- Dockless electric scooter sharing company Bird announced it has acquired Scoot — which is an electric scooter and moped startup.
Bird, a Santa Monica, California-based dockless electric scooter sharing company, announced it has acquired Scoot — which is an electric scooter and moped startup. The terms of the deal were undisclosed, but The Wall Street Journal’s sources said that it was valued at $25 million in a combination of cash and stock.
“We are thrilled to welcome Scoot to the Bird ecosystem and look forward to working with the Scoot team as we further scale our complementary missions – to replace car trips with micro-mobility options for all,” said Bird CEO Travis VanderZanden in a statement. “Together we will make a bigger impact on our riders’ daily lives and the cities we serve.”
Before the acquisition, Scoot launched in 2011 and raised $47 million in funding with a valuation of $71 million since then. Originally, the company was running a fleet of electric mopeds and now it also has electric bikes and scooters in its fleet.
As a comparison, Bird raised about $415 million in funding (Bird’s Crunchbase profile) and in its $300 million round 5 months ago it was reported that Fidelity was leading the round at a pre-money valuation of $2 billion.
As a combined company, Bird and Scoot are planning to offer riders more vehicles and provide services in more communities together. And they have a shared goal of helping cities meet their ambitious goals of reducing both automobile traffic and climate-changing carbon emissions. Scoot is going to continue to operate Scoot as a wholly owned subsidiary of Bird.
“Since we launched the first electric vehicle service you access with your smartphone, we have pursued our mission of Electric Vehicles for Everyone and showed cities that shared, electric mobility is a convenient, fun, and affordable way for citizens to get where they need to go,” added Scoot founder and president Michael Keating. “With Bird, our mission remains the same, but the scale at which we will pursue it, and the vehicles we will offer will be so much better for our riders and the cities we serve.”
