Why we built Orbis
Between the three of us who founded Orbis IO, we've spent more than a hundred years inside UK vehicle leasing and fleet management. We've sat on the broker side, the operator side, the OEM side and the association side. We've watched the industry move from paper logbooks to telematics to connected vehicles, and we've watched a lot of software get built to sell to fleet managers along the way.
Most of it solved the wrong problems.
The tools we kept seeing were built by software people who had read a fleet brochure once. They measured things that were easy to measure — mileage claims, document expiry dates, licence check dates — and presented those numbers back to fleet managers in dashboards that looked impressive in a demo but never quite matched what was actually happening on the road.
What fleet managers actually needed was harder. They needed to know whether the EV reimbursement they were paying their drivers was anywhere near the real cost. They needed to know whether the 300-mile range on the brochure was holding up for drivers doing school runs in January. They needed to know which vehicles were about to break down before they broke down, not six weeks after the AA recovery invoice arrived. And they needed all of that tied back to the actual vehicle, with actual data, not an average pulled from a spreadsheet of averages.
Between us, we'd each spent decades watching fleet managers work around those gaps instead of through them. Different seats at the table, same frustration.
Simon Homer, CEO, brings over thirty years of experience in UK fleet operations and commercial leasing. Simon is a co-founder and director of Covase, where he has spent more than two decades managing fleets for UK businesses across every scale — from small SME operators running a handful of vans to large corporate fleets running hundreds of vehicles. That operational background is what shapes how Orbis IO thinks about the product: not as a dashboard, but as a tool that has to hold up at 7am on a Monday when a fleet manager needs an answer.
Alan Carreras, CTO, has spent over forty years in UK vehicle leasing and fleet management, including time as Chair of the BVRLA Leasing Broker Committee. Alan is MAFP-certified through the Association of Fleet Professionals and has built and led leasing businesses across the broker and operator sides of the industry. Alan leads the data and technology direction at Orbis IO, including our OEM partnerships.
Andy Jackson, CFO, is a co-founder and director of Covase, where he has built more than twenty years of experience managing the commercial and operational side of UK fleet services — the part where the numbers have to work for real businesses running real vehicles, not for a pitch deck. Andy leads finance and commercial strategy at Orbis IO.
The founding team behind Orbis IO has spent decades inside UK vehicle leasing and fleet management. We've sat on the broker side, the operator side, the OEM side and the association side. We've watched the industry move from paper logbooks to telematics to connected vehicles, and we've watched a lot of software get built to sell to fleet managers along the way.
The technology to do what fleet managers actually need now exists. Modern vehicles generate extraordinary amounts of data — battery state, charging sessions, real-world range, fault codes, service intervals, location, driving behaviour. Until recently, most of that data was locked inside the manufacturer. That's changed. OEMs now expose structured, manufacturer-sanctioned data feeds to authorised partners. Which means for the first time, a fleet intelligence platform can go directly to the source, rather than guessing or scraping or relying on aftermarket telematics dongles that only see half the picture.
So we built Orbis IO.
Orbis IO is a fleet intelligence platform built on OEM-native connected car data. It's built for UK fleet managers, by a team that has spent its entire careers inside UK fleet and leasing. We know what fleet managers actually need because many of us have been those fleet managers. Or sold to them. Or renewed their contracts. Or explained to them why the last tool they paid for didn't do what the salesperson promised.
Today, we're announcing our first major partnership. Orbis IO is the first UK partner of High Mobility, the OEM-native connected car data platform. Through High Mobility, Orbis IO now has direct, manufacturer-sanctioned access to data across the vehicles that make up the majority of UK fleets — Ford, Vauxhall, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Audi, Volkswagen, Volvo, Tesla, Kia, Hyundai, Toyota, MINI, Peugeot and Citroën.
Over the next few weeks, we'll be using this space to share what we're learning from the data we're seeing. Not demo-day numbers. Real numbers. The gap between HMRC's Advisory Electricity Rate and what drivers are actually paying to charge. The gap between manufacturer range claims and what drivers actually achieve in a cold UK winter. The maintenance events our platform is forecasting before they happen. The things fleet managers suspected were true but could never prove.
If you've spent any time inside UK fleet management, you'll recognise most of what we write. We hope some of it helps.
If you'd like to see Orbis IO running on real fleet data, book a twenty-minute walkthrough. We'll show you the platform, and we'll answer the one question every fleet manager asks us first: where does your data come from.
— Simon, Alan and Andy Founding team, Orbis IO