When Ahmed Mhiri launched TravelCar in 2012, he wasn’t trying to disrupt the mobility industry, he was trying to solve a simple, everyday frustration: millions of cars sitting idle in airport parking lots while travelers paid high prices to rent vehicles elsewhere. What began as an inventive way to match those needs grew into a global mobility model that would eventually span more than 60 countries, attract $25 million in investment, and catch the attention of one of the world’s largest automakers.
Today, Mhiri is CEO of Free2move, the Stellantis-owned mobility brand built on the foundation of his original vision. And his journey, from IT and cybersecurity engineer to founder to global automotive executive, reveals how agility, data, and operational discipline can reshape mobility at scale.
A Founder Rooted in Tech and Restless for Innovation
Before entrepreneurship called, Mhiri built his career in IT and cybersecurity, leading dematerialization and security projects in France and abroad. That background shaped his approach to mobility long before he wrote a single line of code for TravelCar.
“True mobility isn’t just about vehicles, it’s an interconnected system,” Mhiri explains. “Hardware alone won’t fix it. You need smart data, robust security, and thoughtful experience design to make it work.”
That belief became the backbone of TravelCar: a platform that blended digital simplicity with the physical complexity of vehicle access, parking, and fleet movement.
The idea caught on fast.
By the late 2010s, TravelCar had expanded aggressively, entering the U.S. and Europe, building airport partnerships, and growing into a network that made carsharing a viable solution for travelers long before it was mainstream. The vision resonated. In 2019, Stellantis (then PSA Group) acquired TravelCar, pulling Mhiri and his team into one of the most competitive races in the mobility landscape.
Joining Stellantis: Integration at Startup Speed
Most tech acquisitions slow down under corporate infrastructure. Ours easily could have. We joined a company with hundreds of thousands of employees, legacy systems, and decades of industrial processes.
The challenge was clear: scale like a startup, operate like an OEM.
”Free2move, built on the DNA of TravelCar, was expanded into a unified platform offering carsharing, rental, subscription, and parking services to both consumers and businesses.”
But the transition wasn’t smooth. Free2move inherited:
- steep monthly losses
- fragmented teams
- operational bottlenecks across maintenance, repositioning, and charging
- a product portfolio in need of tight reprioritization
Mhiri led a turnaround focused on discipline without stagnation:
- Cost base optimization without harming customer experience
- Market reprioritization to strengthen operations where unit economics worked
- Data-driven fleet management to reduce maintenance and charging inefficiencies
- Cultural integration across teams that had different histories, processes, and expectations
“When you’re firefighting every day, it’s easy to feel like you’re not moving forward,” Mhiri says. “But that’s exactly when you need to step back, measure impact, and celebrate wins.”
A profitability turnaround in the middle of a global shutdown
Shortly after the integration, COVID-19 hit and 95% of B2C activity came to a standstill almost overnight. For most mobility operators, this was an existential threat. For the team, it became a forcing function.
In less than 12 months, Free2move redesigned its cost structure, accelerated automation, shifted focus to the markets and products that could scale, and doubled down on operational discipline. Against all industry expectations, the company became profitable during one of the worst crises the mobility sector had ever faced.
That moment reshaped the company. It proved that resilience is not a slogan, it’s an operating model.
“After returning to profitability, we added a M&A layer to accelerate scale, not just organically but through targeted build-ups. Each acquisition brought the usual startup-integration challenges: different tools, different cultures, different tech stacks, different apps and processes. And while I drove the vision, the execution belonged to the teams who turned ideas into systems and systems into global operations.”
Under Mhiri’s leadership, Free2move matured into a more resilient, scalable business model that now anchors Stellantis’ broader mobility strategy, a transformation underscored by a bold strategy that delivered a remarkable ~100% CAGR every year between 2021 and 2024.
Preparing for the Next Era of Mobility
Free2move’s ambition is global, and Mhiri sees three major challenges ahead as the company scales:
- Delivering global consistency
As Free2move enters new cities and regions, maintaining a reliable level of service 24/7, across borders is the ultimate test.
- Navigating regulatory complexity
“Different cities, different rules,” Mhiri notes. Mobility doesn’t scale like software. Success requires proactive collaboration with municipalities, infrastructure partners, and local authorities.
- Attracting and retaining adaptable talent
In a rapidly evolving market, Mhiri looks for people comfortable with ambiguity, speed, and the responsibility of shaping services used by millions.
- Unlocking the next frontier: Autonomous vehicles (AV) transforming carsharing
The most anticipated shift in mobility is now within reach: the arrival of autonomous vehicles.
For Free2move, this technology is not a separate future, it is a natural extension of the model that has been built for more than a decade.
Autonomous driving has the potential to fundamentally upgrade carsharing by removing the operational pain points that limit scale today. A self-driving fleet can reposition itself to match demand in real time, drive to users instead of waiting for them, self-park, self-charge, and dramatically reduce downtime, all while improving customer experience.
The promise of AVs is not only autonomy on the road, it is autonomy in operations.
And that changes everything for scale.
A Unified Vision for Seamless, Sustainable Mobility
For Mhiri, the mission has stayed consistent from day one: make mobility simpler, cleaner, more flexible and more accessible.
“What started with TravelCar is now part of something much bigger,” he says. “At Free2move, every challenge is a chance to innovate, and every market we enter brings us closer to a future where mobility is seamless, flexible, and sustainable for everyone.”
From a startup idea scribbled on a whiteboard to a core pillar of Stellantis’ global strategy, Ahmed Mhiri’s journey reflects what the mobility industry increasingly demands: founders who can translate innovation into scale, and scale into impact.
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