🏦 Scooters on Wall St

Plus, $HLBZ lists on Nasdaq, Bird and Spin join Google Maps, and Ola builds its first moped.

August 17, 2021

Hello and welcome to the Micromobility Newsletter, a weekly missive about mobility, mostly mobility in cities by lightweight electric vehicles. The reason you’re reading this email is that you signed up on our website or came to one of our events.

If you’re not a subscriber and you want to keep getting the latest news and analysis from inside the micromobility movement delivered straight to your inbox every Tuesday, sign up here for free. If you’d like to unsubscribe, just click that link.

Thank you for reading.

What You Need to Know This Week

Image

  • The scooter wars are coming to the stock market. First, Helbiz made its Nasdaq debut Friday under the ticket $HLBZ, becoming the first publicly traded shared micromobility company in the U.S. Next up, Bird is preparing to go public via SPAC merger later this year.

  • Bird and Spin are the latest micromobility operators to integrate with Google Maps, allowing users to locate the companies’ scooters directly in the app.

  • The first dockless electric scooters have officially arrived in New York City.

  • Ola’s first S1 electric moped rolled off the line in India this week, boasting some seriously high-tech, high-performance features at the shockingly low starting price of $1,350. The Pro model has a top speed of 71 mph and 112 miles of battery range, and all models include fancy features like a digital voice assistant, keyless unlock, and a color touch screen. Once Ola’s moped plant is fully up and running, it is expected to have an annual capacity of 10m units.

  • While we’re on the topic of India:

    • Micromobility company Bounce plans to replace its fleet of 30k petrol mopeds with EV mopeds, which it will produce in-house.

    • Motorbike-taxi service Rapido announced it raised a $54m Series C round. The funds will help the six-year-old startup, which has a footprint in over 100 cities in India, take on Uber and Ola post-pandemic.

    • EV startup Ather Energy is opening its proprietary 2W fast-charging system to all. “This will pave the way for an interoperable two-wheeler fast charging platform in the country,” the company said.

  • How to commute by e-bike in the suburbs.

  • Interesting thread about how Apple Airtags helped recover a stolen scooter.

  • Hologram, a cellular connectivity platform that services micromobility companies such as Veo, has raised $65m in Series B funding. The round was led by Tiger Global.

  • And Helium, a decentralized wireless blockchain network that provides low-bandwidth connectivity for companies like Lime to track its scooters, has raised a $111m round, led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z).

  • Scooter startup Skip has filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy. The next step in the process will be for Skip to liquidate its assets and settle its debts. The move comes after Skip was acquired by Helbiz late last year.

  • The Verge reviews Hummingbird’s new ultra-portable, 22.7-lbs folding e-bike: “[It’s] expensive, even by the standards of these high-spec folding electric bikes. But it’s a bike that comes so close to having it all that, for the right person, this could easily be a price worth paying.”

  • The compact Wuling Hong Guang Mini EV sold 30k units in China last month, making it the top-selling Chinese EV for 11 months straight. Meanwhile, Tesla sales in China tumbled 69% mont-over-month, and 29% year-over-year

  • How to start your own scooter- or bike-share business.

  • After more than a year, the bike drought shows no signs of letting up. Bike supplier Fox Factory says it’s 8-10 months away from fulfilling current orders.

  • Iggy Pop is helping sell Unagi scooters.

  • A new study from Sacramento finds that dockless electric bike-share replace car and walking/transit trips in roughly equal measure.

  • Germany-based online bike seller Bike24 reports its sales were up 44% in the first half of 2021, compared to the same period last year. 

  • How cameras and computer vision can help solve some of dockless scooters’ biggest problems.

  • Zipp has raised $1.5m to deploy scooter service in its native Ireland.

  • Analysts predict courier businesses will eventually account for almost half of e-cargo bike sales.

  • Looking at the IPCC’s frightening new climate report, Forbes concludes electric cars are not the key to preventing planetary meltdown. “Replacing all of today’s fleet of fossil-fuelled motor vehicles with electric ones would be potentially crippling for electricity supply networks and demonstrably bad for the planet. The real fix is far more straightforward: stop, or at least massively reduce, driving. Driving for short journeys that could be easily walked or cycled has to be made as socially unacceptable as smoking in public.”

Join Micromobility America for $0

ICYMI: The Micromobility America conference touches down in the SF Bay Area in just over 1 month, on September 23rd, bringing together tons of amazing people, demos, and programming.

Tickets are currently nearly 50% off for a limited time, so if you’re planning on coming, you should book yours now.

Or you can experience the full event for free by volunteering to help set up on the morning of September 23rd. It’s a great way to attend the show on a budget and get to know the community. (Space is limited.)

If you’re interested in volunteering, reach out to learn more or reply to this email.

Jobs to Be Done

Welcome to our jobs board, where every week we post open positions in hopes of connecting our talented readers with professional opportunities in the burgeoning world of new mobility. Find out who’s hiring below and sign up for the newsletter to view fresh listings every week.

Hit reply if you have a job that you’re interested in listing.