The Irish bike share company Moby has smashed its crowdfunding target, long before its closure deadline, with almost €750,000 raised despite targeting only €300,000.
Moby e-bikes – in hard to miss hi-vis yellow – have been on the streets of Dublin for months now and the company really benefited from the Covid-19 pandemic.
“Basically, people had absolutely nothing to do,” said
Thomas O’Connell, the main figure behind the Ireland’s newest dockless bike
share scheme.
“Our competitors boomed as well. A bike to go around the city was your only way of getting a bit of a release.”
O’Connell appeared on Dragon’s Den in 2005 when he was
trying to launch a new form of action bike, but failed to secure investment.
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However, he then co-founded the Yvolution company that
produces balance bikes and scooters for children. Having sold his stake in
that, Moby was his next venture.
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When lock-down measures had been bedded in across the Republic earlier this year, Moby was just launching properly in May, after its pilot period commencing last year.
And though it still has only 70 bikes on the streets it
employs seven people and has 4,000 registered users.
It has a licence from Dublin City Council to run 1,000
ebikes in its bike share scheme and the money it has just raised will help fund
that expansion.
The fundraising campaign on Spark
Crowdfunding still had three days to run at the time of writing and though it
had an initial target of €300,000 it has done much better than that, with 254
investors putting a total of €735,579 into the company.
The Spark Crowdfunding campaign forms part of wider plans
to raise €1.4 million, from which it will be able to expand to up to 800 bikes
and also spread its reach beyond Dublin and into other cities.
O’Connell, who is from
Castleblayney in Co Monaghan, put approximately €200,000 into the company while
investors - venture capitalist Brian Caulfield and Sean Mitchell of Movidius, the
microchip development – put €300,000 into the company.
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