Zeus, the Irish e-scooter rental startup, has launched providers in Malaysia, its first Asian market.
he Dublin firm, which supplies electrical scooters to share in cities, rolled out its automobiles in Kuala Lumpur simply earlier than New Year’s Eve.
Since its founding in 2020, Zeus has been increasing its providers round Europe and is energetic in dozens of cities in Germany, Italy and the Nordic nations, with 3,000 scooters on the streets.
“If you look globally at micromobility, it’s expanding rapidly in Europe. It’s probably less rapid in Asia,” chief government Damian Young stated.
“The concept of micromobility is de facto to cut back carbon emissions and decongest cities and so forth. Asian cities might want to extra aggressively transfer in direction of extra sustainable means [of transport] in cities.
“Kuala Lumpur is extra developed, and we thought that we’d begin the entry to an Asian market by means of a extra developed metropolis.”
Zeus has launched with an preliminary 150 automobiles in two areas of the Malaysian capital, which has a metro inhabitants of practically 8m folks. Around 1,000 folks signed up on the primary few days.
“Sometimes with a new scheme you’d see a very positive spike at the start – where people want to try it out, because it’s new on the street and that type of thing. Also we had the benefit of coming in at New Year’s, so there was probably more people out on the streets.”
Zeus has partnered with a Malaysian firm known as Oogyaa to deal with on-the-ground operations. It will face competitors within the metropolis from Beam, a Singaporean firm.
The Irish startup raised €2m final 12 months from buyers, together with former Europcar Ireland chief government Colm Menton.
“We are in the middle of raising more funds to do the expansion for 2022. The focus over Q1 of 2022 will be to complete that funding strategy,” Young stated.
“We’re looking to further expand into Sweden, Norway and Germany and we have a number of other locations in Italy. We will look at the Asian market to see if there’s opportunities for us to expand there, so we’re looking to nearly double the fleet in 2022.”