Swedish e-scooter startup Voi raises $30 million, claims to be close to profitability in several cities

Voi Technology, a Stockholm-based e-scooter sharing startup, has raised a $30 million funding round from Vostok New Ventures, Balderton Capital, LocalGlobe, Raine Ventures, and new investors Project A and Creandum. This capital injection brings the total amount attracted by the company to date to $83 million.

In the seven months since its launch, Voi claims to have served 400,000 riders, who have taken a total of more than 750,000 rides and travelled over 1.5 million km in total. Back in November 2018, when the company raised its $50 million Series A round, the numbers were, respectively, 120,000 users, 200,000 rides and 350,000 km in total distance travelled.

Currently, Voi scooters are available in Stockholm, Gothenburg, Malmö, Lund, Uppsala, Copenhagen, Paris, Lyon, Madrid, Malaga, Zaragoza, Murcia, Lisbon and Faro. Today, the company also launched in Oslo, and plans to start operating in Helsinki and yet-unnamed other cities “later this month.”

Voi also stated that by April the startup is expecting to reach profitability in most of its cities in the Nordics, which seems surprising, as its US counterparts appear to be losing quite a bit of money on each scooter. When asked about the average lifetime of its vehicles, a spokesperson for Voi said that “we don’t share data on the average lifetime of Voi scooters publicly.”

“However, we can say that with each successive model, the lifespan of our scooters increases significantly because the tracking improves so we don’t lose as many scooters, the hardware is more durable so they don't break as easily, and scooter theft decreases the longer you operate in a city,” they added.

Voi takes pride in communicating with the authorities of the cities it operates in. The company said that it's helping to develop an informal “Code of Conduct” for shared e-scooter platforms operating in Stockholm and across Europe. It's also worth mentioning that back in October the Traffic Office of Stockholm was considering banning shared electric scooters from the city but that never happened.