Skip (est. in 2017) was a

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of Ca ...

-based company which provided a

scooter-sharing system A scooter-sharing system is a shared transport service in which Motorized scooter, electric motorized scooters (also referred to as e-scooters) are made available to use for short-term rentals. E-scooters are typically "dockless", meaning that t ...

in several American cities. The company was founded by Matt Tran, Mike Wadhera, and Sanjay Dastoor during

Y Combinator Y Combinator (YC) is an American technology startup accelerator launched in March 2005. It has been used to launch more than 3,000 companies, including Airbnb, Coinbase, Cruise, DoorDash, Dropbox, Instacart, Quora, PagerDuty, Reddit, Str ...

's winter 2018 class. Skip differentiated itself from competitors by making sturdier scooters with larger batteries, offering instructional classes, and working with cities before rolling out. It was acquired by Hertz in 2020 and filed for

Chapter 7 bankruptcy Chapter 7 of Title 11 of the United States Code (Bankruptcy Code) governs the process of liquidation under the bankruptcy laws of the United States, in contrast to Chapters 11 and 13, which govern the process of ''reorganization'' of a debtor. ...

in August 2021.

History

Skip was founded as Waybots in winter 2017 by the creators of Boosted Board, as higher-end competitor to other scooter-sharing systems. In May 2018, Skip raised a $6M seed round of funding. In June 2018, the company raised an additional $25M in its

Series A round A series A round (also known as series A financing or series A investment) is the name typically given to a company's first significant round of venture capital financing. The name refers to the class of preferred stock sold to investors in exchan ...

. In December, 2020, Skip was acquired by competitor

Helbiz Helbiz, Inc. is an Italian-American intra-urban transportation company headquartered in New York City with an aim to solve the first mile/ last mile transportation problem of high-traffic urban areas around the world. Helbiz was founded on 16 Oct ...

Areas served

In February 2018, then Waybots launched in its first city,

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, as part of a pilot program. At the end of August 2018, the city of

gave Skip and

Scoot Scoot Pte Ltd, operating as Scoot, is a Singaporean low-cost airline and a wholly owned subsidiary of Singapore Airlines. It began its operations on 4 June 2012 on medium and long-haul routes from Singapore, predominantly to various airports t ...

permission to operate dockless scooters in the city. In an email sent out October 15, 2019 to its members, Skip announced that their scooters "will no longer be rentable as part of SFMTA’s Powered Scooter Share Program for 2019-2020" effective immediately. Skip has reportedly requested an appeal of SFMTA's decision, in order to continue operations in San Francisco. Between June and July 2019, Skip launched in

San Diego, CA San Diego ( , ; ) is a city on the Pacific Ocean coast of Southern California located immediately adjacent to the Mexico–United States border. With a 2020 population of 1,386,932, it is the eighth most populous city in the United States ...

and

Austin, TX Austin is the capital city of the U.S. state of Texas, as well as the seat and largest city of Travis County, with portions extending into Hays and Williamson counties. Incorporated on December 27, 1839, it is the 11th-most-populous city ...

. The company filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy (dissolution) in 2021.

References

* Scooter sharing companies Y Combinator companies Companies based in San Francisco American companies established in 2017 Transportation in San Diego Transportation in Austin, Texas Transportation in San Francisco Transportation in Washington, D.C. 2017 establishments in California Kick scooters {{US-transport-company-stub