The Sharing Economy Is About To Scoot Into 2019

Back in April, it was somewhat difficult to find global companies that were in the same dockless e-scooter category as Bird, Lime, and Spin. Boy, how times have changed.

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Today, Wind Mobility announced that it has raised $22 million from Source Code Capital and HV Hotzbrinck Ventures. The German startup, which was founded in 2017, is the latest global company to hop into the last-mile transportation scene in which various contenders have popped up over the past year. In fact, half of the global e-scooter companies we list below were founded in 2018. Take a look:

The main plug for these startups is that last-mile transportation, the short yet inconvenient distance between a person’s commuting stop and their workplace or home, is an issue that has caused a lot of congestion in our city streets. They posit that with an option like dockless scooter sharing becoming the main mode of transportation between those stops, less people will be given to driving or grabbing a car.

Ridesharing giant Uber has taken a liking to the last-mile transportation issue, too. The company invested in Lime back in June. Uber’s CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said at the time that the company would most likely put a much bigger emphasis on last-mile transit in the future.

There’s just one issue with all of this: cars are still a very ubiquitous form of transportation in cities. The intended result is that cars will be off the road, which will instead be filled with scooters and standard public transportation. Scooter companies have a lot standing in their way when it comes to making that ideal a reality, not least of all, safety issues. While scooters and cars are forced to share the road, which will be the case for the foreseeable future, safety and regulation will likely be their most pressing challenges.

Illustration Credit: Li Anne Dias