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Free Now (service)
Mobility provider with ride-hailing service and business travel management platform From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Free Now, a division of Lyft, is a mobility-as-a-service provider headquartered in Hamburg, Germany. It operates a mobile app that allows users to book taxis, private hire vehicles and various micromobility options such as e-scooters, e-bikes, e-mopeds and carsharing services. Free Now operates in over 150 cities in nine European countries.[4]
The mobile app can be used to book e-scooters from scooter-sharing systems including Dott, Tier and Voi, e-mopeds from Emmy, Felyx and Cooltra, and e-bikes. The platform also offers access to carsharing services through partners such as Share Now and Sixt.
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Free Now's origins trace back to the founding of mytaxi in 2009 by German entrepreneurs Niclaus Mewes and Sven Külper.[5] The legal entity, Intelligent Apps GmbH, was also established that year.
In September 2014, Daimler AG (now Mercedes-Benz Group) acquired Intelligent Apps, entering the ride-hailing market.[6] In 2016, Daimler acquired Hailo, a British taxi-hailing app founded in 2011. This followed by a rebrand to mytaxi, which created a large app-based licensed taxi operator in Europe.[5] Over the following years, mytaxi expanded by acquiring companies like Beat (formerly Taxibeat) in Greece in February 2017 and Clever Taxi in Romania in June 2017.[7][8]
In February 2019, Daimler and BMW announced a €1 billion mobility joint venture called Your Now, combining their various mobility services, including the car-sharing platform Share Now, the multimodal app ReachNow, Park Now and Charge Now.[9][10] mytaxi was rebranded to Free Now on July 1, 2019.[9]
The joint venture also operated Hive, an e-scooter brand, which was discontinued by mid-2020 as the company shifted its strategy to partner with third-party operators instead.[11]
The platform's consolidation under the new branding continued, with other services such as France's Kapten being fully integrated into the Free Now platform on 2 December 2020.[12]
In January 2021, Free Now announced it would allocate over €100 million in resources over the subsequent five years to promote the electrification of its vehicle fleet across Europe.[13]
In 2022, following a strategic review to focus on its core markets, Free Now withdrew from several countries, including Portugal, Romania and Sweden.[14][15][16]
In July 2025, Lyft acquired the company for €175 million, expanding in Europe.[17]
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