Brand Stories

Last Mile Team: Brand Story by Angel Batalla (Founder & CEO)

Last Mile Team - Brand Story by Founder and CEO Angel Batalla

I am Angel Batalla, a serial entrepreneur since 2008, evolved from 25 years of successful intrapreneurship in significant corporations for whom I designed, lead, and executed over a dozen major Value Chain initiatives across the globe, most of which still persist, for Consumer, Pharma and Professional Products sectors.

When not reengineering processes, you can find me helping social entrepreneurs to develop efficient value chains to maximize their initiatives’ social impact and value.

Adjunct professor at international business schools, a frequent speaker on road transport decarbonization and sustainability, I hold MSc Marine Engineer (Hons.) & Executive MBA degrees.

A New Opportunity: Last Mile Team

A few years ago, I realized that I was not able to make a difference at the scale I would like, so I founded Last Mile Team to create inclusive digital solutions that solve urban logistics and last-mile distribution problems at a large scale and contribute to a cleaner and more sustainable world.

I was lucky to onboard Daida and Lis in the founding team. A lawyer turned .NET architect and developer, and an IT pro experienced in pilot projects respectively. We make an age, gender, culture, and diverse background team. Highly committed people with a great deal of experience and deep knowledge in our respective fields of expertise.

We’ve been working together the last few years on an inclusive approach to reconcile all stakeholders’ interests, contribute to putting road transport on track for the future, and improve the Triple Bottom Line of the Urban Goods Distribution.

The result is a pretty unusual combination of IP-registered, proprietary deep-tech, open-source, and some of the habilitating technologies of industry 4.0 to create a smarter, more inclusive, resilient, and sustainable goods mobility in the future.

Last Mile Team Journey

We launched in January 2020, engaged our first two customers, and fell into an abrupt standstill … in less than three months! We were still bootstrapping at that time, decided to postpone recruitment and investment activities and all non-essential spending, always balancing the trade-offs between short-term survival and maintaining the condition to accelerate and take advantage of future opportunities whenever the reset starts.

So, we decided to participate in as many hackathons and similar events as we could, “soft-pivoted” to develop additional functionalities to enable professional and volunteer drivers to maintain social distancing. We received several recognitions and awards for the positive effects to bolster transport industry sustainability and resilience, facilitating the creation and operation of ephemeral transport networks. Still, it was even more rewarding to meet and exchange ideas with a lot of like-minded impact-driven entrepreneurs.

In retrospect, it was the right decision. During the lockdowns, the goods transport industry was able to offset the increased B2B and B2C delivery demands because personal mobility was severely restricted. The authorities temporarily suspended most regulations to facilitate the supply of goods to all citizens. Citizens that now demand more and more home deliveries and services, but at the same time want more public space, less polluted air and are not ready to get back to the former situation and suffer again congestion, emissions, and the health problems associated with urban goods delivery.

Shaping the Future of Urban Mobility in Europe and Beyond

In May 2020, we joined the European Institute of Innovation and Technology Urban Mobility Scale-up Hub as “one of the most promising early-stage startup teams with business ideas that reduce congestion and increase efficiency in the transport system” for our “convincing and scalable business concept,” and as “one of the teams that will shape the future of sustainable urban mobility in Europe and beyond!”.

We are actively involved in putting European transport on track for the future, reconciling all stakeholders’ demands. In June 2020, we started a three-year European Commission-funded international consortium named LEAD “Low-Emission Adaptive last mile logistics supporting ‘on Demand economy’ through digital twins,” that aims to make digital cities a reality, using technology to help smart urban logistics to become more environmentally, socially and economically sustainable. The project is designing digital twins of urban logistics to support experimentation and decision-making in public-private urban settings. Specifically, the project’s long-term goal is to develop an open physical internet-inspired framework for today’s smart city logistics tech-savvy city planners to generate simulations that can help guide their future plans.

We have a systematic process in place to continuously integrate all these learnings into our Last Mile Digital Platform©, adding functionalities that build on and complement its validation as a “Delivery Logistics Platform for Corporates and Enterprises” by Microsoft and Honeywell.

Goods and field-service personnel road transportation is traversal to all industries and trades that deal anywhere in the world with any physical goods or services delivery or pick-up, direct or reverse logistics, social/ medical/technical services delivery, etc.

Evolving Consumer Expectations Caused by the Pandemic

The health crisis has accelerated the overall growth trend of B2B, B2C, and C2C online shopping by order of magnitude. Manufacturing and trading companies must stay flexible, ready to face the disruption of business models at lightning-speed, the increased demands, and evolving consumer expectations caused by the pandemic in all world markets.

Citizens demand more and more home services, more public space, less polluted air, more livable cities, etc. They are not ready to give back regained space or get back to the prior traffic levels. At the same time, retailers, hospitality, and all other city trade need fluid replenishment. Municipal authorities are in the middle.

Our solutions solve the conundrum, reconcile all stakeholders’ interests, contribute to putting road transport on track for the future, and achieve a Sustainable and Smart Mobility Strategy.

See Also:

Last Mile Team Has a Bright Future

We believe we stand out from the crowd and have a bright future in the entirely different goods mobility sector that will start to develop as soon as we get to whatever “new normal” will be.

Hot-from-the-press, we have received approval from the US Department of Commerce’s International Trade Administration to attend the 2021 SelectUSA Investment Summit under the SelectUSA Tech program, held to connect early-stage and startup technology companies to prospects for advancement in the US market.

We are actively searching for customers and investors to spend monies in sales and marketing business-building activities, be prepared to take advantage of the new opportunities, and accelerate the deployment.

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