Laurent Bouzon and Adrien Hugon
LYKO
March 2021
Future pioneers in the mobility and transport industry
- An interview with Laurent Bouzon and Adrien Hugon, Co-Founders of LYKO
Laurent Bouzon and Adrien Hugon, the two co-founders of LYKO hailing from Lyon, France are both from very distinct professional careers. Adrien, a tech lover and software engineer by profession tried his hand at multiple projects before meet his match Laurent. Laurent, who also inhabits a varied personal and professional background has always been passionate about the transport and mobility industry. The two co-founders along combined their synergies along with, Yacine Belarbi, to eventually form LYKO. Today, LYKO is a technology company that builds mobility services as a tech service framework. Some of their customers include: Air France, Thales, Volkswagen and the SNCF to name a few.
Although, when initially thinking of launching their very own company, Laurent and Adrien did not think of the very same idea they are currently working on today. They were originally a car-pooling (co-voiturage) company. This soon changed after pitching their idea to Air France, who believed that their sophisticated technology could be used on a mass scale and have global implications. LYKO then pivoted from being a carpooling company to something much larger and with a purpose of impacting the entire mobility industry.
Today, their direct clients include governments, public authorities and large-scale companies. With LYKO, their clients can create, integrate, enhance their own smart applications and computer programmes to build systems for ticketing, sales and marketing. This is all done through the use of APIs. Click here to learn more about the product, LYKO proposes to their clients.
The LYKO team is building slowly yet exponentially. From just three people, they are now at just over 10. Finding the right talent of people who understand and believe in their vision is something the company is still working on. During the interview, Adrien stated that, “A big difficulty any and all entrepreneurs face is to get your first clients paying clients. One has to persevere and stay strong until then.” Regardless of the avid challenges LYKO is facing, as most companies do soon after starting out, they will soon have over 100 start-ups and mid-sized enterprises as their clients. In addition, they will have also soon have 20 million indirect users using the LYKO services through existing mobility and transport applications.
LYKO’s vision is simple. The want to be international pioneers in the global mobility and travel industry through the technology they provide. Towards the end of the interview, Adrien returned back to his argument about the importance of persevering and not giving up. He says, “Our main objective is to make the mobility industry more sustainable than it is. We did pivot from where we were but we did not give up. We put our heads to it and are now successful.” Laurent added, “Work on something you are truly passionate about. If you think about it, resilience and passion tend to go hand in hand.”
Click here to read about LYKO, their innovative solution and prices.