- Swedish electric scooter startup VOI has raised a $30 million extension to its previous $85 million Series B round as part of its bid to take on its increasingly well-funded competitors.
- Voi's funding extension comes on the back of surge in activity for e-scooter companies following coronavirus.
- Voi says it was profitable in June, and hopes to be consistently profitable in 2022.
- "This is a capital-intensive market and we want to ensure we are sustainable in the long term," the company's cofounder and CEO, Fredrik Hjelm, previously told Business Insider in an interview.
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European scooter startups are battling to expand as city dwellers coming out of lockdown look for an alternative to public transport.
Swedish scooter startup Voi, founded in 2018, has just raised a $30 million extension to its 2019 $85 million Series B round as it looks to launch in the UK.
The company claims that it was profitable for the month of June following an initial downturn in activity during pandemic-induced lockdowns in Europe.
The fresh cash takes the company's total funding to $165 million.
Voi has expanded from its base in Stockholm to more than 40 cities in 10 European countries. People have taken 20 million rides on Voi scooters in the last two years and the startup has 4 million registered users, with 100,000 downloads in the UK already, according to a company statement on Wednesday.
"This is a capital-intensive market and we want to ensure we are sustainable in the long term," the company's cofounder and CEO, Fredrik Hjelm, previously told Business Insider in an interview. "We've grown a lot and have achieved profitability in some cities and want all our operations to be profitable in the next two years."
Vostok New Ventures led the new round. Previous investors including Balderton Capital, Creandum, Project A, JME Ventures, Raine Ventures, Kreos Capital, Inbox Capital, Rider Global, and Black Ice Capital participated in the round. It comes hot on the heels of a similar funding extension for rival scooter startup Tier, which raised $23 million in June.
The company claims that it saw its revenues grow fifty-fold during 2019 while it increased headcount from 31 at the end of 2018 to 409 staff by the end of 2019.
European scooter companies have raised significantly less than their Silicon Valley rivals but are confident of coming out on top. US firms including Bird and Lime have benefited from huge tranches of venture capital funding, raising $623 million and $935 million respectively, per Crunchbase data.
Check out VOI's pitch deck below:
https://ift.tt/30jHeZy