Antler’s Micromobility Round Table: Trends and Takeaways

Micromobility is a rapidly growing space with ample opportunities for development. On May 4th, we hosted a panel discussion about this interesting space. In this roundtable, we aimed to discover the trends, challenges, and emerging opportunities in the space of micromobility.

Setting the stage

Mobility startups have been around for a while and some of them have been showing incredible traction. For example, Bird made the run from zero to a $1bn valuation in about six months in 2018.

Internationally we have seen that Didi and Grab have very concrete IPO plans, for $100bn and $35bn respectively. We have also witnessed some major fundraises, such as Voi ($160m) and Tier ($250m) at the end of 2020.

In the Netherlands, VanMoof raised $40m in the second half of last year and this year already Felyx raised €24m and Dott raised €70m. Also earlier this year Dutch EV car manufacturer Lightyear has raised $48m in a fresh round of funding led by Zero Point Holding BV.

But what has been the impact of the pandemic on this industry? Which business models will have the largest success in the future, private sales or subscription-based renting, operational leasing, or the shared business model? Is there still room for new players? We asked our panel for answers.

Introducing our panel

We were honored to have a panel of 6 industry experts, who brought different perspectives to the table. On the panel we had:

Steven Uitentuis: Former CEO and cofounder of Swapfiets, a smart bike subscription. He left Swapfiets one year ago to join the Dutch VC fund Ponooc as Venture Director, where he is looking at investments in the Mobility and Energy sector.

Alan Price: VP of People and part of the founding team of Dott, a shared micromobility operator. In this role, he leads all people-related activities. Prior to Dott, Alan worked in ‘on-demand marketplaces’, having spent time at Uber, Wolt, and Ofo.

Marco Knitel: Managing Director and Co-founder of scooter sharing company Check. Marco joined Uber 6 years ago as the first operations manager in Europe and later became General Manager for Uber and UberEats in the Netherlands.

Magda Lukaszewicz: Principal at Balderton Capital, where she focuses on Consumer and Mobility — Balderton is a leading European early-stage (Seed & Series A) venture capital investor, focused exclusively on European founded technology companies.

Pieter Litjens: General Director of CROW — CROW is a knowledge platform for Transport, Mobility and Infrastructure. From 2014–2018 Pieter was deputy mayor of the City of Amsterdam, responsible for transport.

Davy Louwers: Former CEO of the International Bike Group, in the Netherlands known for their retail label Fietsenwinkel.nl. Currently, he is the Founder of Hellorider, which provides leasing and asset management services for old-school mobility providers.

The conversation was moderated by Ronald Jan Schuurs, Partner at Antler Amsterdam.

Key Takeaways from Our Discussion

Has the Covid pandemic been an accelerator for change with respect to micromobility?

Alan explained that “a lot has changed because of Covid. First of all, there is the safety aspect with public transport, which favors modalities such as ours, which you can use in the open air, versus being crowded on the tube. Secondly, there have been infrastructure changes, more bike lanes have emerged. In the last two months alone Paris got 50km of new bicycle road. Mobility becomes a political topic, where parking space makes way for bike lanes, driven by consumer demand.”

Is there still room for new players in this space?

According to Magda “certainly, it is a relatively new sector in the way that it is executed today. And whenever there is a big change, there will be new opportunities on the back of that. For example with scooters, first you have the vehicles, but then you have to think about charging infrastructure, or companies that think about selling services, or sharing data, or financing, or drive systems, or software for bikes. There is plenty that could be done. But it is also important to think as a founder ‘ what is it that is new that I am bringing to the market’.”

She also added that “as we spend more time at home and we get more services delivered to us. There is a lot of opportunity in the micromobility space, focused on B2B. It is better to focus on the users that do 30–40 short rides per day, like gig workers at delivery companies, than those that do 30–40 rides per year.”

Pieter, with your history as deputy mayor of the city of Amsterdam, what is your take on the topics discussed so far?

Pieter explained that “when I started as deputy mayor in Amsterdam in 2014, the shared bike system was a mess: poor quality bikes, a free-floating system, mainly used by tourists. The Amsterdammers hated it. We as a city had no regulations or policies and we decided to ban all bike-sharing. One of the most important things, for any micromobility player, is to see the government as your partner, also when it comes to data sharing. Uber, for example, took an aggressive approach when entering the market, and it did not gain sympathy from the policymakers. When you behave as a partner, the reluctance from policymakers to make way for micromobility will decrease.”

Alan added that in “2017 bike-sharing was a gold rush, there were no tenders, if you could tick certain boxes you could launch. Obike deployed 5k bikes without doing any quality checks. In 2018 there was a similar race on scooters. Initially, we thought: Is this a first-mover advantage? It turned out to be a first-mover disadvantage because the quality of the hardware, the technology, the IoT was not sufficient. Now you need to win tenders and are forced to think about sustainable growth.”

What business models do you think will be most successful in the future: private sales, subscription, leasing etc?

Davy explained that “Swapfiets (ie. a smart bike subscription) is the perfect example of normalizing the shared economy. At Fietsenwinkel.nl the average age of our customers was 51 years, very high for an e-commerce platform. Now, with leasing, we lease to the population that typically already leases cars. For students, it is normal to subscribe to a normal bike. The size of the asset and age play a role.”

Steven added that “The biggest polluter in Co2 admittance is stuff you own. That is the core reason why I believe subscriptions will win — using less is better for the environment. Secondly, if you buy stuff, you also buy the problem if it breaks down. And the younger generation does not want to worry about stuff you don’t want to worry about and they are willing to pay for it. The micromobility market will grow. The mode of mobility will change throughout the future. But I think the e-bike specifically will see a major boost in the coming years. When it comes to the different business models, I think they are all here to stay and it will depend on the vehicle. But I do think that private sales will go down as other models gain more traction.”

Key Insights

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the micromobility industry, notably during the complete lockdown phases. However, micromobility startups have dramatically accelerated when cities opened up again and people preferred to opt for single-rider, open-air transit vehicles to maintain social distancing and have minimum shared points of contact.

Moreover the global population is expected to reach 8.5 billion by 2030, with 60% of people living in cities, accounting for 70% of global emissions. This increase in the urban population will cause an exponential increase in congestion, with a major contribution from traditional transport vehicles such as a car, bus, or train. Micromobility can be a cost-effective answer to this, along with some other issues such as increasing global population and environmental concerns.

There are still some challenges for micromobility, such as lack of regulations, citywide bans, and theft. However, this sector has the potential to disrupt the mobility industry globally massively. And not just on the B2C side, but very likely also on the B2B side there will be new players disrupting the space as they solve some of these issues.

Micromobility is still a relatively young industry and there are still ample opportunities for new players to tag along with the success of this growing sector.

If you want to delve deeper into the conversation we had, you can access the recording of the event here.

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