From shared mobility to autonomous fleets: building the platform behind an urban mobility pioneer
An urban mobility provider operating electric ride-pooling across European cities needed to scale its autonomous driving programme while simultaneously evolving into a broader mobility platform. To address both fronts, they partnered with Netlight across software architecture, data and ML engineering, and organisational development – delivering an API-first platform architecture and a scalable validation and verification capability for the autonomous fleet.
About the client
The client is an urban mobility provider, operating a live electric ride-pooling service in multiple European cities. Their ambition is to bring autonomous ride-pooling to roads worldwide and redefine how people move through cities.
Challenge
Realising this ambition required the client to transform on two fronts simultaneously.
Commercially, the client was evolving from a single-product offering into a broader mobility platform – capable of serving different use cases, cities, and operator models. This demanded enterprise architecture, a clear technical roadmap, and organisational change management to bring teams along.
For the autonomous driving programme, proving that a driverless vehicle is safe enough to carry passengers is a continuous, multi-layered challenge. It requires integrating software from multiple hardware and AD partners with strict regulatory compliance – while simultaneously analysing vast amounts of real-world driving data to verify that the vehicle behaves correctly in every scenario it encounters. The client's development processes and data infrastructure were not yet equipped to meet both demands at the pace their expansion required.
Solution
Netlight embedded across multiple product teams – spanning software architecture and engineering, organisational development, product ownership, and data and ML engineering – working alongside engineers, product managers, and leadership at all levels of the organisation.
For the platform transformation, Netlight led scoping and architectural design together with the client, delivering a working API integration within the first months. The roadmap was aligned with senior management, and Netlight consultants joined the first implementation team to help establish patterns and ways of working for the broader platformisation effort.
Within the autonomous driving programme, a tailored agile framework was introduced in close collaboration with the teams, bringing synchronisation and planning cycles that aligned agile workflows with safety-critical development. Automated quality assurance frameworks were built together to address integration complexity across multiple partners.
In parallel, the Validation & Verification (V&V) capability was scaled up: safety classifier infrastructure was migrated to the cloud, new tooling was established to accelerate classifier development, and the data pipeline from raw vehicle data to actionable safety metrics was restructured to enable each stage to grow and be validated independently.
Impact
- Significantly reduced coordination overhead and earlier issue detection, enabling smoother collaboration across safety-critical teams and accelerating project milestones.
- Faster validation cycles, delivering core autonomous driving functionalities on schedule and in full regulatory compliance.
- New commercial use cases unlocked through an API-first platform architecture, with the first integration delivered within the first months of the engagement.
- A modular V&V architecture with a restructured data pipeline, creating a long-term foundation for safety validation as the autonomous fleet scales.
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