Lime’s S-1 Breakdown: The $1.8B Scooter IPO

**CJ Gustafson** (0:00)
Your favorite micro-mobility brand has risen from the ashes to pay back its debt. Yes, we are talking about the Lime Scooter IPO Breakdown. I have the S1, they're going out on their roadshow this week. This is gonna be incredible, because what is life if you've never crashed a Lime Scooter? I think it was Rene Descartes who said that. This is the Lime Scooter IPO S1 Breakdown.
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Yesterday's price is not today's price.
All right, so a few years back, I worked at a company that flew the entire org to Tel Aviv for this all hands. And the boardwalk along the beach was littered with lime scooters. People rode them everywhere, hotel to venue and back. They were mostly responsible about it. Right up until one of our sales reps decided at 1 a.m. was a perfect time to learn how fast he could rip this thing down a wet boardwalk. And so he face planted into the pavement really, really hard, and he spent the rest of the week walking into sessions with skid marks down one side of his face. It was kind of like Rocky, like, I ain't here no bell. It looked like he got in a fight. I didn't hear no bell. I'd love to see the other guy, but yeah, the other guy was a lime scooter. So from that day forward, whenever he posted a close one deal in the Slack channel that we had at the company, instead of hitting the gong emoji, which people would typically do, people smash the scooter emoji. So I bring this up because the company that turned my coworker into a permanent inside joke is going public this week. Lime, the micro mobility outfit that you've absentmindedly stepped over on a sidewalk or your lawn is kicking off its roadshow to list on the NASDAQ under the ticker Lime. So the offering adds up to around 200 million at a valuation that pencils to about 1.8 billion. So their mission. Lime is the largest global shared micro mobility business. We are on a mission to build a future where transportation is shared, affordable and carbon free.
I will admit something up front. I love this CEO. So Wayne Ting is an operational savant. He was chief of staff to Dara at Uber before he took this thing over. And the way he talks about the unit economics of a scooter business, he talks about decay rates and revenue per year and five year payback windows. It's contagious. I would go to scooter war for Wayne, which makes it more interesting that the company he runs spent a stretch as a complete and utter smoking crater. This is a phoenix rising from the ashes kind of story, except the bird is like two thirds of the way out of the fire, and you can still kind of smell the singed feathers and the very heavy debt load. So post-COVID, Lime torpedoed, right? So it lost almost all of its revenue in a matter of days, and it stayed alive on an emergency check from Uber while its competitors withered and died. And this turnaround since then is remarkable in many ways. But like I said, it's not completely finished yet, and there's this wall of debt that is coming due in September that is pushing them to IPO. They may not be a going concern if they can't IPO. And the timing of this is fun because Lime is slipping out in the narrow gap between SpaceX and the oncoming OpenAI and Anthropic IPOs. So this quote unquote little $1.8 billion scooter company is in a lot of ways the anti-thesis to AI. So there are really two questions we will explore in this. So first, is shared mobility a commoditized business with low switching costs and even lower margins, or an innovation stack buttressed by a mode of in-house hardware and software and operational discipline? Second, can this final, question mark, equity raise pay down the debt and launch Lime's next chapter as a self-sustaining company, or does it stay on the market's drip? Let's get into it. All right, so what does Lime do? Lime rents you an electric scooter or bike by the minute for the trip that is far too long to walk, but far too short to drive. You've all been there in dress shoes before. You're like, I don't really want to walk 20 miles. Maybe we'll take a Lime. They say, Lime has revolutionized the shared micro mobility industry through a vertically integrated platform, which combines our proprietary hardware and software, data, tech enabled operations, and government relations expertise. So like I said, it's both scooters and bikes. I keep after reminding myself that they also have bikes. So scooters get the headline, but Lime does run a real e-bike business too. And the bike pulls a different kind of rider. I say it's for usually an older demographic going on longer trips and more willing to pay because it's more minutes. So keep both in mind here as we go. The scale is bigger than people realize. So since it started, Lime has run more than a billion trips. I do hate aggregate metrics. More than 105 million riders. In 2025, it served about 19 million riders across roughly 230 cities in 29 countries. Mr. Wawad. It is the largest shared micro mobility operator in the world, and it isn't even close. It has about 27% market share across the countries it operates in, 37% in the US, and nearly three times the next operator. The industry itself is still young, so dock-based government bike share goes back to the mid-2000s. So dock-based is like when it literally has the dock, you have to clip it in and out of. But the modern app-based dockless version, we can throw it anywhere. You can throw it on any corner. That only started in 2017 once cheap smartphones, GPS, IOT chips and lithium batteries shared up at the same time. So Lime is the biggest player in a category that is actually still less than a decade old. And most people think Lime is a scooter company. Lime thinks it's a vertically integrated operations company that happens to deploy scooters and bikes, its own hardware, its own software, pile of trip data, tech-enabled field operations and that government relations team that will go and win those city permits. Whether that stack is a real moat or an expensive way to rent commodity scooters is the question that this IPO hinges on. Here's some stats before we get into how a scooter actually pays for itself and where the bodies are buried under the operating line. So their revenue in FY25 was $887 million. They grew 29% year over year, so 29% revenue growth, up from $687 million in 2024 and $522 million in 2023 So two years of high 20s to low 30% growth. Q1 of 2026, they did $170 million, up 32% year over year. So the growth rate is holding into the IPO on a quarterly basis. But if you're going to try to multiply by four, don't, because this is a bad quarter for them seasonally. More on that in weather pattern talk later. Gross margin, 39%.