Cambridge transportation startup Superpedestrian Inc. has raised additional funding as it hopes to get permits to operate its electric scooters in New York City.
The eight-year-old MIT spinoff on Monday said it raised a new $60 million investment from the Citi Impact Fund, OurCrowd, Winthrop Square Capital and other investors, bringing its total funding to $135 million.
In an interview, CEO Assaf Biderman said that Superpedestrian will remain headquartered in Cambridge, even if a potential deployment of its scooters in New York City would be "interesting, because it's the most pedestrian-heavy city in the Western Hemisphere."
Currently, Superpedestrian employs a total of 135 people, including 55 in Cambridge and five in New York City.
"For now, it's all about scale," Biderman said. "We're coming off seven and a half years of investing internally. Now it's about taking those technologies that are mature and putting them out there in the hands of people. We obsessed over making sure that they are ready to go and that they're not released before they're ready to go. So now every dollar that comes in goes toward the deployment, the operation, the quality of the training of the people on the ground, the opening of new markets, launch costs."
The new capital comes in approximately six months after Superpedestrian announced the acquisition of the fleet management division of Boston-based Zagster Inc., confirming the news reported by the Boston Business Journal earlier this year. As part of the acquisition, Superpedestrian brought in a series of assets meant to facilitate its expansion into shared e-scooter operations, including contracts to operate scooters in approximately 15 U.S. markets and Zagster's vehicle management software.
The new capital will help further growth of the company's scooter rental service Link, which Superpedestrian has started deploying in over ten new markets since June, including Oakland, Calif., Columbus, Ohio, and Salt Lake City, Utah.
Superpedestrian is one of many scooter companies that have applied to the New York City Department of Transportation for permits to deploy and operate scooters. Areas within four of the five boroughs, with the exclusion of Manhattan, are up for grabs; a pilot program for the operation of shared electric scooters in the city is expected to launch in the spring of 2021.
"Nobody operates scooters in New York," Biderman said. "We see all over the world, people wanting ... something that's social distancing by design, and a way to move around."
Founded in 2013, Superpedestrian has developed what it bills as an "on-board intelligence" system that allows its scooters to self-detect common malfunctions and provide autonomous maintenance and safety-verification before every ride. The startup is also known for the Copenhagen Wheel, a consumer product that was initially developed in MIT’s SENSEable City Lab as a research project sponsored by the mayor of Copenhagen.
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