Infiniti Motor Company Ltd - the premium automotive brand of the Renault-Nissan Alliance - and Nest, a global innovation platform supporting entrepreneurs, celebrated the successful run of Infiniti Lab Smart Mobility. The eight-week long accelerator programme gathered seven high potential start-ups from across the globe, through a competitive process featuring more than 120 applications, with the aim to find the most advanced smart mobility solutions to power the connected future of transport.

Terrence Zou, the Founder and CEO of Ryde, a local carpooling app emerged as one of the highlights of the programme. Ryde is Singapore's first social carpooling app with over 100,000 users and it has completed over two million kilometres of carpooled rides in Singapore. The start-up also pioneered the peer-to-peer review system for the carpooling platform, adding a trust dimension to the sharing economy.

Ryde recently announced a partnership with ComfortDelGro, Singapore's largest taxi operator. Having received the Third Party Taxi Booking certificate from the Land Transport Authority in the last week of May 2017, Ryde now enables users to book a Comfort or a CityCab taxi through the app. Ryde has over 30,000 cars in its fleet while ComfortDelGro has about 16,000 taxis. This joint offering has further bolstered Ryde's potential for growth in the island nation in the coming quarters.