Carpooling to work or university should be a way to earn money. This is what they believe at Tribbu, the ride-sharing service that follows the model of the French BlaBlaCar but focuses on routine journeys. The business was born six years ago as Hoop Carpool and served only companies: it connected its employees to share a car on the way to the office with incentives for the drivers. It remained that way until it opened to the general public in June and, in September, it was renamed Tribbu (the service’s offices still sport plaques and carpets with the old name). The results of the expansion of the business have been positive: at the end of September, the half million turnover of 2024 has more than doubled and the number of frequent users has increased by two, to 6,000 (the total number of registered accounts, including those of those who barely use the application, reaches 60,000). “It took us a while to understand what we wanted to be,” says Paloma Martín, its co-founder and CEO, 32 years old. What Tribbu seeks by expanding its number of users is to take advantage of the new incentives for sustainable businesses: from the end of 2023, Ecological Transition allows polluting companies to offset their emissions with investment in energy efficiency initiatives, such as car sharing (the old hitchhiking or, in English, carpooling). These funds represent more than half of Tribbu’s turnover, which distributes it in part with its users, as provided by regulations. The application pays one euro per passenger driven every 25 kilometers traveled. More information 70% of Tribbu users are in Spain, especially in Madrid and Euskadi, which have local aid to promote carpooling, but also in Andalusia and Extremadura. Another 20% in Mexico and the rest, between Colombia and Portugal. Tribbu closed September with 46,000 monthly trips, compared to less than 20,000 on average when it served only companies. On average, it takes a user 30 minutes to find a car partner. The company’s main challenge today is to reduce that waiting time and monitor trips live, says Carlos Alonso, chief technology officer and co-founder of Tribbu. To achieve this, the company, which has 25 employees, invests half of its income in technology. Tribbu does not yet expect to generate profits but its founders believe that it has already overcome the most adverse circumstances. “It is an industry that is yet to be built,” emphasizes the CEO next to her more than 10-year-old golden retriever. It all started by chance. Martín, an advertising company from Salamanca, and her partner Nathan Lehoucq had been trying for months in 2018 to come up with a platform to make routine trips such as going to work, but they lacked a technical profile that could create the application. In the middle of that year, through friends, they met Alonso, an engineer from Madrid, in the capital. “It was just what we were missing,” Martín recalls fondly. Then, the three were joined by a fourth young entrepreneur: Andrea García. The four co-founders had been together for just a year developing a pilot project for the employees of the Iberia company and the students of the Alfonso X University when the pandemic arrived. “We had to juggle to continue investing in technology,” Martín recalls in reference to the six months in which they had to take their salaries. The business resisted. They signed 20 new agreements in 2020 with large companies such as Telefónica, and in 2021 they received support from Juan Roig’s accelerator. Since the beginning, Tribbu has raised around four million in three private financing rounds, half in the last one, held on October 6 and in which Iberdrola led with one million euros invested.
