VAIMOO lands in Lisbon, keeps an eye on the Italian market, and is planning new vehicles in the bike sharing field. Led by CEO Matteo Pertosa, the company based in Mola di Bari designs and manages advanced bike sharing and micromobility systems. It also provides fleets of smart electric bicycles, virtual or physical parking stations, and an integrated digital platform for service management in cities.
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So far it has recorded 1.6 million trips, 5.8 million kilometers traveled by bike, and one million hours spent cycling. The employees, including collaborators, number 120. “We have already invested about ten million,” explains Pertosa. “Looking ahead with the entire plan, including engineering, vehicle construction, and other activities, we will be around 30-50 million.”
“We are working very hard,” says Pertosa, “to try to create an alternative to private mobility services. In Italy, according to Aci 2025 data, about 160 billion euros are spent annually on private cars, roughly 11 euros per day per car. Moreover, these vehicles are stationary 95% of the time. This means unused resources. And if you compare this with what institutions and the system in general spend on public transport, you see it is only 8 billion. A clear disproportion. So, there is our desire to seek an alternative because the real problem is that Italians use private mobility because they have no other options that provide immediate availability for their travel needs. Institutions should create conditions so that the market can offer alternative services, but it is difficult. In Puglia, for example, the local public road transport tender, worth 250 million euros per year, has not been held since 2004 and continues with extensions.”
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For the CEO of VAIMOO, “what we are doing is building a piece of this mobility chain, which is the first and last mile. Light electric mobility sharing services such as electric bikes, cargo bikes, minicars, which is a developing segment, serve to make a very low-cost, 24/7 mobility offer widespread and pervasive, and within a maximum of 100 meters from home. We are therefore building a range of vehicles to cover different mobility needs. For example: I arrive at the station and need to carry a trolley, or I need to go grocery shopping. In production and in the field, we have electric bikes and electric bikes for sharing. They are very particular and must be very well known. We are advantaged because not only do we know them well, but we design, produce, and control them at every step. We know what maintenance needs to be done.”
Numbers and markets. “We have produced about 15,000 electric bikes,” explains Pertosa, “and almost all have been sold in Europe. The area that has performed best is Northern Europe, including Copenhagen, Stockholm, and Rotterdam. We have just won a tender in Lisbon where for 2.5 million we will provide VAIMOO technology, that is, all the parts needed to manage a bike sharing service. But we also operate in Italy. There are cities where we are applying to be present. In Bologna, we are waiting to see what the municipality will do; we are also looking at important cities like Milan, but we have to wait for tenders to be announced.”
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