Mobility is more fragmented than ever. Urban congestion has long been treated as a civil-engineering problem—a matter of pouring more concrete or pricing drivers off the road. Urban gridlock has become the invisible tax of modern life. In cities like Los Angeles and New York, commuters lose between 50 to 100 hours a year to congestion, costing billions in economic productivity and quality of life. Meanwhile, the transportation sector remains one of the largest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions. Historically, cities have responded with penalties and mandates: congestion pricing, fuel taxes, regulatory nudges.
MobileFlow approaches it as a software problem hiding in plain sight. Through its flagship Hytch platform, the Nashville-based startup pays people to share rides, shifts incentives from punishment to reward, and records every verified commute on a transparent blockchain ledger. The Hytch platform creates a system that turns friction into flow.
MobileFlow’s cultural DNA is explicit: “Aligned Incentives,” “Time as a Human Right,” and “Equity Through Access.” These values aren’t marketing slogans; they are hard-coded into product requirements and token-economic guardrails. The company’s operating principles—mission first, market aligned; simplicity is sacred; measure what matters—ensure that every line of code is judged by the clarity of its impact, not by the cleverness of its jargon.
CEO Andrew Grinde explains, “We reframe congestion as a behavioral opportunity. Instead of taxing drivers who create traffic, MobileFlow rewards commuters who reduce it. Instead of building new roads, we incentivize smarter use of roads. Rather than penalize movement, it rewards smarter, more connective, and more efficient movement. Group rides, off‑peak travel, or policy‑specific challenges can be multiplied for bonus earnings, letting the platform steer behavior like a software‑defined traffic signal.
”The Hytch platform isn’t a prototype. At its peak in 2018, Hytch logged over 550,000 miles per month, engaged 30,000+ monthly users (with a peak of 54,000 users in 1 month), and reached a high of 800,000 miles logged in a single month. These milestones, including a total of 10 million miles of logged rides in 2018 and 2019, were achieved using traditional cash incentives.
Forbes spotlighted its “cash-for-carpools” model as a blueprint for reversing transit decline, calling the Nashville pilot “proof that loyalty economics can move commuters.” In 2018 Hytch Rewards took home the Tennessee Governor’s Environmental Stewardship Award for Clean Air, it was named the Nashville Technology Council’s Emerging Company of the Year, and picked up the state’s Sustainable Transportation Award. One of the original builders of Hytch – Mark Cleveland – has twice been crowned one of Middle Tennessee’s “Most Admired CEOs,” alongside earlier honors like the Best in Business award for his prior ventures. He recently created the Parallel Entrepreneur Network.
In addition to Mark Cleveland, now serving on the Board, Mobile Flow’s innovation engine is a tight, execution-minded roster: CEO Andrew Grinde is using his experience founding companies in the finance and manufacturing industries to steer funding and partnerships with a manufacturer’s pragmatism; COO Demetre Gostas translates complex tokenomics into practical incentives while guiding frictionless operations; Chairman Samuel Harrison opens doors from Web3 to Fortune 500; board veteran and parallel entrepreneur Robert Hartline injects proven 8-9 digit scale-up playbooks. The engineering team is highly experienced and innovative with their code in both Web2 and Web3 development.
The technology stack driving MobileFlow is a modern blend of Web3 and AI. Blockchain offers verifiability; artificial intelligence supplies adaptability. The app, already live on iOS and Android, features real-time sensor fusion to verify rides without requiring user gestures. Smartphone sensor fusion—GPS, motion APIs, even Bluetooth proximity—verifies that passengers are genuinely sharing a vehicle without requiring awkward in-car gestures or hardware add‑ons. Buddy verification, anomaly detection, and motion correlation ensure that rewards are earned legitimately.
Every journey generates a cryptographic receipt: distance, occupancy, time of day, and estimated carbon avoided. These data packets move through a reward engine governed by smart contracts on an Ethereum-secured Layer-2 rollup.
MobileFlow’s decentralized strategy extends beyond its token. While HYTCH provides the universal incentive layer, hTokens localize it. Each metropolitan region can launch its own localized hToken, such as hLAor hI65, which exists as a geofenced extension of HYTCH. These tokens are designed to reflect the traffic patterns, sponsor interests, and policy priorities of their specific area. Sponsors can use them to target corridors or neighborhoods, while users can unlock local perks or redeem tokens for transit credits, parking discounts, or merchant coupons.
Commuters aren’t just earning digital assets—they’re generating measurable reductions in emissions in addition to planting trees. Each ride logged on Hytch is tagged with emissions avoided, trip type, and location. Thanks to MobileFlow’s prepaid tree-planting program that offsets more than the tail-pipe CO2 produced, users of the Hytch platform plant trees with the miles they generate. These generalized data points feed into sponsor-facing dashboards, enabling cities and employers to track carbon reduction, commuter trends, and ROI with real-time precision. MobileFlow’s data model is privacy‑preserving. Trip records are stripped of personal identifiers before aggregation; sponsors see outcomes, not individual users. Dashboards translate “dollars in” to “emissions avoided” and extrapolated to employee satisfaction and retention.
Incentives alone don’t build community, so MobileFlow is adding the HYTCH Chat, a convenient messaging service to help local commuters communicate and coordinate. Verified commuters gain access to other users with a similar geographic commute and can filter by carpooling preferences like “conversationalist” or preferences for media, discussion topics, etc. MobileFlow aims to make coordination and communication fun, easy and convenient.
MobileFlow is not attempting to replace rideshare platforms or traffic apps. It is the connective tissue that amplifies them all. It helps cities extract more efficiency from existing infrastructure. It helps employers meet Scope 3 emissions reporting requirements. It helps communities save time, money, and air quality—without forcing behavior through mandates or guilt.
The company’s culture is mission‑first and durability‑driven. Its core belief: mobility is power. Its operating reality: if you want people to change how they move, you need to pay them and prove to them that their choices matter. This is why MobileFlow prioritizes simplicity over hype, local partnerships over disruption, and measurable change over vanity metrics.
MobileFlow’s Future
With every mile logged, a cleaner, less congested city becomes more attainable. With every hToken earned, a commuter becomes a stakeholder in their region’s future. And with every sponsor onboarded, the value of the network deepens— in minutes saved, emissions saved, and social equity delivered. MobileFlow’s roadmap scales from corridors to continents.
The MobileFlow team carries the goal of expanding regionally around Nashville and Tennessee after further building its user base in Nashville. During such expansion, they will be placing increasingly high levels of focus and resources on expanding to Los Angeles – their “Green Carpet Rollout” strategy. Los Angeles is not only one of the most congested cities in the United States (and one of the most congested in the world) with very little room for improving public transit infrastructure, it is also hosting the 2028 Olympics. This provides Hytch the opportunity to place itself on a global stage, breaking the seal with commuters all over the world who experience it while in LA. Following LA, MobileFlow hopes to execute a national rollout before proceeding to go global.
MobileFlow plans to plug into future machine-to-machine economies, smart city initiatives, and other transportation tech innovations. By tokenizing everyday commuting and reshaping how cities, employers, and individuals view transportation, they expect to transform commutes globally.
The company hopes to redefine how society perceives and invests in daily commuting, unlocking a multitude of new forms of data-driven, AI-enhanced value. Ultimately, according to CEO Andrew Grinde, MobileFlow“ intends to continue innovating in an expanding smart-city-tech landscape across the world.”
The company envisions a rapid increase in the volume of private buses carpooling large groups of individuals all around their cities, especially from the suburbs to the urban centers and back. Where most mobility startups chase faster routes, MobileFlow chases better rules—rules written in open code, settled in open markets, and measured in the most humane metric of all: time given back to people and cities alike. And with every mile logged, that ledger writes a future where movement is not just efficient—it is rewarding. MobileFlow is not waiting for the future to fix traffic. It is paying people to build the future themselves—one ride, one token, and one city at a time.
Visit www.mobileflow.ai and download the Hytch app to get started.
