An Interview with Ben, a Wunder Marketplace Partner

Today we talk to Axel Kalisch, founder, and CEO of Ben Fleet Services, one of our Wunder Marketplace partners.

In our interview, we spoke to Axel about Ben, its plans for the future, as well as the integration on our Wunder Marketplace.

Hi Axel, who is Ben, and what do you do?

Ben is the tech-driven one-stop-shop service company for all fleet maintenance services. At the core of my team and I’s everyday tasks is our vision: “Enabling the mobility of the future.” But what exactly does that mean? Well, in a nutshell, it means that we offer the full range of services required for the care and maintenance of fleet vehicles.

It all started when we founded Ben about 1.5 years ago as a corporate venture. Back then we kicked off by conducting deep market research and expert interviews and thus were able to identify a general need for fleet readiness within the mobility sector. Addressing this need, we built a minimum viable product that consisted of basic on-site car cleaning first focusing on the SME sector. However, while testing and optimizing our product we were also able to successfully onboard well-known car-sharing providers which affirmed our product-market fit and encouraged us to pursue an expansion strategy adding many more services to our product portfolio.

How are you different from a traditional service provider?

Traditional service providers mainly operate with manual processes and they primarily aim at the niche of traditional fleet vehicles - leasing car fleets or large rental companies. As a result, they offer a rather static product portfolio and are less able to quickly adapt to changes and new customers. Furthermore, they usually provide their service only in certain regions or cities within a country.

We on the other hand offer an agile product portfolio combined with smart digitalized processes. Our own internal disposition software allows us to dynamically assign our workforce and quickly onboard new customers. In addition, we are able to integrate our services efficiently into the existing systems of our customers via an API and therefore automate processes. This way we can answer the sometimes heterogeneous needs of mobility providers, not to mention that we offer our services flexibly in all of Germany from eight different cities.

What kind of services do you offer?

As said, we provide almost all services necessary to keep fleets running. Currently, our product portfolio is made up of the following services: on-site cleaning & disinfection, battery swaps & charging, damage & condition documentation, smart-repair, relocation, charging & refueling as well as retrieval & deploy.

We believe that the mobility of the future consists of various modes-of-transport, which is why our services can be applied to pretty much any vehicle type: cars, transport vehicles, e-kickscooters, bikes, scooters, or even trains. And soon air taxis and hyperloops.

Our overall goal is to support the mobility providers of today and tomorrow with efficient fleet operations so that they can focus on their main task: giving easy access to mobility to everyone everywhere.

What impact does the service of Ben have and why do your customers not integrate your provided services internally?

The answer is quite simple:

We are better and more efficient at maintenance services than a single MaaS provider can be.

Why? As we solely focus on care and maintenance, we can offer operational excellence and have gained tremendous market knowledge. Next to this, we have created a software infrastructure that precisely meets the needs of all MaaS providers. Based on this infrastructure we can serve a network of mobility providers and benefit from economies of scale by pooling their needs.

Therefore, we can offer easy access to professional maintenance services at relatively lower costs.

Why is Ben partnering with Wunder Mobility?

Wunder Mobility builds the future of mobility and the Wunder Marketplace is an excellent platform to support companies in shaping the mobility of the future. As our vision at Ben is “Enabling the mobility of the future” I think it is obvious that we want to be an active part of it. It poses a great opportunity for us to support all those shaping the mobility of the future and those operators wanting to extend their platforms to new lengths.

What are your plans for the future?

We started operating in Berlin with two employees and now we are live in an entire country operating from eight different cities. As such it is only a matter of time until we roll-out our services in additional cities in Germany and other European countries. And to be honest, it will happen rather sooner than later, so if you are keen on cooperating with us, feel free to get in touch. 😊