India's Bounce Zips Up Another $72 Million To Continue Scaling Scooter Culture

Indians used scooters for quick jaunts across jammed cities long before Americans were talking about micromobility and other urban transportation buzzwords. But big U.S. money plus existing finance infrastructure and consumer demand could push one operator to dominance.

Bangalore-based Bounce will continue to grow with a $72 million Series C led by Manhattan Beach, California-headquartered global fund B Capital and New York-based Falcon Edge Capital.

This is a short-term scooter rental concept taking fresh capital from the fund that also backed Bird and other mobility and consumer travel concepts. So the easy leap could be that the Bird-ification of global cities is gaining momentum and the race to find riders will, as with ride-hail’s uneven progress, be a battle of well-capitalized U.S. firms (or their investors) trying to export identical operations around the world, versus domestic upstarts with better knowledge of the regional preferences they must satisfy.

But Bounce’s 8,000-strong fleet is not comprised of kick scooters, the form we used to refer to by the popular brand name Razor. They’re motorized scooters, similar to what we used to call Vespas and Metropolitans. And they’re already an integral part of Indian life.

Potential Bounce customers of all ages exist, and even those who don’t own their own scooter or motorcycle are experienced and insurable riders.

That is apparently a known fact. Asked in a phone interview how the company will recruit as clientele the kind of young city residents who would be keen to try Bounce but likely don’t have driver licenses, Bounce cofounder and chief executive Vivekananda Hallekere laughed. “I’ll tell you how things work in India,” he said. “The second you turn 18 it’s very cultural that you apply for something called a learning license… and it’s very cultural that someone in the family will have a two-wheeler and you learn how to ride using that.”

In other words, people already get licenses and keep their own helmets to ride others’ two-wheeled vehicles. Bounce is just organizing and scaling the process at what it says are affordable rates.

Asked for consumer pricing relative to average income in major Indian cities, B Capital general partner Kabir Narang said it is not an easily calculated ratio, because cities vary widely in their labor economics. However, in Bangalore, the average public transit trip distance of 7.09 kilometers (4.4 miles) on a Bounce scooter with two riders splitting the 10-paise-per-kilometer fare works out to about the same price on public transit over the same route.

The company does not want to replace public transit but complement it. Bounce developed parking agreements to guarantee curb space adjacent to Bangalore Metro Rail stations. Though transit is affordable it is overcrowded, according to Narang, and his portfolio company offers an extra option to budget commuters.

This video shows the user experience for Bounce’s 5,000 keyless scooters in Bangalore:

Scooter culture ensures not only consumers but an ecosystem for the enterprise. Parking considerations unique to two-wheelers were already a part of public policy and retail convenience discussions. An OEM and service center network guarantees affordable fleet maintenance. And lenders who recognize the vast secondary market for two-wheelers confidently financed the startup’s fleet, leaving its venture capital for growing its team, technology and global reach.

Bounce was founded in 2014. Hallekere and his cofounders Anil Giri and Varun Agni at first rented larger motorcycles and began experimenting with other forms of mobility in 2016.  Summer 2018 marked the beginning of dockless rental. Today Bounce offers mostly 110-cc scooters with a top range of 250 kilometers (155 miles) per gas tank. Rental rates include insurance and fuel.

Counting this round, funding to date totals $92.2 million. Sequoia and Accel are repeat investors, believers in a national market that Bounce analyzed as currently having 163 million two-wheelers on the road with 21 million vehicles sold each year. By 2025, Bounce projects those numbers to reach 255 million and 25 million respectively. By 2030, it projects 327 million in the national fleet and 47 million in annual sales. The company counts 110 million people in an addressable market of non-agricultural work commuters nationwide.

Next, the company will use its new capital build its technology and its hardware, seeking to design its own sharing-friendly electric scooter. Outside of India, it will target other markets with existing demand. Europe, Vietnam and The Philippines are up first. “We will go after every market with scooter culture,” Hallekere said.