Irish startup Zeus Scooters has launched in Heidelberg, Germany, with fifty of the three-wheelers available for hire.

A year ago Damian Young (pictured) was running G4S in Ireland. Then last summer he jumped out to create the electric scooter rental business.

Though electric scooters are not legal in Ireland, Germany welcomes this form of micro mobility transport. There are four e-scooter companies already playing in the Germany market, but it’s a big country with room – Young hopes – for one more.

Young (49) knows a thing or two about business startups. He joined Bank of Ireland from school and at one stage was head of the bank’s SME Banking unit. For the Zeus Scooters venture, Young received a favourable hearing at Ulster Bank, where he tied down loan funding underwritten by an 80% SBCI guarantee.

“It was interesting being on the other side of the funding process,” says Young. “With Ulster Bank it helped that there was an individual who has faith in the proposition and pushed it for me.”

In Association with

The former bank executive lives outside rural Bunclody. Carlow LEO helped out with feasibility and priming grants while Microfinance Ireland lent €50,000 in two tranches. The founder has put in some of his own cash and sourced some seed equity from small investors.

For the electric scooters, Young used LinkedIn connections to find a manufacturer in China who could build the three-wheel scooters to the Zeus spec. The final piece of the puzzle was the app and GPS back-end that tracks the scooters, which have a rental charge of 15c to 20c a minute. Young sourced the technology from Wunder Mobility in Hamburg, the largest and fastest growing mobility technology company in Europe.

The Zeus scooters have built-in geofencing, which means the scooters can’t go where they’re not supposed to. An app locates the location of an available scooter and a QR code scan unlocks the ride.

When the user is finished, the scooter is left in general bike parking areas. The Zeus business plan has budgeted for scooter thefts, though at 28 kilos and the GPS tucked away on the onside, Zeus thefts may not appeal to opportunists.

After Heidelberg, Mannheim is next and Young has approvals in four other Germany cities. He plans to have 7,000 Zeus scooters for hire by the end of 2021, hopefully some of them in Ireland. Germany legislated for electric scooter usage in 2019 and in the UK similar legislation is being talked about.

“In a post Covid world people will want to try and avoid public transport or taxis and our scooters provide the perfect solution for people who want to get around in a safe and efficient manner,” says Young.

Further technical innovations are also being developed. Young and his team plan to upgrade the electric scooters with so-called ‘smart helmets’. Users who want to wear a helmet can unlock it from July via the app and access it at no extra cost.

Zipp Mobility Funding

Meanwhile, Zipp Mobility, another Irish e-scooter startup, has announced that it has closed a €300,000 seed investment round and expanded its team to target the UK e-scooter market. The seed funding round was led by a London-based VC and private angel investors.

Zipp Mobility, founded by Charlie Gleeson in 2019, is headquartered at NovaUCD.

Charlie Gleeson (pictured above) commented: “We had originally planned to trial our e-scooters with students on Irish university campuses earlier this year but then COVID-19 arrived. Following on from the recent announcement by the UK government to bring forward and expand their e-scooter trials country-wide, we have now pivoted to focus on the UK market.”

Gleeson's colleagues in the venture are David Maloney, William O’Brien and Ben Duffy.