Our recently concluded Female Founders in Mobility innovation competition surfaced unique, market-ready technology solutions across automotive, aviation, energy, microtransit, supply chain, and smart cities reflecting the trends within the transportation industry at large. One significant trend, which several applicants addressed, is connected-cars and data. With the rise of autonomous vehicles and smart cities, it is essential to have the right data for vehicles to safely communicate with each other on the road. Moreover, these communications will allow for efficient multimodal transportation models.

After successfully concluding our inaugural Female Founders in Mobility 2020 innovation competition, Quesnay is proud to launch the 4th edition of Female Founders in InsurTech to continue to drive inclusive innovation at a critical time in the industry. Qualified startups from around the globe are encouraged to apply through November 18.

As a Contributing Sponsor to the Female Founders in Mobility innovation competition, we know Toyota remains committed to eco-friendly mobility innovation while supporting an inclusive environment. In fact, just last year, Toyota AI Ventures announced a new $100M fund dedicated to investing in early-stage startups developing technologies and business models focused on the autonomous mobility and robotics markets. This type of investment sparked the advancement of autonomous vehicle technology over the last decade, and we’ve seen this reflected in our competition submissions among our female founders.

We launched the inaugural Female Founders in Mobility innovation competition on March 25, 2020 - right in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our operations were being disrupted, our routines upended, and our priorities questioned.

Internally, we had to ask ourselves how we could best continue to advocate and promote female-led startups while also not ignoring the paradigm shift happening all around us. The virus was (and is still) impacting nearly every aspect of life and business, but the Mobility industry is actually uniquely situated at the intersection of numerous public-health related sectors which are poised for new solutions. How exactly were our applicants facing these evolving challenges? We asked:

In an economic environment greatly affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, chatbot technology provides a significant opportunity to minimize hands-on human interaction while providing necessary services to customers. Quesnay recently interviewed Chris Rivard and Anthony Peccerillo from CodeObjects, which powers the chatbot provider Insurbot.ai…

Throughout each phase of the FinTech 2019 competition, we surveyed and/or interviewed over 200 individuals within our community of judges, mentors, industry experts, and applicants and compiled their insights into the below blog spotlighting three of the most relevant topics to financial services in 2020 and beyond…