The Rimac Group describes Verne—its new autonomous ride-hailing service—as its “next impossible thing.” First, founder Mate Rimac established his eponymous electric hypercar company in Croatia, a country with no history of carmaking. That went well. Porsche, Hyundai and Softbank all took stakes. The Volkswagen Group gifted him a majority stake in Bugatti in return for access to his propulsion tech in future models.

Rimac Technology now supplies electric drivetrains to Porsche, BMW and Aston Martin, among many others, and it is developing advanced energy storage tech, too.

And now there’s Verne, Mate’s autonomous ride-hailing service launched today in Zagreb, the Croatian capital. Named after French novelist and futurist Jules Verne, it goes live in Zagreb first in 2026, followed by Manchester in the UK. Agreements have been signed to bring the service to another nine cities in Europe and the Middle East, and Verne is in talks to roll out to another 30 cities worldwide.

So can this ambitious but fast-moving start-up from a tiny nation do the near-impossible and get a robust robotaxi service in operation before most of the other players in this space—including Tesla, which reveals its own robotaxi in August?

Don’t bet against it. Verne was founded by Mate and two of his closest colleagues and friends: Marko Pejković, now CEO of Verne, and Adriano Mudri, the designer of Rimac Nevera hypercar and now chief design officer at Verne. The Rimac Group has a 55 per cent stake in Verne, with Saudi investors holding the rest.

The idea has been in development since at least 2019. Verne already employs 280 staff, and at its global launch revealed a complete-looking ecosystem of app, car and “mothership” buildings, to which the vehicles will return to be charged and cleaned.