This morning that , a San Francisco-based scooter company, added more capita to its Series A with “an undisclosed amount of new funding from Toyota AI Ventures.”

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Skip’s Series A, was announced in June of 2018. The startup in December of 2018, boosting its war chest as it competed with and , two leading domestic scooter startups with far greater capital bases.

Now with new funds, Skip is touting a new scooter design that Axios reports is easier to take apart. The design could help the company secure better unit economics for its scooter fleet. And thus, perhaps, prove that scooters are an economically viable business. That scooter companies have been prodigious fundraisers is fact; that they have yet to find the balance set of revenue and cost of revenue to generate enough gross margin to show that the model can fund companies with Silicon Valley cost structures is not yet clear.

Both Bird and Lime, the domestic Uber and Lyft of scootering, have introduced new hardware models in the last year. But what’s fascinating in all of the discussions of new scooter designs is how much money was raised and spent by companies in the category before they did the hard engineering work to give their new devices a shot at profitability.

For example, Lime introduced its third-generation new scooter in October of 2018, that the new hardware “is built to last up to or even over a year [while] earlier versions generally conked out at six months.” Bird dropped its new scooter in October of last year as well, that the design was “more rugged and long lasting than its predecessors.”

However, Lime had $120 million in a and . Presumably, some of that later round (the startup also ) went into developing the new scooter, but a chunk of its earlier money certainly went into buying and deploying scooters that weren’t as economically sensible. That’s a lot of equity capital that went through the firms and onto the market while not generating economically-favorable results.

Bird’s fundraising is a bit more opaque, but the company did put together , and before it closed its final known round () which also came before its new scooter.

Backing up our idea that Bird and Lime spent money on scooters that didn’t have a shot at making their money back while helping fund the business is backed up by Bird’s $100 million writedown from earlier this year that the company’s CEO confirmed on Twitter. The hardware hadn’t lasted as long as expected.

Skip’s comparatively small raises to-date, even with the extension of its Series A, imply that it has spent far less on scooters that weren’t great in terms of financial return. It would be pretty ironic, in Silicon Valley-terms, if the company that raised the least became the most viable in terms of economics. Not scale, mind. Bird and Lime are far larger I’d reckon given what we know about their relative market penetration. But as we recently learned with The We Company, scale doesn’t always equal success.

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When Bird laid off about 4 to 5 percent of its full-time staff in March, it seemed that the scooter company was working on containing costs. Also read, it was working on overcoming some of the logistical challenges that come with two-wheel travel (expensive repair costs, theft, charging infrastructure, etc). Now, it’s back in the news with another move, this time, with its fingers crossed for growth. 

Each scooter company is going through what Bird did regarding costs and vehicle longevity, and more. Two things have become clear since Bird and blew up back in early 2018. First, that scooters are harder to eke profit from than expected. And, second, that too many scooter companies were founded.

Given both facts, seeing consolidation in the space is the opposite of surprising. Throw in the fact that Scoot has and Bird does not, and the calculus of stacking the two companies up together makes even more sense.

The TechCrunch story also reports that . Perhaps Lime will purchase Spin (its launch ) Who knows! But if Bird does buy a rival, it could tip the market towards a period of consolidation.

Recall that both Lime and Bird were sniffed-over by Uber before the latter declined to buy either.

According to its Crunchbase profile, buying Scoot would constitute Bird’s first acquisition. Its most recent round was almost one year ago, a $300 million led by Sequoia Capital. As such, we presume that the deal would be for more stock than cash, as the latter is likely in tight supply at Bird, which has both growth costs and vehicle-related capex to cover.

Bird’s been busy. It , an e-scooter available for purchase for $1,299, and then this week, announced a .

More when we have it.

Illustration: .

It’s madness, but a very tech-ish form of madness that is infused with greed. We digress.

Given the chronic fracas of the scooter market, we set out to understand which of its constituent players is taking the most global market share, as measured by markets shared, and markets owned. We decided to tally where Bird and Lime, two scooter-ni-corns1 currently operate to get a feel for an answer.

Also, we’ll take a look at a few of the plethora of other scooter companies that have cropped up like so many spring weeds, as investors have seen fit to fund all sorts of players.

Bird

, a scooter-only company, is easy to understand. The company’s app-connected scooters first hit its hometown streets of Santa Monica in 2017. Bird has since quickly expanded to other local and global markets.

Crunchbase News went through its , digging into where the company currently operates. It shook out to eight cities in seven countries including Tel Aviv and London. You can also find Bird’s two-wheeled vehicles in 73 cities in the U.S., including Charlotte, Dallas, and San Diego, as well as on 17 college campuses, including one internationally.

So that’s 98 or so markets.

Lime

is a harder nut to crack, as the company started life as a bike-sharing shop. It later added scooters and battery-assisted bikes. More recently, the fruit and juice-themed company announced that it will mix in cars to its mobility matrix.2

That said, we have a tally of its markets per its website, which works out to 22 cities in 15 countries outside of the United States including Paris and Lyon in France, and Mexico City, Mexico. Back at home, Lime vehicles can be found in 99 cities including Seattle, Tulsa, and Raleigh, and on 28 college campuses.

So that’s 149 markets, give or take. That’s more than Bird’s 98. We have a note into the company asking how many markets that they currently operate in contain scooters so that we can do a fairer, more direct comparison to Bird. We’ll update this post when we hear back. Update: Lime got back to us, reporting that the company has scooters in 72 cities globally. 

Bird Versus Lime

Before we turn to non-domestic and smaller providers, keep in mind the stakes at play between Lime and Bird. The two companies have raised a total of $882 million in known capital. That figure could be short if they have stacked new dollars that they have yet to disclose.

But that capital figure and their billions in shared valuation mean that they have become material companies in their own right. Uber and Lyft have shown that with many more billions in raised capital, you can wind up with something of a mobility-genre duopoly (in the case of ridesharing), although both firms remain steeply unprofitable.

There’s classically tension between growth (revenue, normally, but market expansion for Bird and Lime is a working proxy for our uses), and profitability. I doubt they are focused as much on the latter as the former.

Now, who else is out there? Let’s take a look.

Other Notable Players

, which has raised $31 million, operates in Washington DC, and, critically, in San Francisco. Bird and Lime managed to not get approved to operate in the tech hub after both were running in the city without permits.

Staying inside the United States, is in nine United States cities (Charlotte, Coral Gables, Denver, Detroit, Durham, Jefferson City, Lexington, Long Beach, and DC) and five college campuses. This is a notable grip of markets given that Ford bought the company earlier this quarter. Spin had raised just $8 million during its life as a private, independent company.

is perhaps most famous for its electric vespa-ish scooters that cropped up in San Francisco in recent years. However, the firm managed to be the other scooter company approved to work in San Francisco. Scoot is also an international player, with its upright scooters also touching down in Santiago, Chile.

Interestingly, Bird has not entered any East Asian markets, where smaller companies like Singapore-based startups and have launched their own scooter sharing platforms. Elsewhere globally, the companies face competition including in Germany with and , which both recently picked up capital and are looking to expand in Europe. Other global competitors include Stockholm-based , SĂŁo Paulo-based and , and Mexico City-based .

In the race to dominate the last-mile industry, Lime and Bird have the upper hand, capital-wise at least, for rapid expansion. It shows in the number of markets in which they are currently operating. Still, the companies will also have to perform a balancing act between geographical growth and regulatory approval. And the winner, or winners, are hardly decided yet in a market as young as this one.

Editorial Update: A previous version of this article erroneously stated that Lime operates in 12 cities in eight countries outside of the U.S. and that it does not operate in Asia. It has since been updated.