About INVERS

Inventing automated vehicle sharing

INVERS founder Uwe Latsch presents the world’s first automated onboard unit and software for car sharing at the University of Siegen where he worked as an academic researcher. Uwe did not want to buy his own car for environmental and economic reasons, but regularly needed one to cover long distances for picking up his girlfriend in bad weather. As an electrical engineer, he decided to find a solution for automating the process of sharing a car among his fellow students. With the new onboard unit, users could pay easily by telephone card – no more manual key handover or billing required. INVERS first customer in Germany is the Car Sharing Deutschland Genossenschaft.

Building early partnerships worldwide

INVERS innovative solutions receive great market attention right from the start. Among the first international customers that launch their services successfully on INVERS technology are the Dutch start-up Greenwheels and Car Club Singapore with a fleet size of 100+ in total.

As the first service of its kind, Greenwheels expands its business quickly in the following years to more than thirty cities across the country and has become today’s largest car sharing corporation in the Netherlands. Additionally, INVERS supports the early beginnings of local and regional car sharers in Germany like the Nachbarschaftsauto Dortmund with 100 shared cars.

The young company’s innovativeness gains attention even outside the sharing industry. In 1997, Uwe wins the German founder‘s fund and thus secures the financing of INVERS.

Driving growth and innovation in car sharing

With a passion for solving technological challenges, we are shaping shared mobility. Our solutions have enabled the market entry of Deutsche Bahn that triggered the nationwide spread of car sharing in Germany. Today, DB Flinkster operates successfully in over 400 cities, providing more than 4,500 vehicles at 2,500 stations to its customers.

To increase our impact on the shared mobility market abroad and to support our partners on site, we opened a new subsidiary in Vancouver in 2002.

In 2008, Daimler AG, launched the world’s first free-floating car sharing service Car2Go with our vehicle connectivity technology. This pushed the adoption of shared mobility even further. Most recently, Car2Go merged with BMW’s service DriveNow. Together they are operating as SHARE NOW in 16 cities across Europe, and are still an INVERS customer.

Further growth under new management

In 2012, Alexander Kirn becomes shareholder and CEO of INVERS since Uwe wants to focus solely on product development again, as CTO.

After growing the car sharing industry successfully, INVERS starts developing new business areas. Since 2015, emmy runs its 2,000+ mopeds on our solution and in 2016 Europe’s market leader in peer-to-peer sharing Getaround takes advantage of our vehicle agnostic approach to empower individuals to share privately owned cars.

Due to the continuous growth of the company we open in 2015 a new subsidiary in Cologne in addition to our headquarters in Netphen and the Vancouver office.

Full-stack solutions for all types of shared mobility services

To keep pace with rapidly changing market conditions and customer needs, we launch our API-centric full-stack solution Shared Mobility OS. User applications as well as telematics and device management tools allow even more efficient operations, which also serves the needs of the growing micromobility market. Therefore, Europe’s largest scooter sharer eCooltra transitions its fleet of almost 5,000 scooters to INVERS.

Furthermore, INVERS also launches a funding project to connect third-party technology. This lays the foundation for today’s CloudConnect and the INVERS partner network.

Micromobility and developer focus

Mid 2020 we launched a smaller CloudBoxx telematics and connectivity solution – the CloudBoxx Mini. With a large backup battery, waterproof housing, built-in antenna, motion sensors and many more features, this solution was designed specifically for lightweight micromobility vehicles. CloudBoxx Mini pushed shared micromobility services to the next level.

The shared mobility market was very dynamic, enabling our customers to choose the best strategy without being limited by technological constraints became ever more crucial. We put seamless interplay between all types of vehicles, telematics and shared mobility operators at the core of our business.

Improving rental processes: Damage Detection and Fleet Share

Only one in eight car sharing customers who cause damage to a sharing vehicle report it to the operator. Car sharing operators lose up to 10 percent of revenue because they do not have sufficient information to claim damages. We expand our proven solution for shared mobility by carValoo’s AI-based damage detection.
For fleet operators, vehicle utilization is a key challenge. Unused vehicles do not generate revenue but generate costs. Yet fleet operators can predict phases of particular high or low utilization. With our new solution FleetShare, they can make vehicles from their fleet available to their partner when their own demand is low or add vehicles from their partner to their own fleet during phases of strong demand.