Hello and welcome back to our regular morning look at private companies, public markets and the gray space in between.
While the IPO cycle reprices former unicorns and concern imbues the private market with profit warnings, it turns out that there is still appetite for scooter startups. Even more, there’s hunger for both combinations in the space (not a surprise), and for scooter startup shares (which may be).
As TechCrunch reported yesterday, Bird, an American scooter startup worth several billion dollars, consumed one of its European rivals and raised $75 million in the process. Circ, the formerly independent scooter shop, was struggling to have enough cash on hand and had undergone layoffs, despite having raised €55 million a year ago (that round was announced in January 2019).
The subsumption of Circ comes after other scooter companies underwent layoffs themselves, and in some cases, struggled to raise fresh capital. Tie all of that to the fact that 2019 brought several sharply negative financial reports from Big Scooter, and the result is a milieu that’s been hard to track from a purely financial perspective; this is all the more complicated when we take product and geography into the mix, of course. This morning we’ll fix that by racing through what’s happened since mid-2018 in Scooterdom in accounting terms.
Timeline
What follows is a financial highlights reel, naturally, but one that should provide us with a good overview of the ebb and flow of the world of scooters and micromobility over the last six quarters or so:
- June 2018: Bird raises $158 million in a Series C led by Sequoia Capital
- June 2018: Skip raises $25 million in a Series A led by Accel
- June 2018: RIDE raises $500,000
- July 2018: Lime raises $335 million in a Series C led by GV
- July 2018: Grin Scooters raises $7 million seed round
- August 2018: VOI Technology raises a $2.9 million seed round led by Vostok New Ventures
- September 2018: Grin Scooters raises $20 million seed round
- October 2018: Grin Scooters raises $45.7 million Series A
- October 2018: Grin and Ride merge
- October 2018: Beam raises a $6.4 million seed round led by Class 5 Global and Sequoia Capital India
- November 2018: VOI Technology raises a $50 million Series A led by Balderton Capital
- November 2018: Ford Smart Mobility buys Spin, which had raised at least $8 million
- December 2018: Skip raises $100 million in debt
- January 2019: Grin and Yellow merge
- January 2019: Grow Mobility (the fusion of Grin, Yello and Ride) raises $150 million
- January 2019: RIDE raises $1.2 million
- February 2019: Lime raises $310 million in a Series D led by Bain Capital Ventures
- March 2019: VOI Technology adds $30 million more to its Series A
- June 2019: Bird acquires Scoot
- July 2019: Bird’s 2018 revenue from Q3 ($25 million) and Q4 ($40 million) and its Q1 2019 revenue ($15) and loss from the same quarter ($100 million) become public
- September 2019: Skip adds capital from Toyota AI Ventures to its Series A
- October 2019: Bird raises $275 million in a Series D1 led by Caisse de Depot et Placement du Quebec and Sequoia Capital
- October 2019: It becomes known that Lime expects to post an operating loss of $300 million in the year, against gross revenue of $420 million
- October 2019: RIDE raises $300,000
November 2019: Scooter companies Ojo and Gotcha merge - November 2019: VOI Technology raises an $85 million Series B led by Vostok New Ventures
- January 2020: Lime lays off around 100 people
- January 2020: Bird raises $75 million in a Series D2 led by no one, funded by four parties
Got all that?
We went through that exercise to show a few things. First, that there has been a global push into scooter companies, with the aggregate capital bet likely approaching the $2 billion mark, if not more. Second, that there has been some merger and acquisition activity before the recent Bird-Circ combination. And, third, we’ve seen precious little reporting of profits or any other sort of healthy growth.
Which makes Bird’s $75 million add-on all the more interesting. The company just picked up 300 new employees, which could boost its cost base, depending on how financially healthy Circ was before its acquisition. It’s not hard to wonder whether the deal will actually improve Bird’s underlying economics, and if not, how the purchase might shake up its future fundraising prospects.
Recall that Lime was recently reported to be partner-less after spending months in the market recently, hunting for new capital. If Lime can’t raise, can Bird put together another huge round? What happens if they both struggle to put together megarounds in 2020?
Lime says it’s shooting for an adjusted form of profitability, perhaps as soon as this year. If it can pull that off, the spigots should flow. If it can’t, then it’s hard to see what’s ahead for the two-wheeled giants.