Superpedestrian micromobility raises a massive round C

Superpedestrian Micromobility which operates the LINK escooters in the UK has raised a big $125million round C to roll out their artificial intelligence to protect pedestrians from reckless and poor driving.

While this will be music to the ears of local authorities and councils. Who often struggle to know what to do with this new industry of micromobility.

While this new tech from Superpedestrian provides AI tools to reduce pavement riding the wrong way down a one way street and all of the other annoying things that escooter riders seems to get away with.

Note, they get away with poor escooter driving by the transport infrastructure is set up for a lot of big tin cans called cars.

Changing the highway street signs along with reducing the cars on the road will provide a much better incentive for Escooter rides to ride better. While also improving the behaviour of these high performance ebikes.

Superpedestrian have partly done this by acquiring Navmatic last year.

The software of Navamatic has been adapted to the Superpedestrian escooters.

The Software of Navamatic uses precise GPS positioning to help micromobility escooter and micromobility operators locate vehicles and correct movements in real time.

Along with Superpedestrian's hardware advantages including a combination of AI, sensors and microprocessors, in order to provide a safety feature that would control for many unsafe riding behaviours,

“Even in cities unlike New York or Chicago that haven’t traditionally been walking cities, everyone now understands the primacy of the pedestrian,”

Paul White, senior director of public affairs at Superpedestrian, told TechCrunch a tech blog. “So, those cities and others are saying, we want to have a zero-tolerance approach to sidewalk riding. It’s not enough just to know with a relative amount of certainty that the scooter is on the sidewalk. We really want to see the intervention and the control to keep the scooters where they belong.”

The $125 million Series C round, which consists of both equity and debt.

Who are the investors in this micromobility company?

Jefferies, Antara Capital, the Sony Innovation Fund by IGV and FM Capital alongside existing backers like Spark Capital, General Catalyst and Citi via the Citi Impact Fund all participated in the round Superpedestrian would not share the terms of the debt agreement, nor which investors contributed to equity versus debt.

The previous raises;

In Dec 2020 Superpedestrian raised a series B of $60 Million.

“The capability is super interesting, not just for the scooter business, which is really about working with cities, but the capability is relevant to any small vehicle that operates in a dense, pedestrian-rich environment where having that sort of granular level of human scale controls means you’re not marring the pedestrian experience,” said White.

White goes on: “I think that’s another reason why we saw a lot of participation and interest in this round, not just because what the technology does for our core scooter business, but its relevance to any small electric fleet that’s going to grapple with the same challenges or not blocking the bike lane or intruding on valuable pedestrian space.”