more than 2,500 clients in 2020.

Last year also marked the start for FREE NOW’s micro mobility offer: In Germany, users are now able to book VOI e-scooters, BOND e-bikes and Emmy e-vespas via the FREE NOW platform. Furthermore, FREE NOW started a partnership with the car sharing services Miles. The micro mobility offer will be massively rolled out to other markets in 2021, also further modes of transportation will be available next year.