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Travis VanderZanden, founded Bird in September 2017 after successful careers at both Lyft and Uber.

The company is based in the US and has their headquarters in Los Angeles. Together with their main competitor Lime, Bird is one of te companies who started the Electric Scooter War.

All sharing services has raised a serious amount of capital. It’s a very cash intensive business because you need to purchase a lot of electric scooters. In theory, each scooter is profitable after a few months, but the issue is that they don’t last that long. Lifespan of their vehicles is one of the most critical challenges to solve.

On the other hand, if you have capital, it’s a relatively simple business to start.

That’s why they have scaled so fast. In the beginning, speed to new markets seemed to be the a top priority in the electric scooter war. However, it doesn’t seem to be that difficult to place your own scooters in a city where other companies have established their operations.

The services are so similar so most people don’t care about which company they rent from. The rush to put scooters in every street-corner seems to backlash. Accident are not uncommon, and most countries that have allowed sharing services will probably add some sort of regulations.

It will be very interesting to see what happens if countries such as Germany change their laws. The different sharing services have scales so fast, have hundreds of employees, and are still not profitable.

From what I can find, Bird did a first round of funding in June 2017. The investor was Goldcrest Capital, a venture capital fund based in Dallas that invests in private technology companies. I haven’t been able to find the amount of capital raised at this stage, and even though there’s a lot of progress in the field of machine learning, Google still has a hard time giving me relevant articles when I search for “Bird seed”.

In their Series A, Bird raised an astonishing (if you’re not living in Silicon Valley or China) $15M. Seven investors participated in the round, including Goldcrest Capital, Craft Ventures, and Tusk Ventures.

At this point the electric scooter war had begun and everyone wanted to get ahead of the game by acquiring more capital. Bird raised $100M in their series B (compared to $37M for Uber). The investors were pretty much the same as in their series A apart from Index Ventures.

Only a couple of months lates Bird closed their series C were they raised an additional $158M in order to leave their competitor Lime in the dust. Two weeks later Lime closed their series C with $335M.

To get some detailed information about the spread of Bird, I have used web archives to look at the cities listed on their website at different points in time. The earliest I could find was 2 Jan 2019. It’s not clear to me if they list all their cities or just the most important ones. In any case, it’s clear from looking at the maps below, most cities in the world don’t have electric scooters from Bird.

Even tough sharing services have grown very fast during 2018 and 2019, there seems to be a lot of untapped potential in Asia and South America. I guess regulations and bad traffic makes many large cities in Asia undesirable at the moment.

As you can see from the world maps, Bird has invaded many more cities in Europe during 2019, instead of focusing on the US-market. Note that London is marked on the map, but if you read my post about electric scooters in the UK, you know that they are only allowed inside the Olympic Park.

Bird acquiring Circ is significant news in the electric scooter community. German-based Circ is one of the largest micro-mobility companies in Europe, together with the Swedish company Voi. The article states that Circ is the clear leader in Europe, but that does not seem factual.

The acquisition means that Bird adds more than 300 people to its list of employees and establish a massive presence in Europe. Even though the price-tag is not official yet, but I guess that Lukasz Gadowski, the founder and CEO of Circ, added come hard-earned cash to his name.