KAROS

Their core work

KAROS is a French mobility technology company specializing in short-distance carpooling and shared mobility platforms. Their core product integrates dynamic, predictive carpooling into route planners and public transport ecosystems, enabling commuters to find real-time ride-sharing options alongside buses and trains. Through their UNITE project, they expanded into Mobility as a Service (MaaS) — combining carpooling with multimodal journey planning to serve both urban and peri-urban areas. Their work targets the reduction of car dependency, air pollution, and carbon emissions in cities by making shared mobility a practical default for everyday commuters.

What they specialise in

How they've shifted over time

KAROS entered H2020 in 2017 with a tightly scoped feasibility study on integrating carpooling into route planners — a product-validation exercise with no keyword footprint beyond the project title. By 2020, their scope had broadened significantly: the UNITE project reveals a company that moved from a single-feature carpooling app to a full MaaS platform addressing urban transport, public sector procurement, carbon reduction, and social inclusion. The trend is a clear upward shift from B2C carpooling tool to B2G (business-to-government) mobility infrastructure provider.

KAROS is moving toward becoming a public-sector mobility infrastructure partner — their trajectory points to smart city contracts, municipal MaaS tenders, and integration with national transport authorities rather than consumer app growth.

How they like to work

KAROS has acted exclusively as project coordinator on both H2020 grants and applied through the SME Instrument, which is designed for solo or lead-driven applications — their recorded consortium partner count is zero. This indicates a company that develops its technology independently and brings it to market directly, rather than building through research consortia. For potential collaborators, this means KAROS is more likely to be a technology provider or integration partner in a larger consortium than a co-developer seeking joint R&D.

KAROS has no recorded H2020 consortium partners — both projects were executed as solo SME Instrument grants. Their network, if any, exists outside the formal EU project structure, likely through commercial agreements with transport operators and municipalities.

What sets them apart

KAROS occupies a rare niche: a technology SME that built a carpooling product and then successfully repositioned it as public transport infrastructure, attracting over €2M in EU funding for a MaaS deployment. Unlike academic research groups working on mobility theory, KAROS has a live product with real users — making them a deployment-ready partner rather than a research prospect. For consortium builders in smart cities or sustainable transport, KAROS brings operational carpooling technology that can be embedded into larger multimodal systems without starting from scratch.

Highlights from their portfolio

• UNITE
  The flagship project at €2.15M represents a full SME Phase 2 scale-up, transforming KAROS from a carpooling app into a MaaS platform targeting public transport integration, carbon reduction, and social inclusion across urban areas.
• KAROS
  The self-named SME Phase 1 feasibility study (€50,000) demonstrates the company's early EU engagement and validates the concept that directly led to the UNITE scale-up three years later.