Just two years after successfully raising more than £400,000 through its first Seedrs campaign, the social marketplace for bicycle sharing, Cycle.Land, has returned to the equity crowdfunding platform and quickly secured its initial £100,000 funding target.
As previously reported, Cycle.Land was founded in 2016 and received support from Oxford University Innovation Incubator and launched in Oxford shortly after. The website claims to have 100% month-on-month growth in total users. Its web-app enables UK members and international travelers to borrow bikes from local cyclists, families, and vendors, from as little as £1 per day. It was revealed:
“Cycle.land connects people with bikes! We are a social marketplace for bike sharing. Our mission is to make bikes easily available and affordable to everyone everywhere. We unlock the assets of unused bikes. At the core, we are a peer-to-peer bike sharing community, like Airbnb for bikes. We provide a platform which makes it easy for anyone to share their bikes with one another.”
Cycle.Land facilitates the design, setup, and operation of smaller bike sharing schemes. The company noted that it helps entrepreneurs to operate their own bike sharing schemes with 5-50 strategically placed bikes. For closed communities (universities, companies’ campus) it designs, setups, and operates bike-sharing schemes for their staff and students. Speaking about its growth since the last Seedrs campaign, Cycle.Land stated:
“During our last crowdfunding campaign, our focus was on growing our peer-to-peer bike sharing community. We provided a platform which made it easy for anyone to share their bikes with one another. Since then, we’ve grown above and beyond and have successfully worked with global companies such as OFO and Mobike to launch and manage large-scale bikeshare schemes across multiple cities. This experience has prepared us for the next stage of the company.”
Cycle.Land also reported that it recently formed a joint venture with Youon, China’s public bikeshare company. Youon is notably well known in China and is supported by Alibaba’s financial affiliate, Ant Financial. While sharing details about the collaboration, Cycle.Land revealed:
“At Cycle.land we believe the future is about flexible fleets and data driven operations, which change and adapt with the ever changing needs of users and cities. We want our next venture with Youon, to launch a sustainable urban transport platform with a mixture of vehicles across Europe, to meet the demands of users in these cities.”
Funds from the latest Seedrs round will be used to diversify Cycle.Land’s revenue streams beyond peer-to-peer bike sharing, community bike-sharing schemes, and services to other bike sharing companies. Specifically, The company will use the funds to set up and operate our own urban mobility platform across Europe with the joint venture partner Youon. Cycle.Land added:
“As we are an Oxford University Incubator company, we have worked with and leveraged the expertise of university researchers at the university. This has enabled Cycle.land to work on smart IoT solutions, creating and improving our data-driven fleet management, thus helping to optimise the data and our operational efficiency. As we expand our operations throughout Europe we will be directing these funds towards increasing the efficiency of our operations platform.”
The funding round is set to close later this winter.
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