The past year brought many new, unexpected challenges for mobility companies within the smart city space. Prominent micromobility powerhouses like Bird and Lime, for instance, laid off significant swaths of their workforce while ride-hailing companies saw unprecedented declines in bookings.

But despite the year's setbacks, 2020 also ushered in new areas ripe for growth.

Smart Cities Dive has compiled a list of seven startups, based on our reporting and conversations with industry leaders, that represent compelling solutions to the mobility challenges that cities will likely encounter in 2021.

  1. Tortoise
    Micromobility startup Tortoise offers a "hybrid" solution for scooters to be repositioned via autonomy and teleoperations, aiming to alleviate cities of issues like improperly parked scooters and grocery delivery congestion.
  2. Populus
    Micromobility data management platform Populus helps cities and private operators make data-informed decisions to improve the management of their streets, policies and services.
  3. Vade
    Vade, founded by a group of college students from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and North Carolina State University, has a goal to become "the largest source of real-time curb data."

Read the full list of mobility startups by Cailin Crowe at Smart Cities Dive.