Yes, it does sound like fiction. But that actually is the situation facing , founder of e-scooter network .��

VanderZanden, who this past week from his post as Bird CEO, was expecting his stake to be worth hundreds of millions when the company inked a in the spring of 2021 to go public through a SPAC merger. The agreement reportedly set a valuation around $2.3 billion for the then 4-year-old company, of which VanderZanden owned a roughly 13% stake.

As it happened, the timing of the SPAC deal coincided with a growing tech world fascination around Miami, which had been attracting an influx of prominent VCs and crypto entrepreneurs. Though Bird was founded and based in Santa Monica, VanderZanden joined the Florida-bound flock and went house shopping. Bird also later moved its headquarters to Miami.

VanderZanden’s Florida starter home was a splashy one. In August 2021, shortly before the merger closed, the scooter mogul a $21.8 million mansion in a posh waterfront gated community in Coral Gables. Featuring nine bedrooms, 11 baths, an infinity edge pool and private dock, the property checked the boxes one would expect at that price point.��

The home also comes with an interesting history. It was purchased in 2016 by a Panamanian shell company linked to Samark Jose Lopez-Bello, a narcotics trafficker on the ICE . The federal government later seized the property and reportedly it in 2020 for $12.5 million.��

By the time VanderZanden came around in 2021, scooters were looking like a much more attractive and legal path to fast wealth. Bird’s following the SPAC deal announcement called for the company to have an initial offering value in the billions. VanderZanden’s ownership stake, at that point, looked like enough to afford a whole portfolio of similar mega-mansions

High-flying Bird falls to earth

Things didn’t work out that way. Bird stock has been heading steadily downward since shortly after the merger closed in November, hitting a new trough around 33 cents per share this week. Bird’s market capitalization is a mere $94 million now. And VanderZanden’s stake—13% in the last annual report—is worth around $12 million.

Given this decline, it’s not surprising to see that the Florida mansion is back on the market. This time, per , there’s a $39.9 million —a surprisingly ambitious markup for such a short duration of ownership.

Notably, this isn’t the only mega-mansion that VanderZanden has purchased, or even the highest-profile one. In 2020, he paid $21.7 million to buy a Bel Air mansion formerly owned by Daily Show host . (That went up for sale again too, though it’s unclear what the current status is.) Before that, the would-be scooter mogul bought an $8.1 million Santa Monica property, which he shortly resold for $9 million.

It’s also unclear whether Bird is VanderZanden’s only source of wealth. He served as COO of from 2013 until 2014, and left work as VP of global driver growth at in 2016, before launching Bird. (Lyft later him for allegedly breaking his confidentiality agreement, before settling for an undisclosed sum.)

One thing that is clear, however, is that VanderZanden did not become as rich as he expected to become with Bird. Nor did a host of the company’s very high-profile investors, including , which led its Series C and D, and , which led the Series B.�� 

The scooter space, in general, just didn’t work out as planned for the early mover crowd. As we documented a couple months ago, VCs pumped billions into the space, only to find that public markets weren’t at all receptive to hoped-for valuations.

For what it’s worth, VanderZanden’s tony Florida enclave also doesn’t look like the kind of place where scooter networks would work. In a gated community where homes come with multicar garages, it’s pretty well assumed that last-mile transport comes with four wheels, not two.

Illustration: Dom Guzman

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Yesterday that , an American scooter unicorn, expects to post an operating loss of over $300 million against gross revenue of around $420 million. The same report also details select unit economic data that we’ll examine.

The Lime news is not the first expected or reported scooter-induced loss that we’ve covered this year. Recall that , a key Lime rival, posted a roughly $100 million loss against $15 million in revenue during the first quarter; the loss was boosted by a writeoff and the revenue hit by seasonality making the ensuing deficit appear worse than it might under less irksome circumstances.

But as with the Bird result, caveats or not, Lime’s expected losses are sharp and troubling.

Bird, Lime, and their global rivals rose quickly on the back of strong consumer demand for their products. Initial scooters placed in-market proved flimsy, but well-funded startups were confident that they could improve their hardware, tune their business model, and begin to juice gross margin from their fleets; the bet was that eventual scooter gross margin could cover operating costs, and scooter startups would, therefore, rise to new heights in terms of scale, and value as they grew.

Instead, after rocketing into the unicorn club — a private valuation of $1 billion is all you need for entry — Lime and Bird have managed continued growth, but haven’t yet beat back skepticism regarding their business model.

On that point, let’s examine what The Information reported regarding Lime’s gross margins:

In July, the company told investors it spent about 35% of gross revenue on depreciation, 40% on local operations and 17% on charging. Other smaller costs include payment processing, customer support and insurance.

As depreciation isn’t usually counted as part of a company’s cost of revenue, we can exclude it in our first calculation for Lime’s implied gross margin.

To get a gross margin figure, let’s add, say, 20 percent for “payment processing, customer support and insurance” to the other, known revenue costs. Using our guesstimate, Lime’s gross margins comes in at 23 percent.

If you counted Lime’s depreciation as a cost of revenue, (a cost of goods sold, if you want to phrase it that way) and it’s not hard to argue that it should be, the company’s gross margins appear negative.

In The Distance

The game that Lime has to play isn’t merely getting its scooter rides to generate a bit more margin (or indeed any at all, depending on how you count depreciation costs). Instead, it’s getting its scooters to generate enough margin at scale to cover its operating costs.

That’s a tall order. Recall that Lime is expected to post an operating loss of $300 million against $420 million in gross revenue. That means the company has to generate gobs of gross margin to cover its operating costs, before taking into account whatever its free cash flow must total to (a negative number).

It’s going to take a pretty penny for Lime to get there if it can. Bird is in the same boat. Crunchbase data indicates that Bird has . Lime . That’s well north of $1 billion between the two firms. Capital that has likely largely been spent.

But don’t worry. After Bird raised more money, The Information reports that Lime has a new investor on the line at a new, higher valuation.

Illustration: .

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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It was a week of scooters, startups born out of the failures of others, and Softbank. Whatever summer slowdown the venture world used to entertain now seems firmly passé. This late in the unicorn era, there are no reins.

Want this email every weekend? Subscribe here to Crunchbase News emails! 

Given the pace of news that’s coming out, we wind up covering many positive market indicators (new rounds and the like). But piggy-backing off an earlier column this week, it’s important to keep an eye on what could go wrong.��Tap here to find out what has us worried.

In funding news, we pored over several nine-figure rounds, including insurance unicorn Hippo scoring $100 million (it’s now a unicorn) and China-based ride-hailing company Didi raising six times as much. Gusto, formerly ZenPayroll, also raised $200 million to help power SMB HR.

Fintech, one of our favorite sectors, raised frugal and lavish rounds this week. Stackin’ picked up $4 million to text users advice on how to be better with their money. In contrast, MoneyLion raised $100 million in a Series C, and Robinhood raised a huge $323 million Series E.

In news that could help all of us: Tile,��which helps users track items like their phone and keys, raised $45 million. In news that could’ve helped Anki a few months ago: Freedom Robotics raised $6.6 million to make it easier and cheaper to be a robot startup.

Looking ahead, the funding landscape, especially for late-stage firms, is very bright given that Vision Fund 2 is a go. (What’s up with the Microsoft money?) Threshold also has new money to invest, and WeWork’s IPO is coming sooner than expected.

��������,��a growing share of global VC funding is going to the United States at the expense of China. Reminder, China’s share of the worlds supergiant rounds—venture rounds of $100 million or more—has fallen from its leading position to third place.

All that and here’s a scooter story concerning a retreat, and one more that’s a bit more positive.

Ending on a note beyond the numbers: We chatted with Elizabeth Ashford for Proust Goes Tech this week. Just wait until you get to the part about how an anesthesiologist with pennies taped to his shoes inspired her.

Until next week,

Natasha (,��) and Alex (,��)

P.S.��.

Actual conversation I had today:

Me: what are you in SF for?

Friend from DC: work, but also going to see [friend] and help him build a deck

Me: oh, I didn’t know [friend] started a company!

FfDC: WTF you’re the second person today who thought that…….He’s building a porch.

— Austin Petersmith (@awwstn)

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If you can recall all the way back to last week, you will remember news that , a popular American scooter company, as both its net, and gross revenue declined. The first quarter wasn’t overly kind to Bird, a firm which has raised huge sums of money in the name of growth.

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The timing of Bird’s revenue decline wasn’t entirely a surprise as the first quarter included traditionally inclement months during which scooters are likely less popular — you can’t scoot in the snow. And, we knew Bird was running at a deficit, making the only surprising thing the scale of the loss compared to the size of its temporarily embarrassed revenue result.

Things, naturally, have become more complex. Bird’s CEO uncorked a few tweets after the first story was published, firing back at the new narrative coalescing around his firm and industry.

The negative theme that VanderZanden wanted to combat went something like this (my words, not his – that comes later): Sure, everyone knew that scooter companies were having a harder time than expected squeezing margin from their popular two-wheeled machines. But $100 million in a single quarter against a revenue result of just 15 percent that total? That’s worse than expected.

VanderZanden’s various tweets included enough different data points, and implied arguments, that I think we’ll do some work this morning to unspool them. Let’s get into it.

Tweets

In order, here’s a summary of what Bird’s CEO tweeted, with our notes following each bullet point (tweet):

• : The Information’s story was fake news.

Bird did lose the $100 million that The Information reported, something that VanderZanden confirms in his fifth tweet. However, the CEO begins his tweetstorm by calling their reporting “fake.”

• : Bird is growing rapidly.

The CEO posted a chart, showing what is presumably Bird’s revenue run rate (not ARR, mind) over time. The chart shows that the company’s revenue fell precipitously during the winter months, matching the direction of The Information’s reporting.

VanderZanden states that Bird’s run rate is up “over 4x from this time last year.” The data point has little to do with what The Information reported regarding Bird’s revenue declines from Q4 2018 to Q1 2019, something the CEO’s own chart appears to defend.

• Tweets and : Bird’s unit economics are better than you thought.

In his third and fourth tweets, Bird’s CEO states that its Bird Zero scooters (75 percent of its in-market units) generate $1.27 of contribution margin on “every ride.” This means that each Bird Zero scooter ride, after paying for itself, provides $1.27 to help fund the company’s operations.

The stated margin includes depreciation, and “in-market support.” That’s good, and makes the resulting contribution margin figure seem sturdy.

Tweet four digs into how the $1.27 result is calculated, including the gross spend from a customer that is used to run the math that results. Bird scooters are grossing $4.27 per ride. That’s up from the last time we heard the figure ($3.65 in gross spend per ride). So, Bird has managed to grow its average ride cost by about 17 percent if we’re correctly comparing sums (always tough to do with non-public companies).

Reading the CEO’s table detailing the company’s resulting per-ride “Pro Forma Contribution,” two final things jump out. First, that Uber and Lyft each generate negative contribution from each ride they support according to the presented math. This is a non-subtle diss from the scooter company against the larger and more valuable ride-hailing companies.

And, second, that Bird books no sales and marketing costs that are shared on a per-ride basis. That’s to say that Bird doesn’t count any sales and marketing spend costs in its per-ride revenue and costs calculations. If Bird boosts sales and marketing spend, you can see where it will ding margins simply.

• : Bird did lose $100 million, but it was a write-off due to an accounting mistake (“our original depreciation window was too long”) and not something you should care about.

Let’s be clear, Bird had to write off $100 million in scooter value because it expected those machines to last longer than they did. That’s not good. Trying to spin losing $100 million, spent money raised by selling shares, that you didn’t expect as not a big deal is odd and oddly aggressive.

VanderZanden also details a lack of maturity by calling The Information “DisInformation,” which isn’t witty in the slightest. Nor is it accurate. Especially when the CEO himself states that “[w]e sent this data to the reporter.” I can’t quite figure out why the CEO is unhappy about a publication reporting data that was shared with it. But, hey, I didn’t lose $100 million in Q1 2019.

So What?

If Bird’s CEO had simply followed up The Information’s story by saying “our first quarter was hard, but we’re generating $1.27 per ride today and we think our business has never been more viable,” all this would have been easier. Instead, by attacking the press for reporting accurate numbers, albeit in a manner that he didn’t approve of, VanderZanden put a bad taste in my mouth and lowers market trust in himself.

Let the numbers do the talking; let the Trumpian insults stay untweeted.

What we know is that Bird’s own math shows scooters’ margins and results improving. That should help the firm raise the money it needs to. Just don’t forget that each Bird ride generates positive contribution, which is not the same thing as the company itself making money.

Here’s one way to think about it. For every one million rides that Bird supports in any given quarter, it generates $1.27 million in margin that it can use to fund its corporate-level costs. Those include engineering, its executive group, its government relations work, and so forth. How many rides it will need to power to break even I don’t know, but if you do, please get in touch.

Precisely how the scooter industry will shake out in time isn’t clear. I only have guesses. But if Bird’s math holds, and works for other companies like Lime and the rest, perhaps some of the scooter legions will make it.

Illustration: .

, one of the two leading American scooter companies, is losing money at a terrific rate according to a .

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The scooter company and its best-known rival have each raised hundreds of millions of dollars (, ), totaling more than $1 billion between the pair. The Information reports that Bird is seeking $300 million more, matching a sum .

Losses

That Bird is losing money is neither surprising nor notable. The pace at which it is losing money, however, may be.

When high-growth companies raise cash, they raise it to put the funds to work. Rare is the company that raises money just to sit on it. Lime and Bird have been among the fastest growing companies that we can recall, so their deficits are expected.

But, perhaps, things are more difficult than we anticipated. From The Information:

In this year’s first quarter, [Bird] lost nearly $100 million while revenue shrank sharply to only about $15 million, people familiar with the matter said. In the spring, it told people it was down to about $100 million in cash, even after raising more than $700 million over a year and a half. […]

In the third and fourth quarters of last year, Bird said it generated about $25 million and about $40 million in gross revenue, respectively, the person said. Net revenue was more than $20 million in the third quarter and about $25 million in the fourth quarter, this person said.

So Bird’s revenue has fallen while its losses have continued. The result of such quarters would be dwindling cash. Bird will, therefore, have to raise during a time when its numbers aren’t pointing in the right direction; that’s precisely when you do not want to raise.

Indeed, shrinking from $40 million in gross revenue to $15 million in gross revenue is tough from Q4 2018 to Q1 2019, though Bird did limit discounts according to The Information, so the gap isn’t as sharp as those figures detail.

The company does have a natural advantage in Spring. While warmer weather likely helped the company, whether Bird had a good Q2 or not isn’t clear. But we can presume that the firm lost more money in the period. As such, it probably has less cash than it had when it reported the $100 million figure. That puts a timer on its fundraise, and explains why it wants $300 million and not a smaller sum.

Lime, its archrival, raised earlier this year. That brought Lime’s valuation to $2.4 billion. Presumably, the green scooter company has enough cash to get it to the fourth quarter. But, with Bird showing that it is possible to lose nine figures per quarter, how long each scooter round may last is somewhat hard to predict.

So it’s double-down time. Lime and Bird have had time to develop new hardware, explore new markets, and have made it through winter. If the companies are going to make it, which is to say if their models wind up proving economically viable or not, will likely be answered this summer.

Which is now. More when we have it.

Illustration: .

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Happy Friday and welcome to the end of the week. Let’s wrap on something that we haven’t written about in what feels like months: Scooters.

Yes, everyone’s former summer fling is back in the headlines this week with news that , a European scooter company, has raised another round of capital, .

The new funds come after the firm (Crunchbase lists the total , but we can round as it’s nearly the weekend). Dott is based in Amsterdam and was founded just last year. (Dott’s Series A has been led by and , with a host of other capital sources taking part.)

Why talk about a relatively minor scooter round today? Two reasons. First, Dott is trying to do something operationally different inside the scooter space. Second, we’ve learned about scooters recently. Let’s explore.

Dott’s Gig

American scooter giants and depend on crowd labor to charge their scooters. This idea wound up providing lucrative employment for teens and jokes for the Internet. Dott is going the other direction, hiring more of its staff.

Here’s :

The company has its own warehouses to charge and repair vehicles. There’s no juicer who collect[s] scooters at night and charge[s] them at home. Dott hires full-time employees and works with third-party logistics providers.

TechCrunch goes on to note that Dott is local-government friendly, and deploys “reasonable” numbers of scooters to new markets.

In short, if Lime and Bird’s attempts to ape Uber’s famous speed of execution and brashness were the initial mold for their industry, Dott is trying to break it by being polite about the whole thing, coloring inside the lines and paying its people more fairly.

I can hear the capitalist in your heart sputter, saying something like this: “But if Lime and Bird are losing so much money, how can Dott afford to avoid gig workers as a way to lower labor costs?” I don’t know. But what we can do is go over a few things that we’ve seen recently from scooter companies, and see if any of it can help us understand more fully.

Bumpy Paths

This morning I went back through some of scooterdom’s recent issues. What follows isn’t exhaustive, but goes to show the sorts of issues that Bird and Lime have had recently:

• Recall in 2018 when Uber was said to consider buying either Bird or Lime? That didn’t bear out.
• Bird in March of this year. That’s not a very good sign from a company that has raised a lot of money.
• And then Lime .
• The meme of people throwing scooters into the lake or river or pond or stream is not merely a Bay Area problem. Scooters we’ve recently learned.
• And scooters aren’t welcome in Nashville as of late June. A pilot program is over after someone died.

And on and on, you can find a lot more of the same.

How I read the above is that the Bird and Lime model is now bogged down in the reality that seems to settle in after a period of what Silicon Valley loves to call “hypergrowth.” Except in the case of the scooter princes, Uber had already taught the local magistrates a trick or two when it blew through their fiefdoms years before.

By the time scooters came to town, the principalities were ready, and it’s slowing Lime and Bird’s rise in America.

If that’s a good thing or a fair thing or a bad thing or a symbol of American decline is up to debate, but it seems to be fact that Bird and Lime aren’t having as easy a go of their jobs today as they did a year ago.

Which brings us back to Dott. Initially, I thought that if the go-fast, and avoid-hiring model that Bird and Lime have undertaken is struggling, surely what Dott is up to will have an even harder time in the market. But there is a cost to moving fast, a price to pay for putting speed first.

Perhaps Dott can show that a more deliberate, accommodating, and employee-inclusive model can work in 2019. Now that would be contrarian. Now that would be disruptive.

Illustration: .

It wasn’t too long ago that scooters and scooter startups were the hottest things in tech; quick ridership growth helped investors make successive, and successively larger wagers on companies like Bird and Lime. International competition is rife, and rental scooters are now sprinkled around the world.

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But there may be some turbulence on the horizon that we’ve touched on before, and I want to highlight that in the wake of a few news items and something excellent that .

Bikes

Let’s start with the news. , a China-based bikesharing platform, has been in financial trouble for some time. In December, the company’s cash situation . Despite raising huge sums of money, the company’s investments in hardware and growth seemingly wound up not generating sufficient profit to be viable. Reports surfaced this week that the firm had entered bankruptcy, seemingly capping the arc. However, Ofo later “denied reports of impending bankruptcy and maintained that the company is ‘currently operating normally,'” .

But what’s clear is that Ofo’s financial troubles continue. This set of factors are coupled to that Meituan Dianping, which owns Ofo-rival , will scale back its operations following losses.

So the biggest bikesharing players, despite raising billions, are finding that their model didn’t work. Even at scale.

Scooters

You can see the parallel to the scooter world, of course. But the analogy may not hold. Indeed, it could be that scooters see enough rides per-day in the long-term to allow for their economics to bear out. As a sometimes rider of the little devices, that would be fine by me.

But a details how the economics don’t work quite yet:

More recently, operators like Bird and Skip have spoken more publicly about the rough reality of unit economics.

“When I think about opportunities to figure out our unit economics,” Shalin Mantri, head of product at [scooter company] Skip, told TechCrunch a few months ago, “it’s no secret now — it was probably a dirty secret of the industry, you know, a few months ago — that it’s hard to make money, and some of the biggest challenges to doing that are the cost of charging, the lifetime of the battery, the repair costs, the depreciation of these things being used in a fleet use case and the last is vandalism and theft, which is another big issue.”

There are probably a lot of places to squeeze margin out of the above list, but it will be difficult. The counter argument to pessimism is that companies like Bird and Lime are stocked with smart people tasked with solving the costs and improving unit economics. They may pull it off.

What I do think is notable, however, is how far the scooter groups (again, this is a global phenom, not something merely domestic) managed to raise and scale so quickly before figuring their model out a bit more. Perhaps there was so much capital available, looking for growth-oriented shares, that the scooter boom became a money arms-race?

Whatever the case, as the bikesharing boom unravels, we’re keeping an eye on scooters.

Illustration: .

Yesterday, The Information’s that Los Angeles-based had laid off about 40 employees, or 4 to 5 percent of its full-time staff “in an effort to contain costs.” The company had an estimated 900 employees.

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After soaring to a $2 billion valuation last year, Bird has been locked in  market-share-versus-profit battle with rival Lime, as our EIC Alex Wilhelm reported yesterday. The layoff news also comes days after The Information reported how Bird had to focus on profitability rather than further expansion. It also pointed out that both Bird and Lime “have lost tens of millions of dollars in some months, and..met with Uber last fall to discuss the possibility of being acquired.”

As it appears that arch-rival Lime is continuing to press on with expansion, how it will similarly contain costs is unclear. Perhaps Lime thinks it can convert market share into fresh funding rounds.

Since its inception in (just!) 2017, Bird has raised a total of . Its last raise was a June 2018 led by .

Coincidentally, earlier this week I () moderated a panel on mobility tech at SXSW and at least one of the VCs on the panel said his firm “had passed” on investing in Bird or Lime due to the “narrow profit margins.”

(A quick word on profit margins, and why they matter. If a company’s revenue has thin margins, it leaves less money after paying costs for the company to use on other things, like operating costs. And for a company like Bird, slim margins leave small change for buying and maintaining scooters, let alone paying for a tech company’s infrastructure. The inverse, notably, is true for software companies, which is why SaaS companies can sport 10x revenue multiples, as we’ve reported.)

So while we’re seeing more scooters than ever before, the VCs on the panel said they believed that scooter companies underestimated the costs of replacing damaged scooters and hiring people to retrieve them when they’d gone astray. (More on Bird’s evolution regarding scooters, and their amazingly fragile past.)

Whether or not Bird can overcome the sector’s challenges remains to be seen, but perhaps the unfortunate act of laying off some people will help it move toward a path to profitability – or at least to not losing as much money.

Illustration:

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With the global VC market posting record numbers in 2018, it’s no surprise that venture investors around the globe put lots of money into a hot new idea. What I’m still getting my head around is how many scooter companies there are, and how much they have raised.

After looking into a few recent rounds from dockless, e-scooter companies raised towards the end of 2018 and the first few weeks of 2019, we’re returning to the topic to highlight a few other companies in the space.

Scooters For All

.

That’s how Paris looks, at least according to Twitter user @1, who of scooters in the city, noting a host of brands that are active in the famous locale.

As only some of those companies made our list of recent funding events, I was curious who else we were missing. So, I did a little digging, parsing from , and came up with more names for the scooter faithful.

Here’s a sampling of who else is working to bring scooters to the people:

• . Based in Mexico with $72.7 million in known capital raised.
• . Based in Spain with €402,000 in known capital raised.
• . Based in Brazil with $1 million in known capital raised.
• . Based in Singapore with no known capital raised.
• . Based in Sweden, $52.9 million in known capital raised.

And there are other players in the space that are hard to verify as to life. ?��? Hard to tell from here.

There are even more seemingly dead scooter startups to be found.  looks deceased. has an unsafe site. as well. site is kaput.  seems over seems over as well.  hasn’t tweeted in ages.

All of the above discounts scooter manufacturers, and companies that rent out Vespa-like machines, electric or old-fashioned. Those startups, in my view, are different enough to warrant their own coverage and attention. So the moment they get interesting, we’ll be there.

With and hunting for their next mega round it can seem that there are just two scooter companies around. But there’s quite a lot doing in the World of Scoot.

Top Image Credit: .