Why Karos's EIC Accelerator Carpooling Grew, Just Not to €100M

Karos sells carpooling as public transport: a phone app that predicts commuters' trips, pairs drivers with passengers going the same way, and is paid for largely by employers and local authorities rather than by the riders. The Paris company was selected in the European Innovation Council's January 2020 EIC Accelerator pilot cut-off with blended finance, a grant plus equity, for a project called UNITE, according to the European Commission's list of selected companies, which names Karos as the project's only beneficiary. The EU grant was €2,154,019 towards a total cost of €3,077,170, according to CORDIS.

The proposal set a target that has not been met: UNITE was to bring Karos 500,000 new users, 10 contracts with cities and more than 550 corporate clients, and "a revenue over 100 M€ by 2024". The two Karos companies together reported €17.99 million of revenue for 2023, according to the INPI ratios dataset for the operating subsidiary and the same dataset for the parent. Both were profitable that year. The company is active and, since July 2026, in exclusive talks to buy BlaBlaCar Daily, according to the Journal de l'Automobile.

Where Karos Stands in 2026

Karos is operating and trying to buy its main rival. On 20 July 2026 Karos and BlaBlaCar announced exclusive negotiations for Karos to take over BlaBlaCar Daily, BlaBlaCar's commuter carpooling business. Together the two would have about 150,000 active carpoolers a month, more than 11 million trips a year, over 250 local authorities and 1,500 companies as partners, according to the Journal de l'Automobile and the deal page of adviser Cambon Partners, which says Ring Capital, Citizen Capital and Eiffel Investment Group are putting in new equity. CFNews also reported the talks on 21 July 2026. The deal still required consultation of employee representatives; no completion had been announced when this article was checked, and the price is not public.

The deal follows a public contract win. In July 2025 Île-de-France Mobilités, the transport authority of the Paris region, made Karos the sole operator of its subsidised carpooling service for two years, renewable for two more, replacing a scheme run through BlaBlaCar Daily, Klaxit and Karos, according to the Journal de l'Automobile. The new Covoit IDFM app was officially launched on 10 February 2026 and had recorded 380,000 passenger trips and 50,000 registered users by then, according to Banque des Territoires.

The register shows no insolvency proceedings for either company. The most recent notices in BODACC, the French official gazette, are a capital increase in April 2025 and a board appointment in April 2026. The last annual accounts in BODACC for both companies are those for 2023, published in July 2024; no notice of 2024 accounts appears for either company.

The Technology: Carpooling Run Like a Bus Network

Most carpooling platforms, BlaBlaCar's long-distance service among them, let drivers post trips and passengers search for them. Karos instead learns users' daily movements, predicts their trips over the coming days and proposes matches automatically, including combined itineraries with public transport, its co-founder Olivier Binet told CORDIS in an article on the company's first EU project, a €50,000 SME Instrument Phase 1 feasibility study that ran from January to June 2017. The point is flexibility: commuters are not tied to one colleague's timetable, and drivers are matched only where the detour is small.

The business model is the other difference. The UNITE objective on CORDIS describes "a public-transportation-like business model applied to carpooling", sold through two product lines: Karos Territories for local transport authorities and Karos Enterprise for employers. In practice, cities, regions and companies pay drivers and subsidise passengers so that short trips into suburbs and rural areas cost riders little. In Île-de-France, drivers now receive €2 to €3 per passenger, capped at €200 a month, and holders of the Navigo transit pass ride twice a day for free, according to Banque des Territoires.

The proposal's claim that Karos extends public transport "by a factor of 10" at "a transport cost divided by 10" is the company's own, and no independent test of it has been published. Karos's figures also do not agree with one another. Its November 2023 press release counts more than 10 million carpooled trips and 12,000 tonnes of CO2 equivalent avoided; its website today shows "7M+" carpools and 4,010,200 kg of CO2 avoided.

What UNITE Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

UNITE ran from 1 June 2020 to 30 September 2022, signed on 10 May 2020, under the Horizon 2020 SME Instrument call that funded the EIC Accelerator pilot. Its objective named three technical work packages: integration of carpooling into Mobility as a Service (MaaS) apps run by public transport networks, technical scalability, and tools to change users' mobility habits. The published report for the second period says there was "significant progress on all the work packages", that the pandemic "forced us to delay the growth of the R&D team for several months", and that for MaaS integration "a proof of concept was released and we plan to release a major deployment by the end of the year". CORDIS publishes no report text for the first period, only titles of seven quarterly progress reports.

The commercial targets can be checked against outside sources.

1. 10 contracts with citiesDeliveredBy November 2023 Karos named Lyon, Toulouse, Aix-Marseille, Île-de-France, La Réunion, Grenoble, Lorient and Cholet among its authority clients (Citizen Capital; Karos).
2. MaaS integration with public transportLateProof of concept at project end; the planned "major deployment" was not announced. Covoit IDFM, an app inside the regional transport authority's ecosystem, followed in 2025 and 2026.
3. 500,000 new usersClaimed400,000 users in March 2021; the website now claims "1M+" users, with no definition or date and no independent figure.
4. More than 550 corporate clientsNot achievedMore than 400 clients in total, companies and authorities together, in November 2023.
5. Revenue over €100M by 2024Not achieved€17.99M across the two companies in 2023; no 2024 accounts are public.

The grant clearly funded a working product that public authorities buy, and the scale-up continued after the project. But the revenue target was more than five times what Karos reported in 2023, and the user and client numbers that the company has published since do not show the targets being met. The delivery rating here is therefore partly delivered.

The EIC Fund Stake

The equity half of the award did reach the company. The EIC Fund lists KAROS in its portfolio of invested companies, with a company page quoting Olivier Binet. In March 2021 Karos announced a €7 million round from Macif Innovation and the EIC Fund, which Frenchweb and L'Info Durable described as the fund's second investment in France, after CorWave. Karos said then that its revenue had nearly doubled in 2020 to €2.8 million and that it had more than 400,000 users and 150 corporate and public clients; L'Info Durable put the staff at 35. Karos's own magazine carried the same announcement.

The proposal planned €3.2 million of EIC equity. The amount the fund actually invested has not been published. BODACC records the EIC Fund's appointment to the Karos board in a notice of May 2021 and its departure in a notice of February 2024, when Ring Capital and Citizen Capital joined the board. Whether the fund still holds shares is not public; it remains on the EIC Fund's portfolio list.

What Karos Has Achieved Since the Award

Expansion abroad started in September 2021, when Karos launched Ta'Med in Denmark with the motorists' association FDM, according to its magazine. A German brand, GoFlux, followed in 2022 and a first Spanish deployment with Vitoria-Gasteiz in September 2023, according to the November 2023 release. How much revenue these markets bring in has not been published.

In November 2023 Karos Mobility raised €17 million in a round led by the impact investors Ring Capital and Citizen Capital, with Aster, Eiffel and Macif Innovation reinvesting, according to the Journal de l'Automobile and the investors' press release. The release said trips on the app had risen 2.5 times year on year, that Karos was "désormais rentable" (now profitable), and that the company aimed to become an entreprise à mission, a French legal status for companies with a stated social purpose. The national company directory does not list Karos Mobility as an entreprise à mission, though it flags the company as part of the social and solidarity economy.

The Money

The profit claim matches the filings. Karos Mobility, the parent and EU grant holder, made a net profit of €619,074 in 2022 and €292,996 in 2023, on 2023 revenue of €4,398,825, after losses of €1.93 million in 2018 and €1.47 million in 2019, according to the INPI ratios dataset. Karos France, the operating subsidiary, reported revenue of €13,589,554 and a net profit of €1,727,360 for 2023 in the same dataset. Its equity-to-assets ratio was minus 29.9%, which means its equity was negative at the end of 2023. Several earlier years were filed with a confidentiality declaration, so the full series is not public.

Why Europe Should Care

Commuter carpooling sits directly on public policy. France's national daily carpooling plan, launched with €150 million, aims for three million carpooled trips a day, a level the government says would cut French emissions by 1%, according to Banque des Territoires. At EU level, the Commission's Sustainable and Smart Mobility Strategy aims for a 90% cut in transport emissions by 2050 and for connected multimodal travel, the kind of integration with public transport UNITE was meant to build.

That dependence on public money is also the risk. Karos's growth came from contracts with authorities and from subsidised trips, and the Île-de-France deal shows how one tender can decide a market. The BlaBlaCar Daily takeover, if completed, would bring two of the three apps that previously served the Île-de-France scheme under one owner, which leaves authorities with fewer bidders in future tenders.

The Verdict

Karos has not been asked for comment for this article. It is based on public records, company statements and EU project data, linked throughout.