Voi Technology, the “micro-mobility” startup that operates an e-scooter service in a 38 cities throughout 10 European nations, has raised an $85 million in Series B funding.
Backing the spherical is a mix of present and new traders. They embrace Balderton Capital, Creandum, Project A, JME Ventures, Raine Ventures, Kreos Capital, Inbox Capital, Rider Global, and Black Ice Capital. The new funding brings the full raised by Voi to $136 million.
Eagled-eyed readers could have observed that, primarily based on our earlier Voi protection, the full determine is $32 million brief. That’s as a result of not all of Voi’s earlier Series A dedication was cashed in after the corporate was supplied extra beneficial phrases for its $30 million Series A extension and due to this fact elected not to attract down the second tranche of its unique Series A.
Launched in 2018, the corporate is best-known for its e-scooter leases however now pitches itself as a micro-mobility supplier, providing quite a few totally different transport gadgets. These embrace varied e-scooter and e-bike fashions, in a bid to turn out to be a broader transport operator serving to to re-shape city transport and wean individuals off utilizing vehicles.
To date, Voi says it has four million registered customers and has powered 14 million rides. More lately it has launched new, extra strong {hardware} that has been designed to maintain the rigours of economic e-bike sharing. The thought is that extra appropriate {hardware} will assist e-scooter firms enhance margins since extra rides could be extracted from the life-span of every car.
On that be aware, Voi says it can use the brand new funding to develop “strong profitable businesses” within the 38 cities the place it’s already working, in addition to improve its R&D spend to enhance its know-how platform and merchandise. Earlier this 12 months, the corporate introduced that it’s already worthwhile within the cities of Stockholm and Oslo.
“Clearly, we feel we are on track to achieve this in more of our cities and that is our aim,” Voi co-founder and CEO Fredrik Hjelm tells me. “At this point, a key focus for us is to ensure we continue to increase the lifetime of our e-scooters, forge key partnerships and continue to work in those cities which provide the best conditions for a profitable e-scooter business”.
Hjelm says that Voi’s model 2 scooters are projected to final over 18 months, which suggests the corporate ought to be in revenue earlier than it wants to lift once more. However, he wouldn’t be drawn on when that is perhaps.
With regards to R&D and enhancements to the Voi platform, the corporate will proceed to work on the lifetime of its e-scooters, along with improved restore administration through integrating “predictive diagnostics”.
Hjelm additionally says Voi is growing “AI-powered” fleet administration and extra usually the platform’s functionality to help future product portfolio enlargement. In different phrases, we will count on new micro-mobility system classes sooner or later.
