Earlier this year, Denver awarded Veo a 5-year exclusive contract to deploy 9k vehicles across the city this summer, making it the largest exclusive micromobility contract in the United States.

For a company that started out with prototype vehicles in the trunk of its founder's car, demoing to city partners one campus at a time, it is quite a distance to have travelled.

The person responsible for that distance is Candice Xie, co-founder and CEO of Veo. She started the company in 2017, deployed its first dockless bike share system in 2018, and added electric scooters in 2019.

Since then, the business has grown to over $50m in revenue on roughly $16m in total funding. In an industry that lionised the blitzscaler and celebrated the billion-dollar raise, Veo did something almost nobody managed to do. It became genuinely, verifiably EBIT positive.

In this episode of the Micromobility Podcast, Candice sat down with host Prabin Joel Jones to talk through how.

A Blank Slate in a Gold Rush

The year Veo launched, micromobility was having its gold rush moment. Bird and Lime were raising hundreds of millions of dollars. Conferences in San Francisco were packed with founders announcing their latest rounds from the stage.

The logic animating the whole frenzy was seductive in its simplicity. Get big fast, plant vehicles in every city you can reach, and let the economics sort themselves out once you had enough scale to make them work.

Candice arrived into all of that with something none of the big players had. A blank slate.

This was her second job out of college, and she has since reflected on why that turned out to matter so much. She had no prior playbook to follow and no inherited assumptions about how the industry was supposed to operate. So she did the obvious thing that everyone else seemed to be skipping. She focused on what riders and city partners actually needed.

That focus showed up immediately in how Veo spent its early capital. Almost all of it went into hardware development. Not into sales teams, not into city expansion, not into the kind of overhead that makes a company look serious from the outside.

Into the vehicle itself, because Candice's view from the start was that the vehicle is where ridership happens, and without the right vehicle in the right place, none of the rest of it matters.

The Harder Path, Chosen Deliberately

Building proprietary hardware was, by any reasonable measure, the riskier path. Design flaws scale with the fleet. Manufacturing problems can halt deployment. Every broken unit sitting in the field is a cost that compounds.

Candice knew all of this going in. She and her co-founder evaluated what was available on the market at the time and concluded that nothing could hold up to the demands of real shared use in the field.

Deploying those vehicles was not something she was willing to do. Her belief was that putting subpar vehicles out there would hurt the rider experience, erode public trust, and damage the entire industry. She thinks that is exactly what happened with a number of the early operators, and that the industry is still paying the price for those decisions.

Her co-founder came from the bike industry and brought serious engineering experience into Veo from day one. Between them, they set an unusually high bar for what the vehicle should look and feel like, extending well beyond functionality and safety into something that does not always get talked about in this industry. Accessibility.

That word came into focus for Candice during the early demo trips, when she was flying between Seattle and Florida with vehicles in the trunk of her car. She would watch people try a standard stand-up scooter for the first time and notice the same thing over and over again.

Many of them were genuinely uncomfortable. They gripped the handlebars too tight, barely moved above walking pace, and were visibly uncertain about what they were doing.

The instinct in that situation might have been to conclude that those particular people were not the target market. Candice reached a different conclusion entirely. The product was not accessible enough. That was not a rider problem. That was Veo's problem to solve.

What followed was a product roadmap unlike almost anything else in the industry. Sit-down scooters, class two e-bikes, cargo e-bikes, two-seaters and now trikes, each one built around a specific group of people who the standard stand-up scooter was leaving behind.

The two-seater came directly from watching people double-ride on stand-up scooters in the field, which is dangerous, and asking why they were doing it. The answer was that there is a large population of people who cannot balance on a bike or scooter but still want to ride, or want to ride with someone else. Veo built for them.

Riders started seeking out Veo's two-seaters and cargo bikes specifically, bypassing competitors' vehicles entirely. The sit-down scooter, launched in 2020, became the single most popular vehicle in the fleet. Several competitors have only recently introduced similar products.

Starting Small, Building to Win

With limited capital and no operational track record, the obvious play was not available to Veo. Competing in the major cities where everyone else was concentrating their resources and their money was simply not on the table. So Candice went somewhere else.

University campuses and smaller second-tier markets became Veo's proving ground. Private campuses moved faster than city governments, the regulatory environment was far more manageable, and the geography was tight enough that the economics could actually be demonstrated rather than projected.

What surprised many observers was how strong the ridership numbers turned out to be on campus. The design of most university campuses is essentially purpose-built for micromobility. Cars stay outside the perimeter and everything that happens inside it moves on foot or on two wheels. The demand is consistent and the geography is contained.

The users are also young people who are, in many cases, forming habits they will carry for the rest of their lives. That last point mattered more than Candice had initially anticipated.

Students who used Veo for years graduated, moved to larger cities to work, and arrived there already convinced that they did not need a car to get around. They were not just customers. They were early adopters who had been educated into a different relationship with urban transport.

By the time major cities like New York opened up competitive bidding processes, Veo had built something that most of its competitors were still trying to construct. Years of operational history, a portfolio of exclusive contracts, and a business model that could be demonstrated rather than simply argued for. Those were exactly the things a serious RFP rewarded.

When COVID Became a Clarifying Moment

Then COVID arrived, at just about the worst possible moment for an industry that had bet heavily on growth and external capital to paper over its economics.

For the well-funded operators, the response was to go back to investors and raise more. Veo had already reached positive unit economics before the pandemic hit, which meant a different path was available.

Rather than scaling into the problem, the team focused on making the fundamentals stronger. Operational reliability, unit economics, the kind of foundational work that does not generate headlines but determines whether a business is actually viable in the long run. The team and the contracts were protected through the downturn, and the company came out the other side in better shape than it went in.

Candice is characteristically direct about what EBIT profitability means inside Veo. It is not something to celebrate. It is the floor.

The goal has always been a business that can sustain itself and provide service for decades, and every financial metric the company tracks is simply a tool for getting there, not an end in itself.

That philosophy shaped practices that look unusual from the outside. While other operators in the early years were using aggressive depreciation assumptions on their vehicles, partly to produce a P&L that looked healthier than the underlying economics justified, Veo went conservative.

Vehicles from 2019 are still operating in the fleet today. Veo has had to extend its depreciation schedules over time to reflect the fact that its hardware simply outlasts what the original assumptions predicted.

Margin improvement, in Candice's telling, comes from the same kind of ground-level honesty applied to operations. When the team noticed high consumption rates on motor wheels across the fleet, the natural read from the centre was a product defect.

Someone went out to the field, watched what was actually happening, and found that mechanics were replacing wheels because of flat tyres rather than any underlying hardware problem. A change in how the team was trained resolved it entirely. That single observation translated into hundreds of basis points of margin improvement.

It is the kind of gain that does not show up in a pitch deck and cannot be achieved by outsourcing your way to a cleaner cost structure on paper.

What the Big Players Keep Getting Wrong

That last point is where Candice locates the core strategic mistake made by many of the larger, better-funded operators. Capex and labour are the two biggest line items in this business. The temptation to reduce both by outsourcing field operations is understandable. On a spreadsheet, it looks like discipline.

In practice, Candice thinks it hands away the very things that determine whether the business works.

Operations are where vehicle availability gets determined, where vehicle condition is managed, and where the rider experience is either delivered or lost. A dusty vehicle in the field sounds like a trivial concern. It is, in many cases, the first thing a potential rider sees, and it can be the reason they walk past without taking the ride.

The kind of operators who notice a dusty vehicle and do something about it are not the kind of operators who outsource their field teams.

Candice goes to the field herself, in the markets where she lives, and checks on vehicles. That habit runs all the way through the organisation. It is not a quirk of leadership style. It is the same discipline that drove the decision to build hardware in-house in the first place, applied to how that hardware is managed every single day it is in service.

On the metrics that matter most, revenue per vehicle per day and trips per vehicle per day, Veo outperforms across the board.

Why Denver Chose Veo

The Denver contract, which Candice describes as the single most important contract in the United States right now, is the clearest external validation of everything that approach has produced. Nine thousand vehicles, exclusive rights, 5 years, in a city that has consistently been ahead of the rest of the country in how it thinks about micromobility policy.

Denver moved from a multi-vendor permit structure in 2020 to a more structured model, and now to a long-term exclusive partnership built around ridership growth as its primary objective, with infrastructure investment to match.

On the broader question of exclusivity versus multi-operator models, Candice's position is settled. Exclusive contracts lower the administrative burden on cities, give riders a cleaner and less confusing experience, and create real accountability between a city and the operator it has chosen.

Multi-operator environments, in her reading, tend to produce races to the bottom. Operators cut corners and ignore regulations in pursuit of ridership numbers, which eventually damages public confidence in the programmes themselves. When riders see one operator letting people ride in no-ride zones just to inflate their numbers, it reflects on the whole industry.

What gave Denver confidence in Veo was not a pitch carefully assembled for the RFP. It was a track record built over years of operating consistently. The quality of the vehicles, the reliability of the service, the commitment to affordability, none of it shifted when the contract was on the table.

It was the same as it had always been, and that was something the city could actually evaluate rather than simply take on faith.

What Comes After Profitability

Veo has recently raised $60m in debt-based capital at favourable rates, a deliberate move to access lower-cost financing for the growth phase that follows profitability.

The question of what to do with the surplus has a clear answer in Candice's mind. Not to maximise it indefinitely, but to reinvest it back into the things that drive ridership. Lower prices. More vehicle types. Better hardware and better software.

More people in the system generates more revenue, which generates more reinvestment, and over time that cycle is how you genuinely move people out of cars and into something more sustainable, more affordable, and as Candice puts it with evident sincerity, more fun.

The geographic focus for the next phase is firmly North America. Candice's read on the opportunity is different from the European-first narrative that shapes a lot of the industry conversation. Her argument is that the transportation gap in North America is larger and more consequential than in Europe, particularly in cities where public transit is thin on the ground and micromobility is often the only realistic option for people who do not own a car.

She sees M&A as the right mechanism for eventual international expansion, and the ambition behind it is not modest. The goal is to become the largest micromobility company not just in North America but globally.

When Prabin asked what advice she would give to founders thinking about entering this space, Candice did not offer a framework or a list of principles. She said to focus on what matters most, do it well, and get one percent better every single day.

2 years ago, Veo was one of twenty brands that cities were not paying attention to. That has changed, and Candice is only just getting started.

When Prabin asked for her favourite micromobility city in North America, she did not hesitate. Denver, she said. Because they truly understand what they want, they have a long-term vision, and they are an incredible partner to build with.