BEAM MOBILITY

Beam started in 2018 in Singapore. Alan Jiang and Deb Gangopadhyay founded it right as shared e-scooters were exploding in the US.

Jiang had watched that gold rush up close. He decided the smarter move was Asia-Pacific, where almost nobody was fighting yet.

The pitch was simple. Give crowded Asian cities a cheap, clean way to travel short distances.

They painted the scooters purple and called them Beam. Then they went city by city, working with local councils instead of dumping scooters overnight.

You open the app. You find a purple scooter or e-bike nearby.

You scan it, ride it, and park it. You pay a small unlock fee plus a per-minute rate.

Beam owns the scooters and rents them out thousands of times each. The math works when a scooter gets ridden a lot before it wears out or gets damaged.

Cities like it because Beam pushes riders to park in marked spots, not in the middle of the sidewalk.

The main product is the app and the purple e-scooter fleet. You unlock a scooter with your phone and pay by the minute.

Beam also runs e-bikes in some cities for longer trips. The clever bit is the parking tech.

The app steers riders into marked bays with small rewards. It can also slow or stop a scooter ridden into a no-go zone.

Beam pitches all of this to city governments as the responsible way to do shared scooters.

Beam's edge was picking the market nobody wanted to fight over. While Bird and Lime burned cash brawling in American cities, Beam quietly took Southeast Asia and Australia.

It also made parking its signature move. The app offers little rewards for leaving scooters in designated bays, which keeps regulators happy.

Happy regulators mean permits. Permits mean Beam gets to operate while rivals get banned.

By 2022 it ran e-scooters and e-bikes across 35 cities. Playing nice with city hall turned out to be a real strategy, until it stopped playing nice.

Shared scooters are a brutal business. The vehicles get vandalized, dumped, and worn down fast.

Every one that dies before it earns its keep is a loss. But Beam's worst wounds were self-inflicted.

In August 2024 Auckland cancelled its licence after finding Beam ran nearly 40% more scooters than allowed and fed misleading data to hide it. The council referred the matter to police.

Wellington suspended Beam around the same time for the same kind of breach. Beam lives and dies by government permits.

Cheating on them nearly torched its business in one of its biggest regions.

Beam raised $135 million over its life. The early money came from big names, including Sequoia, Founders Fund, and ZhenFund.

Sequoia Capital India and Hana Ventures led the $26 million Series A in 2020. The $93 million Series B in 2022 was led by private equity firm Affirma Capital, with Sequoia and others piling in again.

Those are serious backers for a scooter company most Americans have never heard of. The bet was always that Asia-Pacific micromobility would be huge, and that Beam got there first.