Segway Inc. is a Chinese owned, formerly American manufacturer of two-wheeled

personal transporter A personal transporter (also powered transporter, electric rideable, personal light electric vehicle, personal mobility device, etc.) is any of a class of compact, mostly recent (21st century), motorised micromobility vehicle for transporting an ...

s, chiefly through its

Segway PT The Segway is a two-wheeled, self-balancing personal transporter invented by Dean Kamen and brought to market in 2001 as the Segway HT, subsequently as the Segway PT, and manufactured by Segway Inc. ''HT'' is an initialism for "human transpo ...

and Segway miniPro product lines. Founded by inventor

Dean Kamen Dean Lawrence Kamen (born April 5, 1951) is an American engineer, inventor, and businessman. He is known for his invention of the Segway and iBOT, as well as founding the non-profit organization FIRST with Woodie Flowers. Kamen holds over 1,000 ...

in 1999, the company's name is a

homophone A homophone () is a word that is pronounced the same (to varying extent) as another word but differs in meaning. A ''homophone'' may also differ in spelling. The two words may be spelled the same, for example ''rose'' (flower) and ''rose'' (p ...

of the word "

segue A segue (; ) is a smooth transition from one topic or section to the next. The term is derived from Italian ''segue'', which literally means "follows". In music In music, ''segue'' is a direction to the performer. It means ''continue (the next ...

". Segway Inc. was headquartered in the U.S. state of

New Hampshire New Hampshire is a U.S. state, state in the New England region of the northeastern United States. It is bordered by Massachusetts to the south, Vermont to the west, Maine and the Gulf of Maine to the east, and the Canadian province of Quebec t ...

and primarily marketed its products to various niche markets, including

police The police are a constituted body of persons empowered by a state, with the aim to enforce the law, to ensure the safety, health and possessions of citizens, and to prevent crime and civil disorder. Their lawful powers include arrest and t ...

departments,

military A military, also known collectively as armed forces, is a heavily armed, highly organized force primarily intended for warfare. It is typically authorized and maintained by a sovereign state, with its members identifiable by their distinct ...

bases,

warehouses A warehouse is a building for storing goods. Warehouses are used by manufacturers, importers, exporters, wholesalers, transport businesses, customs, etc. They are usually large plain buildings in industrial parks on the rural–urban fringe, outs ...

, corporate campuses, and industrial sites. It has held some key

patents A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of time in exchange for publishing an enabling disclosure of the invention."A p ...

on designs for self-balancing

personal transporters A personal transporter (also powered transporter, electric rideable, personal light electric vehicle, personal mobility device, etc.) is any of a class of compact, mostly recent (21st century), motorised micromobility vehicle for transporting an ...

, although some of them have since expired. Since the

Chinese Chinese can refer to: * Something related to China * Chinese people, people of Chinese nationality, citizenship, and/or ethnicity **''Zhonghua minzu'', the supra-ethnic concept of the Chinese nation ** List of ethnic groups in China, people of ...

company Ninebot acquired it in 2015, Segway has focused on developing a stronger presence in the consumer market with smaller products such as the Segway miniPro.

History

Origins

The first patent by

for a self-balancing transportation device was filed on February 23, 1993, and granted on December 30, 1997, in relation to the

iBOT The iBOT is a powered wheelchair developed by Dean Kamen in a partnership between DEKA and Johnson & Johnson's Independence Technology division. History Development of the iBOT started in 1990 with the first working prototypes available in 199 ...

, a self-balancing wheelchair which he developed at DEKA, a company that he had founded in 1982. That patent has since expired,, now expired although it was followed by various others, and some patents assigned to the company have not yet expired (as of early 2019). Development of the iBOT started in 1990 with the first working prototypes available in 1992. In late 1994, DEKA signed a deal with

Johnson & Johnson Johnson & Johnson (J&J) is an American multinational corporation founded in 1886 that develops medical devices, pharmaceuticals, and consumer packaged goods. Its common stock is a component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the company i ...

to manufacture the unit, with Johnson & Johnson paying for all subsequent R&D with DEKA received a smaller royalty fee than normal in return for their retaining rights to all non-medical applications of the technology. The iBOT was revealed to the public on

Dateline NBC ''Dateline NBC'' is a weekly American television news magazine/reality legal show that is broadcast on NBC. It was previously the network's flagship general interest news magazine, but now focuses mainly on true crime stories with only occasion ...

in a segment by

John Hockenberry John Charles Hockenberry (born June 4, 1956) is an American journalist and author. He has reported from all over the world, on a wide variety of stories in several mediums for more than three decades. He has written dozens of magazine and newsp ...

on June 30, 1999.

Independent years

Segway Inc. was founded in July 1999 to develop non-medical applications for the self-balancing technology, and the

, a two-wheeled personal transporter, was launched in December 2001, with first deliveries to customers in early 2002. When it was launched in December 2001, the annual sales target was 40,000 units, and the company expected to sell 50,000 to 100,000 units in the first 13 months. By 2003, the company had sold 6,000 units, and by September 2006 approximately 23,500, when all units sold up to that point were recalled due to a software glitch that could cause the units to reverse, potentially causing riders to fall off. In a March 2009 interview, a company official said the firm "has shipped over 50,000" Segway PTs. Segway Inc's investors remained optimistic. Dean Kamen predicted that the Segway ''"will be to the car what the car was to the horse and buggy"'' and

John Doerr L. John Doerr (born June 29, 1951) is an American investor and venture capitalist at Kleiner Perkins in Menlo Park, California. In February 2009, Doerr was appointed a member of the President's Economic Recovery Advisory Board to provide the Pre ...

, a

venture capitalist Venture capital (often abbreviated as VC) is a form of private equity financing that is provided by venture capital firms or funds to startups, early-stage, and emerging companies that have been deemed to have high growth potential or which hav ...

who invested in the company, predicted that Segway Inc would be the fastest company to reach in sales. By 2007, cumulative sales were 30,000 units. Critics pointed to Segway Inc's silence over its financial performance as an indication that the company was still not profitable, following expenditure of some developing the Segway PT. In 2009,

General Motors The General Motors Company (GM) is an American Multinational corporation, multinational Automotive industry, automotive manufacturing company headquartered in Detroit, Michigan, United States. It is the largest automaker in the United States and ...

announced that it was building a prototype two-seat electric vehicle with Segway. An early prototype of the Personal Urban Mobility and Accessibility vehicle, dubbed Project P.U.M.A., was demonstrated in New York a day ahead of the press previews for the 2009

New York International Auto Show The New York International Auto Show is an annual auto show that is held in Manhattan in late March or early April. It is held at the Jacob Javits Convention Center. It usually opens on or just before Easter weekend and closes on the first Su ...

. At

Expo 2010 Expo 2010, officially the Expo 2010 Shanghai China, was held on both banks of the Huangpu River in Shanghai, China, from 1 May to 31 October 2010. It was a major World Expo registered by the Bureau International des Expositions (BIE), in the t ...

Shanghai Shanghai (; , , Standard Mandarin pronunciation: ) is one of the four direct-administered municipalities of the People's Republic of China (PRC). The city is located on the southern estuary of the Yangtze River, with the Huangpu River flow ...

, the successor was presented, the "EN-V project". James Norrod served as the President and Chief Executive Officer of Segway Inc. from April 2005 to January 2010 and steered the sale of the company to a group led by British millionaire

Jimi Heselden James William "Jimi" Heselden OBE (27 March 1948 – 26 September 2010) was a British entrepreneur. A former coal miner, Heselden became wealthy by manufacturing the Hesco bastion barrier system. In 2009, he bought Segway Inc., maker of the ...

, chairman of Hesco Bastion in December 2009. After the sale, Dean Kamen was no longer involved with the company. Ten months after buying the company, Heselden died after he accidentally drove a Segway off a cliff. In February 2013, Summit Strategic Investments, LLC, announced it had acquired the company for $9 million, saying that it planned to refocus, grow its product portfolio and expand its worldwide network. In September 2014, Segway filed a complaint with the United States International Trade Commission about the infringement of several of its patents by several Chinese companies, including Ninebot, Shenzhen INMOTION Technologies and Robstep Robot. Two years later, on April 1, 2015, Summit Strategic Investments sold the company for more than $75 million.

Subsidiary of Ninebot

On April 1, 2015, Segway was acquired by Ninebot Inc., a

Beijing } Beijing ( ; ; ), alternatively romanized as Peking ( ), is the capital of the People's Republic of China. It is the center of power and development of the country. Beijing is the world's most populous national capital city, with over 21 ...

-based transportation robotics startup that had raised $80M USD from

Xiaomi Corporation (; ), commonly known as Xiaomi and registered as Xiaomi Inc., is a Chinese designer and manufacturer of consumer electronics and related software, home appliances, and household items. Behind Samsung, it is the second largest ma ...

and

Sequoia Capital Sequoia Capital is an American venture capital firm. The firm is headquartered in Menlo Park, California, and specializes in seed stage, early stage, and growth stage investments in private companies across technology sectors. , Sequoia's total a ...

. In May 2016, it was announced that the Segway miniPRO, a smaller

self-balancing scooter A self-balancing scooter (also hoverboard, self-balancing board, segway or electric scooter board) is a self-balancing personal transporter consisting of two motorized wheels connected to a pair of articulated pads on which the rider places their ...

, would be launched in June that year. In June 2018, after initially announcing that production of the Segway PT would move from Bedford, New Hampshire to China, the company decided to keep most of its production in its New Hampshire facility. On July 15, 2020, Ninebot ceased production of the Segway PT and laid off the 21 employees working at the Bedford, New Hampshire plant.

Pivot to E-bikes and becoming major shareholder of Sur-ron ebikes

In 2019, Sur-Ron, a privately held company, announced major investments from Segway with plans to design an ebike for Segway and off-road motorcycles. The Segway dirt e-bike model x260 and x160 were officially revealed at the SEMA 2019 show.

Products

: ;Products branded 'Segway' * Segway i2 SE (professional

for use in warehouses and other locations) * Segway x2 SE (ruggedised self-balancing scooter for use on most challenging terrain) * Segway SE 3 (three-wheeled standup

motorized scooter A motorized scooter is a stand-up scooter powered by either a small utility internal combustion engine or a small electric hub motor in its front and/or rear wheel. Classified as a form of micro-mobility, they are generally designed with a lar ...

for professional use) * Segway Robot (autonomous robot based on the Segway mini plus) * Segway Drift W1 (self-balancing rollerblades) ;Products branded 'Ninebot by Segway' * Ninebot by Segway E+ (self-balancing scooter for general use) * Ninebot by Segway miniPro (smaller self-balancing scooter for general use, controlled by a 'knee control bar') * Ninebot S (2019 similar to miniPro) * Ninebot S+ (2019 larger version of the Ninebot s) * Ninebot by Segway One S2, (latest generation

self-balancing unicycle An electric unicycle (often initialized as EUC or acronymized yuke or Uni) is a self-balancing personal transporter with a single wheel. The rider controls speed by leaning forwards or backwards, and steers by twisting or tilting the unit side to ...

) * Ninebot by Segway One E+ (earlier model of self-balancing unicycle) * Ninebot by Segway ES1/ES2/ES4 (a series of electric kick-scooters). An ES4 is essentially an ES2 with external battery attached. * Ninebot by Segway Max * Ninebot by Segway F20A/F30/F40 * Segway GT 1/2 Series

References

External links

Official Segway Inc. website
{{DEFAULTSORT:Segway Inc Battery electric vehicle manufacturers Electric vehicle manufacturers of the United States Manufacturing companies based in New Hampshire American companies established in 1999 Vehicle manufacturing companies established in 1999 1999 establishments in New Hampshire Personal transporter manufacturers Bedford, New Hampshire Companies based in Hillsborough County, New Hampshire 2015 mergers and acquisitions American subsidiaries of foreign companies