Transportation

Consolidation continues in micromobility as Cooltra snaps up Cityscoot

Comment

Cityscoot moped scooter in Paris
Image Credits: Nicolas Kovarik / IP3 / Getty Images

Paris’ commercial court has accepted Cooltra’s offer to acquire Cityscoot. These two companies provide shared electric mopeds that you can unlock and ride to go from one place to another. Cityscoot had been placed under court-ordered receivership several months ago.

As interest rates hovered around 0% in Europe, micromobility startups thrived. Europe became the perfect playground for scooter startups, bike-sharing services and electric moped companies thanks to dense cities combined with a low cost of capital.

But things have taken a dark turn with rising interest rates. Not only did it became harder to raise funding rounds, but also to secure the debt facilities required to acquire new vehicles. It has fostered a wave of bankruptcies and mergers.

Cityscoot, one of the leading micromobility services in Paris with its iconic white-and-blue electric mopeds, is the latest company that is going to stop operating following a last-minute acquisition from Cooltra.

Cityscoot was the first company to introduce the concept of shared electric mopeds in Paris, before scooters from American companies like Lime and Bird and shared bikes from Chinese companies like Ofo and Mobike landed in Europe.

The company raised tens of millions of euros from private and public investors, including Groupe RATP and Caisse des Dépôts. It expanded to other cities, such as Nice, Milan, Rome and Turin — Paris remained Cityscoot’s main market.

At the same time, foreign micromobility companies also started to look at Paris as a potentially interesting market, including Cooltra and Yego. Lime even played around with the idea of launching electric mopeds in Paris. Cityscoot, Cooltra and Yego won a tender process organized by the city of Paris to limit mopeds to three operating licenses.

Cooltra is mostly acquiring a user base

And yet, just a few months later, Cityscoot failed to secure a new funding round to keep the company afloat and filed for insolvency. It was later placed under court-ordered receivership. As part of this process, the court received several offers to acquire Cityscoot.

The company’s former CEO Bertrand Fleurose has been very vocal on LinkedIn about his intentions to buy Cityscoot. But the court rejected his offer, likely because he didn’t have enough financial backers.

Cooltra made another offer that mostly focuses on Cityscoot’s assets, including its user base. Following today’s ruling, only 30 employees will keep their job even though Cityscoot had more than 150 employees. According to court documents, Cooltra is spending €400,000 ($430,000 at today’s exchange rate) to acquire Cityscoot and plans to spend around €1.5 million ($1.6 million) over the next two years to finance the merger.

But Cooltra also wants to act quickly. The company says that Cityscoot users will be able to connect to Cooltra’s app with their existing login information starting tomorrow. Cooltra’s mopeds will also get new stickers to show that Cityscoot and Cooltra are now the same service to ease the transition.

As a reminder, in other micromobility news, Bird recently filed for bankruptcy after acquiring Spin, and Tier and Dott announced plans to merge and form a single entity. Voi also recently laid off 120 people. And Superpedestrian shut down in the U.S.

It’s a bloodbath for micromobility startups in the current economic environment. And Cityscoot’s demise is likely not the last company to file for bankruptcy in the space.

Image Credits: BrasilNut1 / Getty Images

More TechCrunch

Paris-based Mistral AI, a startup working on open source Large Language Models — the building block for generative AI services — has been raising money at a $6 billion valuation,…

Sources: Mistral AI raising at a $6B valuation, SoftBank ‘not in’ but DST is

You can expect plenty of AI, but probably not a lot of hardware.

Google I/O 2024: What to expect

Dating apps and other social friend-finders are being put on notice: Dating app giant Bumble is looking to make more acquisitions.

Bumble says it’s looking to M&A to drive growth

When Class founder Michael Chasen was in college, he and a buddy came up with the idea for Blackboard, an online classroom organizational tool. His original company was acquired for…

Blackboard founder transforms Zoom add-on designed for teachers into business tool

Groww, an Indian investment app, has become one of the first startups from the country to shift its domicile back home.

Groww joins the first wave of Indian startups moving domiciles back home from US

Technology giant Dell notified customers on Thursday that it experienced a data breach involving customers’ names and physical addresses. In an email seen by TechCrunch and shared by several people…

Dell discloses data breach of customers’ physical addresses

Featured Article

Fairgen ‘boosts’ survey results using synthetic data and AI-generated responses

The Israeli startup has raised $5.5M for its platform that uses “statistical AI” to generate synthetic data that it says is as good as the real thing.

2 hours ago
Fairgen ‘boosts’ survey results using synthetic data and AI-generated responses

Hydrow, the at-home rowing machine maker, announced Thursday that it has acquired a majority stake in Speede Fitness, the company behind the AI-enabled strength training machine. The rowing startup also…

Rowing startup Hydrow acquires a majority stake in Speede Fitness as their CEO steps down

Call centers are embracing automation. There’s debate as to whether that’s a good thing, but it’s happening — and quite possibly accelerating. According to research firm TechSci Research, the global…

Retell AI lets companies build ‘voice agents’ to answer phone calls

TikTok is starting to automatically label AI-generated content that was made on other platforms, the company announced on Thursday. With this change, if a creator posts content on TikTok that…

TikTok will automatically label AI-generated content created on platforms like DALL·E 3

India’s mobile payments regulator is likely to extend the deadline for imposing market share caps on the popular UPI payments rail by one to two years, sources familiar with the…

India likely to delay UPI market caps in win for PhonePe-Google Pay duopoly

Line Man Wongnai, an on-demand food delivery service in Thailand, is considering an initial public offering on a Thai exchange or the U.S. in 2025.

Thai food delivery app Line Man Wongnai weighs IPO in Thailand, US in 2025

The problem is not the media, but the message.

Apple’s ‘Crush’ ad is disgusting

Ever wonder why conversational AI like ChatGPT says “Sorry, I can’t do that” or some other polite refusal? OpenAI is offering a limited look at the reasoning behind its own…

OpenAI offers a peek behind the curtain of its AI’s secret instructions

The federal government agency responsible for granting patents and trademarks is alerting thousands of filers whose private addresses were exposed following a second data spill in as many years. The…

US Patent and Trademark Office confirms another leak of filers’ address data

As part of an investigation into people involved in the pro-independence movement in Catalonia, the Spanish police obtained information from the encrypted services Wire and Proton, which helped the authorities…

Encrypted services Apple, Proton and Wire helped Spanish police identify activist

Match Group, the company that owns several dating apps, including Tinder and Hinge, released its first-quarter earnings report on Tuesday, which shows that Tinder’s paying user base has decreased for…

Match looks to Hinge as Tinder fails

Private social networking is making a comeback. Gratitude Plus, a startup that aims to shift social media in a more positive direction, is expanding its wellness-focused, personal reflections journal to…

Gratitude Plus makes social networking positive, private and personal

With venture totals slipping year-over-year in key markets like the United States, and concern that venture firms themselves are struggling to raise more capital, founders might be worried. After all,…

Can AI help founders fundraise more quickly and easily?

Google has found a way to bring a variation of its clever “Circle to Search” gesture to iPhone users. The new interaction, launched in January, allows Android users to search…

Google brings a variation on ‘Circle to Search’ to iPhone users

A new sculpture going live on Wednesday in the Flatiron South Public Plaza in New York is not your typical artwork. It combines technology, sociology, anthropology and art to let…

Always-on video portal lets people in NYC and Dublin interact in real time

Apple’s iPad event had a lot to like. New iPads with new chips and new sizes, a new Apple Pencil, and even some software updates. If you are a big…

TechCrunch Minute: When did iPads get as expensive as MacBooks?

Autonomous, AI-based players are coming to a gaming experience near you, and a new startup, Altera, is joining the fray to build this new guard of AI agents. The company announced…

Bye-bye bots: Altera’s game-playing AI agents get backing from Eric Schmidt

Google DeepMind has taken the wraps off a new version of AlphaFold, their transformative machine learning model that predicts the shape and behavior of proteins. AlphaFold 3 is not only…

Google DeepMind debuts huge AlphaFold update and free proteomics-as-a-service web app

Uber plans to deliver more perks to Uber One members, like member-exclusive events, in a bid to gain more revenue through subscriptions.  “You will see more member-exclusives coming up where…

Uber promises member exclusives as Uber One passes $1B run-rate

We’ve all seen them. The inspector with a clipboard, walking around a building, ticking off the last time the fire extinguishers were checked, or if all the lights are working.…

Checkfirst raises $1.5M pre-seed to apply AI to remote inspections and audits

Close to a decade ago, brothers Aviv and Matteo Shapira co-founded a company, Replay, that created a video format for 360-degree replays — the sorts of replays that have become…

Controversial drone company Xtend leans into defense with new $40 million round

Usually, when something starts to rot, it gets pitched in the trash. But Joanne Rodriguez wants to turn the concept of rot on its head by growing fungus on trash…

Mycocycle uses mushrooms to upcycle old tires and construction waste

Monzo has raised another £150 million ($190 million), as the challenger bank looks to expand its presence internationally — particularly in the U.S. The new round comes just two months…

UK challenger bank Monzo nabs another $190M as US expansion beckons

iRobot has announced the successor to longtime CEO, Colin Angle. Gary Cohen, who previous held chief executive role at Timex and Qualitor Automotive, will be heading up the company, marking a major…

iRobot names former Timex head Gary Cohen as CEO