Fast-growing electric scooter and e-bike hire company Lime is planning a move into the Middle East.
The San Francisco-based company, which completed a Series D funding round in February - raising $310 million in a deal which valued it at $2.4 billion - posted an online job advertisement seeking a Dubai-based public affairs manager “to lead the efforts in bringing scooters/e-bikes to the MEA (Middle East and Africa) region”.
The advertisement said that the public affairs manager would “establish strategic relationships with government and community leaders, policy makers, and regulatory agencies, regularly meeting with them to build trust and mutual interest, mitigate potential obstacles and convey the company's priorities and strategies”.
The company, which also received backing from Uber and from Google Ventures last year, did not respond to requests from Zawya to comment.
Lime faces an immediate regulatory challenge in Dubai, given that Gulf News reported in February that several competing electric scooter rental businesses such as Qwikly and Skoot Mobility were ordered to halt operations.
The RTA later clarified that the ban applied purely to scooter rental companies, and not to individuals who had bought their own e-scooters. It said the ban would remain until new regulations governing electric scooters were put in place, adding that a study was already under way.
Scooter rental companies such as Lime, as well as competitors Bird and Spin, have grown rapidly across the United States and have pushed out into other, global markets, but regulators within different countries have taken different approaches as to how to legislate for them.
Lime's co-founder and CEO, Toby Sun, said in its Series D funding announcement in February that “more than 10 million sign-ups and over 34 million trips have been taken on a Lime vehicle, a 5.5x increase in trips in the last seven months alone”.
He said the company already had operations in more than 100 cities, towns and university and company campuses, with operations in 15 different countries.
However, although the company last week said that in Paris almost 250,000 people, or around 11 percent of the population, already used electric scooters either ‘frequently’ or ‘from time to time’, they remain banned in the United Kingdom.
The UK's Department of Transport said last month that it would explore regulations around both e-scooters and e-bikes as part of a Future of Mobility in cities study that it described as “the biggest review into transport in a generation”.
(Reporting by Michael Fahy; Editing by Mily Chakrabarty)
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