Lime begins life as a public company after years of uncertainty

Lime priced its initial public offering on Wednesday, raising $167 million and closing out nearly a decade as a privately held company. The scooter and e-bike operator sold 6.68 million shares at $25 apiece, landing squarely between the $24-to-$26 range it had targeted heading into the listing.

Trading in the new stock opened on the Nasdaq that afternoon under the ticker "LIME," and shares climbed roughly 9% within the debut's first sixty minutes. The pop gives Lime an implied market value of about $1.66 billion — a figure that sits just below the valuation rival Bird secured in 2021 when it went public by merging with a blank-check acquisition vehicle rather than through a conventional IPO.

Founded nine years ago, Lime has cycled through several distinct chapters as a private business, and its valuation swung sharply along the way depending on investor appetite. The company built its footprint renting out dockless scooters and bikes in cities worldwide, riding successive waves of enthusiasm for shared micromobility even as some of those waves later receded. It also weathered the coronavirus pandemic, a period when shuttered offices and stalled urban foot traffic hit shared-transportation ridership across the industry.

Uber has been a longtime financial backer of Lime, a relationship that reflects the ride-hailing giant's broader strategy of holding stakes in adjacent transportation services rather than building every mode itself. That backing helped keep Lime funded through periods when standalone scooter startups elsewhere struggled to raise money on their own.

Lime has indicated that the newly raised capital is earmarked largely for shoring up its balance sheet: the company carries around $1 billion in liabilities, and paying that down is described as a central use of the IPO proceeds. Reducing that debt load could ease pressure on the company's finances as it operates as a publicly traded, and therefore more closely scrutinized, business going forward.

The listing arrives as something of a milestone for a sector that has had a volatile relationship with public markets. Bird, once seen as Lime's closest peer, took the SPAC route to going public in 2021 at a richer valuation than Lime commands today, only to later run into serious financial trouble — a reminder that a strong opening trade is no guarantee of durable performance once a micromobility company answers to shareholders every quarter.

For now, Lime's debut gives it a fresh injection of cash and a public valuation benchmark, but the real test will be whether the company can convert that momentum into steadier profitability than the boom-and-bust cycles that defined its private years. Investors and city regulators alike are likely to watch closely how Lime balances debt reduction against continued investment in its scooter and bike fleets in the coming quarters.

Source: TechCrunch