Pelikan Mobility

Pelikan Mobility is a Paris-based company operating in commercial electric vehicle leasing and fleet management. It sells two linked products: Pelikan Lease, a very-long-term rental offer dedicated exclusively to electric light commercial and service vehicles, with contracts running up to 10 years and 300,000 km — well beyond the standard French long-term lease of about 6 years and 160,000 km — and including battery coverage, maintenance, roadside assistance and reduced refurbishment charges; and Pelikan FleetPilot, a software platform that aggregates fleet data such as real mileage, total cost of ownership, taxation and usage patterns and produces a vehicle-by-vehicle management trajectory (renew or extend, switch to electric or keep an ICE vehicle, reassign a vehicle within the fleet).

The platform builds a digital twin of a customer's fleet from ingested operational data and simulates long-term scenarios covering daily routes, charging times, diesel and electricity pricing, range, payload and parking constraints, weighing both capital and operating expenditures. The company positions this analysis as the basis for its leasing economics: because electric vehicles are longer-lived assets than diesel equivalents, longer contracts reduce residual-value risk and lower monthly cost by amortising the battery over its actual life. Pelikan does not itself install or operate charging infrastructure, instead working with specialist partners while using FleetPilot to recommend depot-versus-field charging strategies.

The company states that around 70,000 vehicles sit on the FleetPilot platform and that customers combining Lease and FleetPilot see average savings of roughly €150 per vehicle per month.

Founding story

The company was launched at the end of 2022 by David Salfati, previously at Engie and Macquarie, and Vincent Schachter, previously at CEA, TotalEnergies and smart-charging company eMotorWerks, which was sold to Enel. Its stated mission is to sharply reduce the usage cost of electric fleets and make decarbonisation of a sector representing close to 10% of European emissions economically viable.

Business model

Pelikan combines an asset-based leasing business with a software platform. Pelikan Lease provides very-long-duration rental contracts for electric utility and service vehicles from multiple manufacturers, bundling battery, maintenance and assistance coverage and risk cover; FleetPilot is the accompanying fleet-optimization platform. At the time of the 2024 seed round the company said it would also need to raise a debt fund to finance the leasing business, which targets large customers.

Revenue derives from long-term vehicle lease contracts (up to 10 years / 300,000 km) covering vehicle, battery, maintenance and assistance, alongside the FleetPilot fleet-management platform used to optimise the fleet's total cost of ownership.

Traction

At the March 2024 seed announcement the company had seven customers whose combined fleets amounted to slightly under 100,000 vehicles tracked on the platform, with the first leasing plans expected that summer. The company later reported more than 70,000 vehicles on the FleetPilot platform, a team of about 15 people, and average customer savings of €150 per vehicle per month when combining Pelikan Lease and FleetPilot.

Latest developments

Pelikan markets both Pelikan Lease and Pelikan FleetPilot commercially and publishes analysis on French fleet regulation, including the status of low-emission zones (ZFE) for 2026 after a repeal vote was struck down by the Conseil constitutionnel, and the LOM law's clean-vehicle quotas and incentive tax of up to €4,000 per vehicle.