Subscribe to the Crunchbase Daily

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 , São 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.

News that would buy , a small American scooter company made a splash. That scooter-war veterans and had managed to acquire another, larger rival mattered for the young unicorns. For Ford, the move was yet another acquisition, and move, into the broader mobility space.

Follow Crunchbase News on

The incumbent transit company didn’t merely generate good headlines when it said it was going to work on non-car mobility projects. The Spin deal, of course, comes several years after , and, as Crunchbase News reported the other day, the automotive giant has never been more startup-hungry than it is today.

But on the Spin side of things, clarity was harder to find. Reports on the value of the deal were all over the map, from to , and .

Even more, that the company’s prior, hoped-for token offering hadn’t gone off. That coupled with the interval since the firm’s last round of external capital, and it looked like Spin had run low on cash and found itself a home and an exit for its shareholders.

Maybe not. According to , the company had another option:

“[W]e’ve learned from multiple sources that the deal came after Spin had a signed Series B term sheet in hand, for $20 million on a $65 million pre-money valuation, led by New York’s Rosecliff Ventures.”

That actually makes sense? If Bird and Lime are worth billions, surely Spin, with its access to the San Francisco market, had value. And, given the amount of money sloshing around Silicon Valley today, it could have found some to put into its own pockets.

Perhaps Ford promised backing and help to Spin that it couldn’t have hoped to match on its own? And $20 million would have only gone so far. This old chart (source) shows how much Bird and Lime have grown after raising hundreds of millions apiece:

Mentally stack that against Spin’s $20 million Series B. The Ford option makes sense.

Top Image Credit: .