The Now and The Future of Electric Scooter Startups

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European micro-mobility via e-scooters

2017 marked a sudden rise among electric scooter startups. Rental American-based Lime and Bird became a huge success – Lime has raised a total of $935M in funding over 9 rounds (up to 2021), while Bird has got $623M over 8. In 2018, European e-scooter startups have started to have traction, too. Here are 4 main European e-scooter startups:

  • VOI – Sweden – $356M
  • TIER – Germany – $381M
  • WIND – Germany – $72M
  • dott – Netherlands – $57M

All these companies are differing in pricing, but all of them are providing rental service with dockless e-scooters for last-mile trips.

Observers and industry insiders remarked that e-scooter popularity and hype among investors were reminiscent of taxi startups like Uber. However, the COVID-19 pandemic slowed down the momentum – most companies had to shut down their operations during the spring. Despite that, overall usage levels of e-scooters basically returned to pre-COVID days by the end of 2020 and new business deals were made by all listed companies.

It’s no surpise that Europe became a birthplace for a lot of similar startups. EU is a great starting place, since they already have the required infrastructure and laws. Previously, bikes were the most popular alternative transportation in Europe, so lots of cities across the EU had vuild bike lanes and such. Same infrasturcture is currently in use by newer e-scooters,

With cities pressed to solve their transportation crisis amid rising concerns around gas-powered emissions, e-scooters renting is growing fast as one of the most popular micromobility transports. According to McKinsey’s forecast, the micromobility market has a potential to be worth between $200B – $300B by 2030 in the US alone, estimate size for Europe is about 100-150 billions. It equals about a quarter of forecasted global shared autonomous-driving market potential of roughly $1,600 billion in 20301.

European e-scooter startups are just in their infancy, with most of them being 3 years old or less. Despite that, it’s becoming clear that e-scooters can become one of the most popular alternative transportations out there in the future…