Mobycy, a dockless bicycle-sharing startup, has spindled to e-bike and e-scooter-sharing, designing them in-house and piloting the service in Gurgaon. Cofounder of Mobycy, Akash Gupta told that the first set of 100 electric scooters were already on the streets and this would soon be extended to other parts of the National Capital Region.
The reason for setting up of Mobycy in 2017 was to address the issue of last-mile connectivity and the company soon realized that given the conditions in India, scooters were a better alternative to bicycles. “We will have 300 ‘Zypp’ scooters in NCR by the end of the month and up to 5,000 over the next six months,” he said. Over the next six months, we will be expanding to enter other cities like Hyderabad, Bengaluru and Pune.
The company is gearing up to launch e-scooter-sharing in Hyderabad and is working with the city’s metro service operator to provide last-mile connectivity to stations. The company used locally available electric bikes to start with before deciding to design it themselves. Manufacturing has been outsourced to a third-party vendor.
“These are smaller, custom-designed bikes which are better suited for Indian roads,” said Gupta.
The scooters are fitted with smart locks that allow users to locate scooters in the vicinity through an app and unlock them by scanning a QR code. The app updates users on the remaining battery and runtime on the scooters.
The company recently raised an undisclosed amount of angel funding through Venture Catalysts. Gupta said that it is in talks to raise $5 million over the next few months. These funds would be deployed towards expanding the business and building the technology for better connected scooters, in addition to marketing and customer acquisition.
The last-mile connectivity (under 6 km) segment in India, in which Mobycy operates, is pegged at about $4.5 billion, as per certain estimates. As of now, Mobycy operates 2,000 bikes across three locations in India.
