SET Award 2026’s Mobility Innovators
Transport is responsible for roughly a quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions, and it is among the hardest sectors to decarbonise. The vehicles are numerous, the infrastructure is massive and entrenched, and the users are individual people with habits, budgets, and routes that resist top-down redesign. The SET Award 2026 Mobility & Transportation category shows that the transition is happening anyway.
Hardware solutions lead at 50%, reflecting that clean mobility often requires physical reinvention: new drivetrains, new charging posts, new bikes. Software accounts for 36%, with hybrid approaches making up the remaining 14%. The category is deployment-ready: 79% of companies are late-stage, with 65% either optimised or stably deployed.
Two innovation clusters define the field. The first is EV charging infrastructure: solving the grid bottleneck that is slowing electrification, whether through battery-buffered fast chargers that work without a strong grid, curbside posts that bypass utility queues by tapping nearby buildings, or software platforms that turn parked vehicles into grid-balancing assets. The second is clean mobility hardware for emerging markets and specialised applications: electric motorcycles built for African roads, solar-powered cargo bikes replacing headloading, retrofit kits converting existing diesel fleets, and advanced materials reducing the energy burden of the vehicles themselves.
Winner: Finmile – The Intelligence Layer For Last-mile Delivery
Last-mile delivery is the most energy-intensive segment of the logistics chain and the hardest to optimise. Routes change by the hour. Parcel volumes are unpredictable. Drivers make thousands of micro-decisions daily. Finmile, based in the United Kingdom, has built an AI platform that brings coherence to this complexity.
Its core technology combines real-time route optimisation with parcel-level intelligence. It is tracking not just where vehicles go but how individual packages move through the system. This closed feedback loop between fleets, drivers, and retailers enables efficiency gains of up to 42%, cutting both energy use and emissions across the delivery network. Clients include JD.com, Temu, TikTok Shop, and Inditex, operating at global scale. With turnover already exceeding €5 million and a product at full commercial deployment, Finmile is one of the more commercially mature companies in the category, and one of the best examples of software doing what software does best: eliminating waste through information.
CLIP.bike – The Five-second e-bike
The e-bike market has a paradox at its heart. Cycling is already one of the most climate-friendly ways to move through a city, yet the transition from standard bike to e-bike costs upward of €2,000, requires purchasing and storing a new vehicle, and leaves the existing bike unused. CLIP.bike, based in the United States, has built a product that resolves this paradox entirely.
CLIP attaches to any standard bike’s front fork without tools in five seconds. Powered by a 450W motor and a 96Wh lithium-ion battery, it delivers 16–24 km of assisted range, recharges in under 60 minutes, and weighs little enough to carry in a backpack. At €450 it is the most affordable motorisation option on the market by a significant margin. With over two billion bicycles already in circulation globally, the addressable market is enormous, and CLIP requires no new manufacturing, no new vehicle sales, and no new infrastructure investment to tap it.
The company’s dual-market strategy sharpens the proposition further. In European and North American cities, CLIP serves commuters who already own or share bikes but cannot justify the cost or logistics of a full e-bike. In emerging economies, BOLT targets livelihood riders via partnerships with World Bicycle Relief and Battery Smart, with swappable battery networks reducing the upfront barrier further still. Few mobility start-ups can claim genuine relevance from the streets of New York to the farms of sub-Saharan Africa. CLIP can.
Gridio – Making Every EV a Grid Asset
Electric vehicles are the largest distributed battery network the world has never used. Millions of cars sit parked and plugged in for hours each day, consuming power at whatever moment their owners connect them rather than when renewable generation peaks and grid prices fall. Gridio, headquartered in Tallinn, Estonia, is changing that.
Its hardware-free platform integrates real-time electricity prices, carbon intensity data, and solar generation signals to automatically shift EV charging into the cheapest, cleanest hours — with no action required from the driver. The company has secured official API partnerships with Tesla, Mercedes-Benz, BMW/MINI, and the Volkswagen Group, enabling secure and reliable vehicle integration at scale. For drivers, this translates to 30–50% lower charging costs. For utilities and energy retailers — Gridio’s primary B2B customers in the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, and the Nordics — it enables demand flexibility, reduced grid congestion, and new revenue streams from EV load management. As net metering frameworks are phased out across Europe and renewable generation continues to grow, the ability to synchronise EV charging with wind and solar production will become a core infrastructure capability. Gridio is building it now.
More Innovators Reshaping Mobility
EV Charging Infrastructure
- YEDT (Türkiye) manufactures BoostVolt, a battery-integrated fast charging system that enables high-speed EV charging in weak-grid or off-grid locations, cutting installation costs by up to 50% versus conventional fast chargers
- Ecofactor (Ukraine) operates one of Eastern Europe’s largest charging networks, with over 23,000 chargers deployed across 11 countries, combining proprietary TOR fast chargers with solar-powered hubs and integrated battery storage
- It’s Electric (USA) installs curbside EV chargers in US cities by drawing spare electrical capacity from adjacent buildings, eliminating the need for new utility connections and deploying at zero cost to property owners or municipalities
- Paren (USA) provides a real-time intelligence platform that standardises reliability, pricing, and availability data across EV charging networks, processing over 100 million daily events to help automakers, operators, and public agencies navigate the fragmented charging landscape
- Yellow Haze (YoCharge) (India) offers a unified SaaS platform covering EV charging management, fleet electrification, grid analytics, and home energy integration, targeting charge point operators and fleet owners across India and the MENA region
Clean Mobility Hardware and Vehicles
- Roam (Kenya) designs and manufactures electric motorcycles built specifically for African roads, with over 3,500 units deployed across 10 charging hubs and financing partnerships enabling affordable ownership for individual riders and small businesses
- The Farmer’s Sons Cargo Bicycles (Nigeria) builds solar-powered cargo bikes for smallholder farmers and market traders, with an integrated cool box for preserving perishable goods and vehicle-to-home power output for off-grid communities
- iX Energy (India) converts existing diesel trucks and buses into hybrid or fully electric vehicles using certified retrofit kits, enabling fleet electrification without vehicle replacement at a fraction of new EV costs
- Weenav (France) develops electric and hybrid propulsion systems for river and maritime vessels, with its Kronos motor replacing combustion engines across commercial and recreational boat applications
- Voltcore (Luxembourg) produces carbon-nanotube-enhanced conductive composites that replace metal wiring in vehicle heating systems, cutting energy use by up to 50% and weight by 80% while enabling recyclable, sensor-integrated thermal surfaces
Aviation and Alternative Fuels
- Circa Biotech (UAE) converts food waste into sustainable aviation fuel feedstock through industrial Black Soldier Fly bioconversion, operating a 6,000-tonne-per-year facility and preventing over 40,000 tonnes of CO₂e annually with a validated pathway to HEFA refineries
The picture that emerges from the SET100 Mobility & Transportation category is one of a sector finding traction in unexpected places. The grid bottleneck is being solved not by waiting for infrastructure investment but by turning existing vehicles and buildings into network assets. Electrification in emerging markets is advancing not by replicating Western car-ownership models but by leapfrogging them with locally manufactured, locally financed clean hardware. And the software layer — routing intelligence, charging optimisation, real-time data standards — is making all of it measurably more efficient without touching a single piece of physical infrastructure. The funding environment is difficult, the teams are lean, and the problems are genuinely hard. But the category’s most compelling companies are moving faster than the headwinds.
