Tire and Dot, two leading European scooter- and bike-sharing services, are forming a service called Dr. The two startups have already planned to merge and form a single company in January 2024.
With this merger, the companies did not want to create a group of micro-mobility services. The operation was all about scale. With razor-thin margins, micromobility is a challenging industry, and scale is a key factor in improving unit economics and expanding the fleet of vehicles available to better compete with leaders in the space. lime.
“When we combined the two companies, we wanted to operate as one company, one technology stack, one set of operating methods across the board; just one company, not two companies,” DotK CEO Henry Moysink told TechCrunch. Told to
That’s why the company is moving everything to a single app and a fleet of vehicles for the end user. Tier 1 users will gradually be moved to dotapp on a city-by-city basis. Migration should be done by March 2025.
“If you’re in a city where Tire operates and Dotcom doesn’t, users will have to download the new app. If you have the latest Tire app, it’s just a few clicks. If not , so you have to download and register again,” Moissinac said.
Tire electric bikes and scooters are not going anywhere. They will be refreshed with dot stickers to cover the tire logo. You may have seen this change in some cities where both tires and dots were available.
“One of the big challenges was bringing the two fleets together on one technology stack, rebuilding our standard operating practices … what we’ve seen is that some things were done very well here, some things there. were well done, and we’re trying to bring the two together,” Mosenek said.
The new Dot fleet covers 427 cities across Europe and the Middle East. The overlap was quite small, as Dot and Tire were competing in only 17 cities. In total, this represents around 250,000 electric bikes and scooters.
During the past year, Dott and Tier had a little over 10 million unique riders who used these mobility services for 100 million trips. So that’s 10 trips per rider on average with some very repeat customers and some customers who only tried the service once. And the company thinks that’s one of the most important metrics.
“Our strategy is around locals. We are a local service for locals with frequent riders. The most important metric for me is the number of rides per active rider per month,” said Moissinac.
As part of this strategy, ridership is growing faster than the company’s revenue as Dott promotes passes to increase frequent use. For example, in Paris, you can buy a €4.99 pass so that all your rides for the next 30 days cost a flat fee of €1.75 per ride.
When Dott and Tier announced the merger, they also raised €60 million (about $67 million at current exchange rates). There is no funding round accompanying Monday’s announcement. “We’re fine with the cash,” Moissinac said.
“We don’t need a lot of cash, but we have opportunities that we can unlock if we invest a little bit more money. I don’t know if we do it now or later … in general, weather. In the winter, it’s a good time to think about your strategy for next year,” he added.
Credit : techcrunch.com
