Today, I’m excited to announce we have sold a majority interest of Micromobility Industries to Mayten. 

I first met my Co-Founder, Horace Dediu, in Copenhagen in the fall of 2018. I had left Pecolate a week prior and hopped on a plane to see Horace speak and talk about mobility in a new way, under a term he pioneered, Micromobility. The premise was simple, most trips were short trips (less than 3 miles) and most trips were alone in a car. If some of the trips could be shifted to smaller electric vehicles as technology’s driving force continued to make better and cheaper products, everyone would win and we would create much more livable urban landscapes. 

I loved the idea, living in NYC and seeing the benefit of movement outside of a car, I wanted to help the entrepreneurs that were going to make the micromobility dream a reality. We started what was a simple media company under the banner, Micromobility Industries. We would be a platform for dreamers that were building a better mobility future with events in America and Europe, a podcast led by Oliver Bruce and a website that cataloged all the micromobility companies in the industry. Over the years, a lot of our vision has become a reality and I’m proud that our work has touched millions of people. Micromobility became the category for classifying small electric vehicles around the world, governments have started micromobility departments and urban planners include concepts around micromobility for everything from parking facilities to how they built roads and buildings. 

The category has been through a boom and bust over the last 5 years as shared micromobility became overfunded and over regulated and the Covid rush led everyone to buy an ebike, golf cart or scooter.  Now the category is at a more steady growth state and one that will continue to add more trips to our lives, ideally in a fun and freeing way that we can’t get with other modes of transportation. For the next great cities being built around the world, micromobility will have a seat at the table and be a major part of the modes to move people around.  

For me personally, I feel the next frontier of mobility is upon us and that is why I started Ride AI (along with Alephic but more on that in a future post). The great unlock for micromobility will come when we are all guaranteed a level of mobility safety that we currently don’t have with the dangers that are on our streets. I’m very confident with AI we will get there and the future is much closer than many expect. Some of the early green shoots we can see with our eyes are Waymo vehicles, Tesla FSD improvements, general purpose robotics and automated traffic enforcement. The days are bright for safer mobility where an order of magnitude improvement could save 40,000 American lives and 1,000,000 global lives per year. 

With Mayten as the new partner to take Micromobility Industries forward I couldn’t be more excited to have my friend Prabin Joel Jones running it. Prabin is a great entrepreneur and his vision for micromobility and the businesses it can create is second to none. I can’t wait to see what Prabin will do and I will be there as a partner in future Microbility Industries events around the world.

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Thanks to everyone that has made micromobility a category and helped create a better way to move. Onward!  

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