Scooter Startup Yellow Raises $63M To Take Over The Congested Streets Of Latin America

Morning Report: Brazilian startup Yellow wants to bring scooters all over Latin America.

São Paolo-based dockless bicycle and scooter startup Yellow has raised a $63 million Series A on the heels of its $12.3 million seed round closed in April.  According to TechCrunch (and Crunchbase), the round was the largest Series A ever for a Latin American Startup. The investment led by Silicon Valley-based GGV Capital, and brings Yellow’s total known funding raised to  $75.3 million, according to Crunchbase.

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As reporting on the round has pointed out, Yellow’s founders Ariel Lambrecht and Renato Freitas are more famous for their most previous ridesharing startup 99. The ridesharing startup sold to China-based ridesharing giant Didi Chuxing for $1 billion in January after raising $241.3 million during its lifetime.

The two mobility entrepreneurs are looking to move from cars into that last-mile space, beginning with São Paolo, which Fortune ranked the 4th most congested city in the world. The company plans to unleash 20,000 bikes and more than 1,000 scooters onto Sao Paolo’s city streets by the end of the year, according to Bloomberg. And as U.S. companies like Lime, Bird, and Uber’s e-bike company Jump expand to Europe, Yellow aims to get a head start on the Latin American market, beginning with Mexico, and is also planning to open up a local factory. Axios noted that manufacturing is a familiar industry for Lambrecht and Freitas’s co-founder Eduardo Musa who was the former CEO of a bike manufacturing company.

So it looks like Yellow has the chops to get the job done—manufacturing knowledge, experience in the ridesharing space, and success bringing a company to a big exit. If anything, getting an early start in the region that has yet to experience a scooter war is strategic, especially as the industry’s heavily-backed incumbents have their eyes on other markets.