The Rimac Group describes Verne, its new autonomous transportation service, as its “next impossible thing.” First, founder Mate Rimac established his eponymous electric hypercar company in Croatia, a country with no history of car manufacturing. That went well. Porsche, Hyundai and Softbank took stakes. The Volkswagen Group gave him a majority stake in Bugatti in exchange for access to its propulsion technology in future models.
Rimac Technology now supplies electric drivetrains to Porsche, BMW and Aston Martin, among many others, and is also developing advanced energy storage technology.
And now there’s Verne, Mate’s autonomous ride-hailing service launched today in Zagreb, the Croatian capital. Named after French novelist and futurist Jules Verne, it will launch first in Zagreb in 2026, followed by Manchester in the UK. Deals have been signed to bring the service to nine other cities in Europe and the Middle East, and Verne is in talks to roll it out to 30 more cities around the world.
So can this ambitious but fast-paced startup from a small nation do the near-impossible and get a robust robotaxi service up and running before most other players in this space, including Tesla, which reveals its own robotaxi in August?
Don’t bet against it. Verne was founded by Mate and two of his closest colleagues and friends: Marko Pejković, now CEO of Verne, and Adriano Mudri, designer of the Rimac Nevera hypercar and now design director of Verne. The Rimac Group has a 55 percent stake in Verne, with Saudi investors owning the rest.
The idea has been in development since at least 2019. Verne already employs 280 people, and at its global launch revealed an entire ecosystem of app buildings, cars and “motherships,” to which vehicles will return to be charged and cleaned. .