Harry Behrens – bloXmove co-founder. Harry was until recently the Head of the Daimler Mobility Blockchain Factory where they built a mobility blockchain platform. Harry describes himself as a software guy. Now, along with his co-founder Sophia Rodiger, he has performed a management buyout of the Daimler Mobility Blockchain Platform which is the core of what bloXmove will be bringing to the market. In this podcast we discuss how bloXmove will enable building an open mobility ecosystem.

 What is blockchain?Harry defines distributed ledger technology (DLT) as way for independent parties to keep a shared set of truthful facts of transactions they conduct amongst each other. It is a peer to peer system that facilitates trusted transactions between trustless parties, where they can trust the distributed ledger to reflect the reality of the business relationships between them.

 From Daimler Mobility Blockchain to bloxMove

One of the many uniqueness of this startup is that of the four founders, two of them are women with the CEO being a woman named Sophia Rodiger, who also comes from the Daimler Mobility Blockchain Platform.

The Daimler Mobility Blockchain Platform is a blockchain project at Daimler Mobility AG whose aim is to sustainably optimize booking and invoicing processes for mobility solutions.

Non-native electric automakers, where native electric being Tesla for example, are facing serious transformations, in additions to the challenges of COVID19. Daimler for example is doing a form of demerger of all its entities where the truck unit is being separated from the passenger car unit and its financial arm is being split into two. In such times Daimler, like any other business, needs to focus on its core business. Thus, no matter how promising the mobility blockchain platform could be for Daimler or Daimler mobility it isn’t core business.

The platform was production ready and was ready to be “unleashed” as Harry describes it. However, as the platform was built for ecosystem, he believes that any big player with a very strong brand name will never be able to build an ecosystem because it won’t be able to attract the other brands to its ecosystem. For example, Daimler wouldn’t be able to attract Toyota, BMW or Tesla to join the Daimler Mobility Blockchain Platform.

Thus, the only way to do a platform game, to go into platform economics based on software can only be done via a perceived neutral entity.  A platform branded as the Daimler Mobility Blockchain Platform will never be able to become the platform for shared mobility or urban mobility.

It was thus agreed that Sophia and Harry will perform a management buyout of the Daimler Mobility Blockchain Platform via bloXmove with the help of venture capital funding from players such as Outlier Ventures.

“By granting the software license, we want to make it possible for the platform to be used for other areas of application and thus to reach its full potential. I am very pleased that our successful pilot project is now being continued and further developed at bloXmove,” says Carmen Roth-Schäfer, CTO Daimler Mobility AG.

BloXmove being this independent third party is now able to build on this mobility blockchain platform and build a mobility ecosystem to revolutionise the way urban mobility is conducted.

 Changes to the mobility industryAbout 5 years, Harry shares, that the automotive industry started looking into an analysis of the upcoming megatrends such as “CASE” (Connected, Autonomous, Service/Software, Electrification), development towards smart cities, environmental consciousness and avoiding congestion in the big cities.

Mobility as a service is increasingly growing as large cities are increasingly becoming congested and cities are in turn trying to reduce the number of vehicles in them by adding congestion charges and reducing parking spaces. Cars are increasingly becoming internet connected computer on wheels with higher degre...