Moving on up: EIT Urban Mobility CEO Maria Tsavachidis on how to make cities more liveable thanks to sustainable mobility

The EIC Scaling Club Podcast on European Deep Tech

We recently attend the EIT Summit in Brussels, where we had a chance to catch up with Maria Tsavachidis, CEO of EIT Urban Mobility, one of the organisation's so-called KICs.

What is a KIC, you ask?

As the EIT explains on its website, the acronym stands for "Knowledge and Innovation Communities" and they are essentially Europe-wide networks centred around addressing a specific societal challenge; from sustainable energy to climate change to healthy food and green transport.

EIT Urban Mobility is among the earliest such communities, started in January 2019 to "encourage positive changes in the way people move around cities in order to make them more liveable places".

EIT, which is a body of the European Union, provided co-funding of up to €400 million for the period 2020 to 2026 to make some moves (pun intended).

In the interview, Tsavachidis provides some further background on EIT Urban Mobility and its raison d'être, the size of the problem that needs tackling and the three main initiatives that it's outlined to do so, examples of interesting startups and partners it's working with, and much more!