VivaTech 2025: Keolis presented its innovations in mobility

This year, Keolis was back at VivaTech, Europe’s leading tech event, to showcase its latest innovations. In a spirit of innovation and collaboration, we’re unveiling groundbreaking solutions focused on sustainable mobility, employee well-being, and accessibility. Invited to our SNCF booth, we showed you how these innovations are helping to shape tomorrow's mobility.

Our sessions on the future of mobility and digital inclusion

Our experts were on hand at the SNCF booth to help you discover a program as rich as it was captivating, and explore our latest advances in innovation.

1. Antonia Hoog - Group Strategy Director- Keolis Goup, presented our partnership with Pimms Médiation, highlighting Keolis and SNCF’s commitment to tackling the digital divide.

2. Laurent Bulté, Director of Service Offering and Performance - Keolis Group, introduced Impulse, the data visualization platform that shares the status of the network and reconstructs passenger journeys using AI developed by Keolis, in partnership with IVADO.

3. Arnaud Julien, Chief Innovation - Keolis Group, showed how AI supports employees and improves their day-to-day work.

4. Thierry Arrouvel, Head of Research, Data & Innovation, MaaS, and Digital Marketing - Keolis Bordeaux Métropole, explained how AI is reinventing the voice of the customer through smart recruitment, dynamic engagement, and real-time feedback analysis.

5. Adrien Broué, Head of Innovation Lab - Keolis Group, shared how Keolis uses AI to better match supply with real demand of transport services—reducing wait times, improving comfort, and enhancing the passenger experience.

6. Driver Mental Load Analysis: Sofia Escamilla Garcia, UX Strategist and Researcher at Keolis Group, and Gaël Allain, Expert in Applied Cognitive Sciences at Mental Eco, explained how neuroscience and AI can evaluate the mental load of public transport drivers, thereby enhancing their performance and well-being.

7. Optimization of Electromobility: Bruno Lapeyrie, Director of the Energy-Bus Center of Excellence at Keolis Group, presented KeOps, a solution using AI to optimize electric bus usage, reducing costs, breakdowns, and administrative burden for more efficient and sustainable mobility.

Our startup partners at VivaTech 2025

Once again, we’re proud to work with partners who are driving real progress in mobility and sustainability:

- Andyamo simplifies travel for people with reduced mobility. In Lyon, we’ve integrated an option into the TCL app to calculate routes adapted to their needs.

- Bioteos improves air quality in urban environments using innovative microalgae technology. A pilot in the Lille metro aims to provide a healthier space.

- On the TBM network in Bordeaux, Episto enhances customer insights with generative AI, delivering more relevant feedback.

- Mentaleco, experts in mental ecology and neuroscience, is helping create a more positive experience for drivers and promoting the values of future mobility. For Keolis, they’ve conducted two studies : one about tram and bus drivers and another about on-demand transport drivers.

- Urbanloop, present in Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines since the Paris 2024 Olympics, offers a public transport system with autonomous rail pods—an innovative step forward in mobility.

- Finally, during roadworks, Wemap supported us with an augmented reality smartphone guidance system to inform passengers of temporary stop changes.

Through our partnerships with startups, Keolis implements a strong open innovation strategy to support sustainable and inclusive mobility. By integrating emerging technologies, we rely on the unique expertise of startups to address today’s mobility challenges.

Learnex: exchange & innovate with startups

VivaTech is also a time for dialogue and innovation. This year again, we organized a Learnex session to connect with startups and share those experiences with our Keolis innovation leads across regions.

We were also pleased to welcome teams from Keolis networks along with our partners from the Public Transport Authorities, including Île-de-France Mobilités, Bordeaux Métropole, and the Greater Dole Urban Community.

Together, we explored concrete solutions presented by our partners and innovative startups, focusing on key topics such as new energy sources, artificial intelligence and computer vision, accessibility and inclusion, adaptive new modes of transport, enhanced customer relations, commercial speed, and predictive maintenance.

These two learning expeditions led to the identification of numerous promising use cases that will enrich our portfolio of innovations and benefit Keolis networks and their transport authorities.

Looking back at VivaTech 2024

In 2024, Keolis took part in Europe’s biggest tech event, which offers the perfect opportunity to present the innovative projects led by the Keolis Group, its regions and its partners. It was also a chance to meet with new startups and to continue developing our Open Innovation approach.

- Our sessions were an opportunity to present our innovations in the service of post-carbon mobility, accessible and attentive to each and every one of us:

- Personalised schedules: Adrien Broué presented this algorithm-based innovation for creating personalised schedules for drivers, improving work-life balance without compromising the quality of service delivered.

- Open by Keolis, the innovation approach at the service of local authorities: Arnaud Julien presented the network of innovation Labs co-constructed with the Mobility Organising Authorities, run locally and fed by the Group's innovation network.

- Autonomous buses and shuttles: Clémentine Barbier has taken us on a tour of the latest news and projects in autonomous public road mobility (buses and shuttles).

- Patterns CO2: Nicolas Cosson, Chairman of Hove, presented Patterns CO2, a tool developed for local authorities and AOMs to measure the impact of mobility projects on modal split and CO2 emissions.

- Data and energy transition - Keolis Alpes-Maritimes: Eric Calle presented the data platform for managing operating data, deployed by Keolis Alpes-Maritimes to support the electrification of its buses, and which will make it possible to continuously assess the performance of their components.

- Impulse: Arnaud Julien presented this platform, which enables all the players involved to share a common vision of the network for optimised management of the transport network.

- Affluence: Arnaud Julien showed us how AI can automatically measure on-board affluence to help passengers choose their seat on the train.

2024, our partners at Vivatech

- Employees' well-being: We talked about health at work and employee well-being with the start-up Ergosanté, which offers exoskeleton solutions to relieve awkward postures. Following an in-depth study of musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs), we worked with Ergosanté to deploy an exoskeleton model in Tours on various maintenance workstations. This device, which protects the shoulders and arms during prolonged standing with arms raised, will be presented on the SNCF stand.

- Inclusivity

Accessible transport is part of our commitment to mobility that takes account of everyone. Someware presented its solutions for improving accessibility and walkability in towns and cities. Based on international and European data standards, its Handimap solution is deployed on our Rennes network. Handimap integrates with the route planners of local applications and websites to offer routes suitable for everyone, whether wheelchair users, the visually impaired, senior citizens or children.

Ezymob and its solution deployed on the Keolis Besançon network was also presented at Vivatech. Thanks to AI, the solution developed by this start-up detects doors, free seats on board and audio guidance for visually impaired passengers.

- Guiding passengers using Augmented Reality : Another solution to enhance the passenger experience comes from start-up Wemap, which offers interactive maps and navigation systems for indoor and outdoor spaces. Deployed in Nancy in 2023 as part of the work to replace the main tramway line with a trolley bus line, this solution aims to guide passengers from closed stops to transfer stops. By simply flashing a QR code, the guidance system is launched with augmented reality images.

Our other partners also present elsewhere at the show:

- Bioteos and its microalgae-based air treatment solution, which is being tested on our network in the Lille metro.

- Affluences and its patented flow counting system, which has been adapted for testing in the Lyon metro.

And meeting other startups:

Vivatech is also an opportunity to talk to a number of start-ups present at the show. This year, a learnex enabled us to share these meetings with our innovation correspondents from various Keolis territories.

Startups are a key element of innovation at Keolis, with experiments that enable new approaches and solutions to be tested under real conditions in our territories.

Among the players we met at Vivatech:

- 1km à Pied : HR software for geographical mobility to reduce commuting costs

- Entropy : transport demand forecasts for all TAD services

- Fruggr (by Digital4Better) : improving the digital footprint and decarbonising IT services

- Neovya (Mobility by Technology) : road traffic modelling and forecasting to optimise routes

- Bib Batteries : AI for battery residual value analysis