Stairling, a French startup that offers ride-hailing drivers a salaried-entrepreneur contract, has acquired MySam, a ride-hailing platform founded in Albi in southern France in 2016, Maddyness reported on September 14, 2026.
The price was not disclosed. MySam is being renamed Staircab and turned into a platform that lets hotels, tourist offices, airports, event venues and local authorities offer their own chauffeur and taxi service to customers.
MySam founder Pierre Rosi is running the new business as head of Staircab.
Stairling itself was founded in 2024, so the deal comes about two years into its life. Tech.eu listed the purchase among the week's notable European exits and acquisitions.
What MySam brings
With the purchase, Stairling takes on close to 200,000 customers and a base of 18,000 registered drivers spread across 200 to 350 cities.
MySam had built a ride-hailing platform focused on helping drivers develop their own clientele. Stairling chief executive Mimoun El Alami said that expertise on the ground and the tools MySam gave drivers to win their own customers complemented Stairling's own offer.
“Nos deux solutions sont très complémentaires. Stairling apporte un cadre plus stable, dans lequel les chauffeurs gardent le contrôle de leur activité et de leur rémunération. MySam apporte son expertise terrain et des outils concrets pour aider les chauffeurs à développer leur propre clientèle”
What Stairling does
Stairling has been developing a cooperative-style model for chauffeur-driven ride drivers since 2024. Drivers on its platform get an entrepreneur-employee contract with a payslip, social protection and weekly pay, while keeping control of their work and income. About 2,000 drivers have signed up.
The company raised €1.5 million (about $1.8 million) in 2025 from Plug and Play Ventures and Kima Ventures, along with Source Ventures and 199 Ventures. It says it already handles about €100 million in payments a year on behalf of its drivers.
El Alami says Stairling is not a ride-hailing marketplace but an operating system for drivers, working only on the supply side. He does not intend to take on the large ride-hailing platforms directly, describing Stairling and Staircab as two building blocks of one infrastructure for drivers.
How Staircab will work
Staircab is aimed purely at businesses. Partners can offer a ride service without running a fleet or a dispatch operation themselves, through four routes: an API for aggregators and large accounts, an embed that adds booking to an existing website or app, a white-label version under the partner's own brand, and hardware with QR codes for physical sites such as hotels, stations and airports.
Behind all four sits one system that handles booking, dispatch, invoicing and regulation around the clock in French and English. Partners can earn a commission of up to 10% on each ride booked through their channel, and Staircab takes 10%. Drivers who want to build their own customer base can also use the platform.
That last point matters for MySam's existing drivers. Staircab is open to drivers who want to develop their own clients and, in effect, build up a business of their own with goodwill they can later sell, rather than relying entirely on rides allocated by a large platform.
The bigger plan
El Alami wants Stairling to become the largest fintech in the gig economy. The startup is waiting for a licence from France's banking regulator, the ACPR, that would let it handle financial flows directly for its drivers and move closer to a neobank model. A new funding round is being finalised.
His target is 3,000 to 4,000 workers on the entrepreneur-employee status by the end of 2026, and 200,000 within five years, handling €2 billion to €3 billion in payments a year. Maddyness noted that France had 47,800 taxi drivers and 125,000 ride-hailing drivers with active professional cards in 2025, so growth on that scale would require expansion abroad or into other parts of the gig economy.
Buying MySam gives Stairling a driver network and a business-to-business product two years after it was founded, a faster route to scale than signing drivers one by one.
