Singapore e-scooter start-up gets Series A extension

Square Peg Capital and GSR Ventures led the extension, which brings the round to $30.5 million. The company, which was founded in 2016, received initial funding last December from the same investors as well as SeedPlus and Seeds Capital, an investment unit of Enterprise Singapore, a government agency.

Neuron lists Singapore and nine locations across Australia and New Zealand – including Auckland, Brisbane and Adelaide – as its core markets. The company has grown aggressively in Australia and New Zealand since launching in June 2019. Nearly two million trips amounting to 4 million kilometers have been completed by 400,000 riders on 4,000 e-scooters.

Demand for micro-mobility services has increased following COVID-19. One in five users that rode a Neuron vehicle during the lockdown in Australia had never been on an e-scooter before. Since the pandemic, Australian and New Zealand riders have increased their average e-scooter trip distance by 23% to 2.6 km, while the average duration has risen by 10% to more than 14 minutes.

“Cities across the world are rethinking their transport systems and increasingly people are looking for a safe, inexpensive and socially-distanced way to travel post-COVID-19. This presents a great opportunity for micro-mobility providers. Our experience of operating in Australia and New Zealand, combined with fresh funding, will help us accelerate our growth across the region and beyond,” Zachary Wang, the company’s CEO, said in a statement.

Neuron partners with city councils when rolling out services in new locations. The company plans to enter at least five new cities in Australia and New Zealand within the next 12 months – services launched in Canberra and Townsville in the last two weeks – and recently announced that Slough would be its first location in the UK.

The start-up also designs and manufactures all its own scooters, facilitating geofencing – which allows councils to assign low-speed zones, no-riding zones, and no-parking zones – interchangeable batteries, voice guidance and fall detection capabilities, and an app-controlled helmet lock. Neuron also employs data scientists, urban planners, and engineers to translate raw data into insights for e-scooter-sharing operations.

“The company continues to create new technology solutions to address the transport challenges of individual cities, and they work closely with councils to implement them in a way that drives better outcomes for the public. This approach has seen Neuron introduce a number of world-firsts, cementing them as an industry leader,” said Tushar Roy, a partner at Square Peg.

Other investment activity in the e-scooter space includes a $26 million Series A for Singapore-headquartered Beam, which operates in Australia, New Zealand, South Korea, Taiwan, and Malaysia. Lime and oBike also used Singapore as a launching pad for services across the region.

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• Topics
• Southeast Asia
• Early-stage
• Technology
• Singapore
• Australia
• New Zealand
• Transportation
• Square Peg Capital
• GSR Ventures