Bird, once primed to be the Uber of electric scooters and valued at $2.5 billion, just filed for bankruptcy
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- Electric scooter company Bird has declared bankruptcy.
- It was valued at $2.5 billion in 2019 as it rode a wave of hype for rented electric scooters.
- The pandemic almost bought its business to a halt and it was later left struggling for survival.
Electric scooter pioneer Bird, which once sought to become the Uber of electric scooters, just declared bankruptcy.
The urban transport company said on Wednesday that it had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in Florida, after several years of financial problems.
Bird was one of the first companies to rent out electric scooters in city centers, and rode a Silicon Valley craze for micro-mobility to a $2.5 billion valuation in 2019.
The company said Wednesday that its services would continue to operate as normal while bankruptcy proceedings, which do not include Bird's European and Canadian subsidiaries, are ongoing.
"We are making progress toward profitability and aim to accelerate that progress by right-sizing our capital structure through this restructuring," said Bird's interim CEO Michael Washinushi.
Bird was founded by former Uber and Lyft executive Travis VanderZanden, who was once described as the "electric scooter king," in 2017.
The electric mobility company quickly became a VC darling. It has recieved around $1.2 billion in venture capital funding since 2017, according to investing database Dealroom.co.
However, the startup also attracted a fair amount of controversy, with Bird heavily criticized after it installed its scooters in Santa Monica without telling local officials.
Former employees also accused the company of having a toxic corporate culture, with one former COO reportedly getting drunk and pretending to fire random employees over Slack as a joke.
The global shutdown of major cities in the Covid pandemic hit the scooter startup hard, forcing it to pull all of its scooters from US and European markets and lay off 30% of its employees.
The company IPO-ed in 2021 but its shares lost 90% of their value in the six months after. In November 2022, it admitted in a press release that it had been inflating revenue for the past couple of years.
VanderZanden officially left the company in June of this year, and Bird was delisted from the NYSE in September after failing to keep its market cap above $15 million for 30 consecutive days.
Bird declined to comment when contacted by Business Insider.