Dash has recently launched its pilot for a green transport solution. We had a chat with Co-founder, Omar Mahamed, to hear his story…

Dash at a glance: 

• Start date: 2022
• Market sector: Shared Mobility
• Location: Bristol
• Number of employees: 2
• Company growth status: Pre-seed (concept phase/testing)

Let’s start with Dash’s elevator pitch

At Dash, we are building an eco-friendly vehicle sharing service that provides our communities with an affordable solution to vehicle ownership. We believe that vehicles should be thought of as a resource that is a community amenity, in the same way that gyms, swimming pools etc are. By shifting away from vehicle ownership and focusing on serving the growing vehicle usage space, we believe that we can rapidly impact the communities we serve by slowing down the carbon emissions from newly purchased cars.

How did your startup journey begin?

My co-founder, Abs and I have known each other for more than 10 years and have always wanted to start a business that would have a positive impact on the communities that we are from. We iterated through different business ideas and concepts and decided to stick with Dash as we felt that it was closely aligned to our passion for improving our community, and contributing to lowering the negative effects that cars have on a global scale. By 2022, we were able to refine the concept and decided to go ahead with pushing it forward to existence. 

How has SETsquared Bristol incubation support helped?

We joined Quest with SETsquared Bristol’s Breakthrough Bursary, and the mentorship and networking have been invaluable. There were so many areas we did not know about and we simply would not have, had we not been a part of SETsquared. We really enjoy bouncing our ideas off our mentors prior to actioning them, as well as the constructive feedback we receive. One simple conversation with one of the mentors managed to save us thousands before we started our pilot scheme. The  workshops are setting us up for future success, as they are  guiding our business development in terms of our pitch, business model, financial model and so on. 

What are your startup top tips for other founders?

If you are working with multiple founders, make sure that you select the right people that will both support and challenge your ideas. You want people that will pick up the pace when you  slow down and vice versa. Make sure to keep a central repository of all your work, so that you can reiterate and review your approach, this will be helpful in refining your concept further. 

What’s next for Dash?

We are currently in the pilot phase of our concept, having successfully launched the pilot on the 12th  February. We will continue to run this and monitor customer feedback and conduct market research with our end-users to gather as much information as possible. Once this is complete, it will be back to the drawing board and ingesting the data to gather as much insight as possible. 

Find out about SETsquared Bristol’s incubation programmes.