Kevin Talbot has watched micromobility from a vantage point that very few people share.

As managing partner at Relay Ventures, he was an early investor in Bird at a time when electric scooter sharing was still a speculative bet on urban behaviour. He then built Bird Canada from scratch, ran it profitably while the global parent struggled, and eventually engineered a situation in which the Canadian franchise absorbed the franchisor entirely.

He has delivered keynotes at Micromobility Europe in Brussels, been a recurring presence on the Micromobility Podcast since its early days with Oliver Bruce, and now arrives in Berlin with a forward-looking keynote in preparation. In this episode, Prabin Joel Jones sits down with him to go through the whole arc. What worked, what did not, where the industry is heading, and why he believes two global operators are the inevitable endgame.

The Thesis Behind the Bird Investment

Relay Ventures came into Bird at the Series C, a late entry by venture standards, but one structured with a specific logic. The fund invested into Bird Global while simultaneously securing the rights to operate the Bird brand in Canada. That combination gave them a position in the established company and the seed capital for what became Bird Canada, built from the ground up with their own management team.

The original investment thesis rested on several converging trends. Half of all car rides were under three miles. Cities were densifying as younger demographics moved away from suburban sprawl. Mobility as a service was gaining credibility as an alternative to personal car ownership. Bird had invented the category and was led by a team Talbot and his colleagues considered world class.

But the thesis had a deeper cultural layer underneath all of that. Talbot traces the success of electric scooter sharing to a generational phenomenon rooted nearly a century earlier. The kick scooter evolved from a children's toy into the Razor and the Micro Scooter, one of the best-selling toys of the late 1990s. The generation that grew up riding those moved to cities, and when they encountered a shared electric scooter on a street corner, they recognised it immediately. The technology was new but the object was completely familiar.

That familiarity compressed the adoption curve in a way no amount of marketing could have achieved on its own.

The enabling infrastructure was the smartphone. Uber had trained an entire urban population to summon a ride with a phone. GPS, mobile networks, authentication, and payments had all matured at roughly the same time, creating the conditions for shared micromobility to exist. Portland's early results gave Talbot and his team enough empirical grounding to build their need-to-believes. The market would be large, adoption would continue, and vehicle longevity would improve. That last assumption, on the vehicles, turned out to be more complicated than anyone expected.

What They Got Right and What They Got Wrong

On vehicle longevity, the bet largely paid off. Early scooters lasted weeks. Today there are vehicles still operating after six years, some approaching eight. That was a genuine vindication of the thesis.

It also created a problem nobody had anticipated. Lasting longer meant lower replacement costs, but it exposed a critical operational failure. Bird did not move to swappable batteries quickly enough. Operators who made that transition earlier gained a decisive fleet efficiency advantage. With fixed batteries, half a fleet is always charging while the other half is on the road, which effectively requires double the asset base to deliver the same operational output.

The capital structure problem was the other major lesson from those years. All of the early operators were venture-funded, which meant they were financing asset-heavy operations with equity. Equity is the most expensive capital available. The right instrument was debt matched to the lifecycle of the vehicle. That thinking arrived eventually, but implementation lagged badly.

The core issue was that operators needed to be not just EBITDA positive but genuinely cashflow positive, able to service and eventually retire debt rather than simply refinancing it indefinitely. Talbot is direct about this. Showing EBITDA positivity is not the same as building a self-sustaining business. That distinction matters more in a capital-intensive model than almost anywhere else. A handful of operators in the industry have reached something close to cashflow positive territory today, but the debt on the balance sheet still has to be paid back at some point, and that remains the unresolved question sitting underneath the industry's current optimism.

Regulation turned out to be a persistent headache rather than an existential threat. Cities that had been caught off-guard by Uber and Airbnb were ready for micromobility from the start. There was no window of forgiveness-asking. Operators faced constant RFP cycles, government relations costs, and fragmented municipal requirements that varied city by city. Licence plate sizes, braking specifications, payment models, none of it was standardised. That complexity made operations expensive without fundamentally preventing them.

The companies that adopted a regulatory-first philosophy were able to operate within the rules rather than against them. Bird Canada was built on exactly that approach, and it showed in the results.

How the Franchisee Swallowed the Franchisor

Bird Canada's story is largely singular in the history of the industry.

Structured as a licenced franchise operation, it launched in 2019 using Bird's vehicles, network operations centre, payments platform, and software. Relay did not need to build any of that. The licence cost one dollar. The team was small and deliberately constrained, focused entirely on winning city licences and running the operation as efficiently as possible.

The result was profitability from the first year. Several Canadian cities ranked among Bird's top performers across the entire global network. The absence of technology debt, the lean structure, and the focus on bottom-line discipline rather than growth-at-all-costs created something that the wider Bird operation never quite managed to achieve at scale.

When Bird went public via SPAC and its share price began a sustained decline, Relay's position became complicated. The put-call arrangement that allowed Bird to repurchase the Canadian operation, or Relay to sell it to them, was steadily losing its value alongside the stock. The team evaluated their options. Franchise to another operator. Strip the Bird branding and build independently. Or pursue what Talbot describes as the crazy idea in the room, using Bird Canada's strong performance and new invested capital to take a controlling position in Bird Global itself.

That is what happened.

The stock had eroded enough that the value of Bird Canada combined with fresh capital bought Relay a control position. The franchisee had absorbed the franchisor. A year later, the US operations went through a Chapter 11 restructuring process, a tool used to clean up the cap table and remove the enormous burden of public company compliance costs. Talbot estimates those compliance costs ran to over $10m in the final year alone. The business swung to over $20m of EBITDA in the year following restructuring.

The bankruptcy headlines that followed completely misrepresented what had actually happened. It was a restructuring, not a collapse. The operations outside the United States, in Canada and Europe, were entirely unaffected.

The Oligopoly Thesis

Talbot's view on where the industry ends up is fairly stark, and he does not soften it.

Shared micromobility is no longer a venture fundable category. The window for new entrants building shared transportation services is firmly closed. What remains is a consolidation cycle that has further to run than most people inside the industry currently expect.

His endpoint is two global operators. Regional players face a structural ceiling. They reach equilibrium in their home markets, growth tops out, and the only path forward is through consolidation. A merger between Voi and Tier-Dott is theoretically possible but practically difficult given the degree of market overlap between the two. The more likely path is acquisition into a larger global platform rather than peer-to-peer combination.

Until that consolidation completes, valuations across the sector will remain compressed relative to the genuine operational impact these companies have had on cities.

That impact, Talbot argues, is genuinely underappreciated by the markets pricing these businesses. Walk through Paris, Brussels, Chicago, or London and the transformation in urban mobility over the past seven years is visible. Bike infrastructure expanded in direct response to shared micromobility. City-wide cycling rates climbed significantly. Transit options that simply did not exist in 2018 are now embedded in daily routines for millions of people.

And yet the companies responsible for much of that transformation trade at one to one-and-a-half times revenue. Uber, which achieved analogous urban impact, trades on an entirely different basis. The difference comes down to cashflow, and until operators genuinely solve that, the valuation gap is not going anywhere.

Where the Real Opportunities Still Exist

For founders building in the space today, Talbot's advice is to look away from shared services and toward the infrastructure and software layers underneath them.

Perception models, AI-enabled fleet management, and sensor systems that allow vehicles to do things they cannot currently do are all legitimate venture-scale opportunities. Importantly, none of them are confined to micromobility. A company building perception software for scooters is really building it for autonomous vehicles, logistics robots, and a dozen other applications. That breadth makes it the kind of business venture capital will actually fund. Building a new shared scooter service is not.

On form factors, Talbot is a genuine and vocal believer in the microcar as the next meaningful frontier, particularly for North America. The average new car in the United States now costs over $50k. Electric vehicles sit even higher. Wages have not kept pace with any of that.

At the same time, ninety percent of all trips are under 25 km, 60% are under ten, and the average urban driving speed is 30 km per hour. A weatherproof two-seat vehicle with adequate range for daily urban trips, priced at twenty thousand dollars, solves a real affordability problem that neither bikes, scooters, nor mass transit can fully address.

The barriers are real and Talbot does not dismiss them. The US has no regulatory tier equivalent to Europe's L6E and L7E vehicle classes, which means any microcar attempting to reach market must be over-engineered to meet full safety standards, driving costs straight back up. Litigation risk deters manufacturers. Consumer psychology in North America has been trained over decades to equate size with safety, and purchasing patterns remain dominated by SUVs and trucks.

The European microcar market with the Citroën Ami and Microlino is still small. But the pressure is building as car prices climb and the argument for a simpler, cheaper, urban-optimised vehicle becomes harder to ignore.

His keynote at Micromobility Europe in Berlin will look forward. Last year in Brussels it went back through the history. This year it turns toward what comes next. On the evidence of this conversation, he has a very clear idea of what that looks like.