Meet the Entrepreneurs speaks to Vilhelm Hedberg, the founder of ‘ekar’; the Middle East's first and largest personal mobility company, headquartered in Dubai.
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00:00 [MUSIC]
00:10 As a young kid, I was constantly listening to my father on the phone,
00:14 speaking to people from all around the world, doing different deals.
00:17 And he had this really strange way of changing his tone of voice,
00:21 changing even his accent sometimes, and I was always sort of fascinated.
00:25 He's sort of adapting to become a worldwide person, and
00:27 doing business with all kinds of interesting people from all kinds of
00:30 different cultures, and connecting with these people.
00:32 That, for me, I think was some sort of a seed that was planted in my brain.
00:36 [MUSIC]
00:38 There's always like these ideas running through my head, but I didn't know enough.
00:41 And I realized that I think what makes sense is to work in a kind of a career job,
00:46 establish and understand how business actually works,
00:48 which found me later recruited to Dubai about 13 years ago.
00:53 [MUSIC]
00:54 I worked for a couple years until I started my first company,
00:58 which is a company that I then sold after about four or
01:02 five years in operations to build up eCart.
01:06 I wanted to make maybe a bigger social impact.
01:08 We started discussing car share.
01:09 What I did know was that for
01:11 every car that is shared is ten owned cars off the road.
01:17 It reduces traffic, reduces need for parking, reduces, of course,
01:21 then CO2 emissions.
01:22 This is the thing that I was looking for.
01:24 [MUSIC]
01:26 January 15, 2017, we launched out with 100 cars in partnership with the RTA in Dubai.
01:32 I actually flew my father in, seeing the joy in his face that his son had been able
01:37 to put together something like this, one of my proudest moments.
01:40 And then we both kind of were like, okay, what's next?
01:43 2019 eCart was the highest utilized free floating car share service in the world.
01:49 And that's our Dubai service.
01:51 At that time, we had done something around 40,000 metric tons of CO2
01:55 emissions savings in the UAE alone.
01:58 When we came out of COVID, we had our own software, and
02:02 now we were able to empower the car rental industry.
02:07 Releasing out Mobility OS to the largest car rental companies on the planet for
02:12 them to then inject their own cars into short-term mobility,
02:17 one of the biggest milestones we've ever had.
02:20 So we're at the neighborhood now of 3,500 cars, and
02:23 that number will grow to 11,000 cars by the end of this year.
02:26 We're in four countries now, we're looking at adding two more.
02:31 The personal feeling of satisfaction for
02:34 running a business is the smallest component of the entire business itself.
02:39 What I get the most amount of joy from is the people that I work with, and
02:43 just knowing that we're making an impact to literally hundreds of thousands of
02:47 people, that for me is the major joy.
02:51 [MUSIC]