the pain of congestion in roads to personally designed experiences that give freedom, worth, collective happiness and delight. People, streets, cities, and planet earth are our laboratory where we conduct field experiments to blend anthropology with innovation, production and marketing through crowdsource methods.

In an animated way, we are the Ghostbusters of the demons that haunt carpooling. We are solving the mystery of network effect and the security issue to enable “real carpooling”. Google/Waze has been after the same treasure for the last few years in Tel Aviv and San Francisco. Luckily, Lojika has a much bigger population to work with – now setting up the biggest field tests ever with over 100,000 people in Istanbul. We will follow up with similar test launches in London, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Moscow, Shanghai, and Mumbai beginning Q4 this year. There are 6bn daily commutes in the world and we aim to be the Airbnb of carpooling.

EU ranked us in the top 5 among 11,000 innovation projects for H2020! What is the catch? We have an unfair advantage. We are based in Istanbul! It is crowded, and terrible by means of public transportation. Cars are 2.5 times more expensive, car fuel is 3 times more expensive than US – yet income is low by western standards. What’s more; its road infrastructure forces 18 million people to squeeze in 4 main arteries for journeys that can take up to 2.5 hours each way. In our pilots they are much more eager to turn the daily misery of commute to a new medium for comfort, cost sharing, and social connectivity compared to elsewhere. This tech savvy young population is in the global top 5 users of Facebook, Twitter, Whatsapp, and Foursquare. All these factors make Istanbul a perfect place for Lojika to develop and test its novel approach to carpooling. Combining anthropology and algorithms is proving to be the game changer.