Tier and Dott, Europe's leading scooter and bike sharing services, will become one service called Dott. The two startups have already announced plans to merge and form a single company in January 2024.
With this merger, both companies did not want to create a conglomerate of micromobility services. The operation was all about scale. Micromobility is a challenging industry with razor-thin margins, and scale is a key factor in increasing the number of vehicles available to improve unit economics and become more competitive with Lime, the leader in this space. is.
“When we merged the two companies, we wanted to operate as one company, one technology stack, and one set of operating practices everywhere. Just one company, not two companies,” said Dott CEO. Henri Moissinac told TechCrunch.
That's why the company is moving everything to a single app and a single fleet for end consumers. Tier users will be redirected to the Dot app in stages, city by city. Migration must be completed by March 2025.
“If you live in a city where Tier operates and Dott does not, users will need to download a new app. If you have Tier's latest app, it's just a few clicks away. If you don't If so, you will need to download and re-register,” Moisinak said.
Tier electric bikes and scooters aren't going anywhere. Updated with a dot sticker covering the Tier logo. You may have seen that change in some cities where both Tier and Dott are available.
“The big challenge was integrating the two fleets into one technology stack and rebuilding standard operating practices. There are things that work, there are things that work over there, and we're trying to bring the two together,” Moisinak said.
The new Dot Fleet covers 427 cities across Europe and the Middle East. Dot and Tier competed in 17 cities, so the overlap was very small. Overall, this equates to approximately 250,000 electric bikes and scooters.
Last year, Dot and Tier had a little more than 10 million unique passengers who used these mobility services on 100 million trips. This means an average of 10 trips per passenger, with some users being very frequent and others just trying the service once. The company believes this is one of its most important metrics going forward.
“Our strategy is local-centric. We are a local service for local people who are frequent riders. The most important metric to me is rides,” Moisinac said.
As part of this strategy, Dott promotes passes to increase subscriptions, and rides are increasing faster than the company's revenue. For example, in Paris, you can buy a pass for 4.99 euros and get access to all rides for the next 30 days for a flat rate of 1.75 euros per ride.
When Dot and Tier announced their merger, the companies also raised €60 million (about $67 million at current exchange rates). Monday's announcement does not involve any funding round. “Cash is fine,” Moisinac said.
“I don’t need more cash, but there are opportunities that open up if I invest a little more cash. I don’t know if I want to do it now or later…Winter is usually a good time to think about next year’s strategy ” he added.