November 3, 2022
Cyclists with large backpacks – the latter bearing the delivery service logos – are now part of the urban landscape of every major city. This is supported by sophisticated logistical processes. How can people and goods get from one place to another in the most efficient way? German start-up Motion Tools wants to answer that question.
One of Motion Tools’ customers is a taxi company. As passengers stayed away during the pandemic, drivers began delivering food. That’s where Marian-Maximilian Martens’ company came in: Motion Tools is a B2B software-as-a-service provider for mobility and logistics services, with whose support, for example, food delivery from companies like Flink should run smoothly.
Motion Tools offers a software platform for various logistical processes, such as food deliveries (restaurant pickup, scanning, customer tracking, etc.), but also for taxi companies, as it is known by the Uber app.
“Beginners for large companies, Motion Tools must provide quick and easy access to software that can digitize simple to complex transportation services,” says Martens, co-founder and CRO of Motion Tools. Plans for this start at €500 and can go up to €100,000 or more per month depending on the customer’s needs. “Sometimes we can still be too expensive for someone who says, ‘I just want to get this package from A to B and I don’t have any special requirements,'” says Martens.
Today, MotionTools has 20 employees who – although the actual location is in Hamburg – work primarily remotely and distributed across the world. The company’s latest valuation from October 2021 shows a value of €16 million. According to Martens, Motion Tools has long been self-financing and has only made one round of seed funding and received an investment in the low single digits of a million euros. Among the investors are entrepreneurs like Mattes Schrader and Frederik Vollert. The company wants to improve the software even further, but doesn’t want to invest in marketing in the US or Asia – because competition there is very strong, with companies like Onfleet (US) or Tookan and Locus (Asia). What Martens didn’t play into his hands, however, was the corona pandemic – although it also created new opportunities. “We’ve had customers using our software for taxi services; which ended suddenly because of the Corona”, recalls the businessman. That’s why Motion Tools put existing resources into the delivery process and was able to land delivery services like Flink from Germany or Kavall from Sweden as customers.
Martens’ ventures were not always so successful. It all started with two companies that didn’t go the way the later founders of Motion Tools had envisioned. Martens had founded his first company in the automotive industry; Back then, he wanted to market user-tailored entertainment such as personalized radio advertising in cars from car-sharing providers. This was not as expected. “Patrick Arle, founder and CEO of Motion Tools, had a similar experience at Wundercar, which had a similar concept to Uber,” says Martens. However, this was stopped at the time due to legal restrictions in the German taxi industry.
However, none of them gave up. Motion Tools is doing well today – in the future, he needs to find a balance between his private life and business, says Martens. He always worked hard: “One of my first jobs was in agriculture, I would bend my back for 6.40 euros an hour – but I also learned a lot”, says the founder.
Marian-Maximilian Martens is an industrial engineer. In her spare time she enjoys working on e-scooters, riding motocross or helping with agriculture.