Inside the rise of the mobility stack and the layers investors now trust
For a decade, the future of urban mobility was sold as a design problem: one app to plan, book, and pay for every trip. That promise often branded Mobility-as-a-Service was seductive, intuitive, and incomplete.
In practice, modern mobility has evolved less like a consumer app and more like fintech or energy infrastructure. What’s emerging instead is a mobility stack: physical assets, operations, digital orchestration, payments and settlement, identity and trust, data, and governance. And in 2024–2025, capital is making a decisive judgment about which of those layers matter.
Start with what’s scaling. Public EV charging has moved from pilot to infrastructure class. Across Europe, North America, and parts of MENA, charger deployment accelerated sharply in 2023, with fast chargers growing faster than slow ones—a crucial shift for mass adoption and fleet use, according to the International Energy Agency. The reason is not just climate policy. It’s bankability. Chargers tied to strong sites, predictable utilization ramps, and uptime SLAs can be financed, refinanced, and securitized.
Contrast that with much of consumer MaaS. Super-app ambitions persist, and analyst forecasts remain bullish—but wildly inconsistent, depending on what is counted as “MaaS revenue.” Pure aggregation platforms still struggle with low switching costs, fragmented fare rules, and the hardest problem of all: settlement. Who holds the float? Who refunds the customer when a bus is late and a scooter fails? Who reconciles revenue across five providers?
These frictions explain why the mobility stack is assembling in pieces. The quiet winners are not always the best-known brands, but the actors who control distribution channels (employers, campuses, real estate), high-reliability supply (charging, depots, fleets), or high-trust rails (payments, identity, data).
What the market really looks like
From a capital perspective, mobility has split into two markets.
The first is contracted, asset-heavy infrastructure. EV charging, depots, fleet leasing, tolling, and parking systems can attract project finance and private credit when risk is clearly allocated. Lenders focus on utilization assumptions, electricity pricing exposure, and uptime. Research from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory shows that for fast charging, demand charges and power prices can dominate profitability—making energy hedging and site selection as important as hardware.
The second market is platform and aggregation software, where outcomes depend heavily on structure. MaaS integrators become financeable only when they secure exclusive supply, regulated fare integration, or B2B demand through employers or governments. Without that, unit economics remain fragile.
Regionally, the contrasts are sharp. In the EU, dense cities and regulatory mandates support integrated ticketing—but compliance costs are high. In the GCC, capital availability and greenfield development favor premium charging hubs and airport-city mobility. In parts of Africa and Southeast Asia, the opportunity lies in digitizing informal transit and B2B mobility for workers—leapfrogging consumer MaaS, but only if payments and governance are credible.
Across all regions, the same bottleneck appears. As the International Transport Forum has repeatedly noted, most failures happen at the interfaces: data standards, settlement, and service-level enforcement—not the user interface.
How an allocator or operator can engage—without chasing hype
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Who this is for:
Family offices, infrastructure funds, and founders operating across multiple jurisdictions with moderate-to-high risk tolerance.
Conditions that need to be true:
- Clear contracts allocating utilization, power price, and uptime risk.
- Access to patient capital aligned with infrastructure time horizons.
- Regulatory visibility on permits, data, and pricing.
Optional Steps to Take:
- Start with the rails: charging, depots, fleet leasing, payments, and insurance adjacency.
- Underwrite like project finance: stress-test utilization and energy prices; look for DSCR proxies.
- Favor B2B demand anchors (employers, cities, campuses) over consumer-only apps.
- Require a resilience scorecard: climate exposure, redundancy, cyber risk, spares strategy.
- In emerging markets, partner locally to navigate informal transit and FX constraints.
Risks & frictions:
- Regulatory shifts around curb space and pricing.
- Energy price volatility eroding margins.
- Overstated emissions claims without verifiable data boundaries.
Where the real deals sit in the stack
The most active deal flow sits in charging O&M roll-ups, fleet leasing platforms, and payments infrastructure embedded across mobility merchants. Typical tickets range from mid-seven figures for site portfolios to nine figures for regional platforms. For portfolios, these assets behave less like venture bets and more like infrastructure hedges offering yield, inflation linkage, and strategic optionality as cities electrify.
Consumer MaaS still matters but as a distribution layer, not the value core.
How to plug into the ecosystem responsibly
Start with: independent legal and tax counsel in your target jurisdiction.
Then: speak to infrastructure operators, private credit funds, and payments providers.
Finally: evaluate platforms only where settlement and governance are explicit.
Take Action:
To track similar mobility, infrastructure, and cross-border capital plays across Africa, MENA, LatAm, Eastern Europe, and Southeast Asia, join the monthly I-Invest Brief and Deal Radar.
“Urban mobility isn’t being won by the best app—it’s being underwritten by whoever controls settlement, uptime, and trust.”
Key Datapoints
- Public EV charging stock grew strongly in 2023, with fast chargers outpacing slow ones (IEA).
- Electricity pricing and demand charges are decisive variables for fast-charging profitability (NREL).
- Interoperability and settlement remain the top barriers to MaaS at scale (ITF-OECD).
Sources & Disclosure
Key sources: IEA Global EV Outlook; NREL fast-charging economics; ITF-OECD MaaS data architecture; academic MaaS frameworks.
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