Lime.

A green machine at every corner

LStand on a busy street in Paris, London, or Washington and count to thirty. Odds are a Lime rolls past - a stout green e-bike or a Gen4 scooter humming along the bike lane. There are more than 35,000 of the latest scooters out there, scattered across 30-plus cities, plus a bike fleet that shares the very same swappable battery. Nobody owns them. Everybody borrows them. That is the whole point.

Lime is, by ride volume and footprint, the largest shared electric vehicle company on Earth. It operates in over 200 cities across nearly 30 countries, and in 2025 it pulled in roughly $886.7 million in revenue while posting positive free cash flow for the third year running. In May 2026 its parent, Neutron Holdings, filed to list on Nasdaq under the ticker LIME. That is a long way from a parking complaint.

Most car trips are short. Almost insultingly so.

Here is the inconvenient fact that started everything: a huge share of urban car trips are under three miles. People burn a ton of metal and fuel to move a single body a distance you could cover on a bike before a podcast ad finishes. Cities choke on congestion. Parking eats real estate. And the climate quietly absorbs the bill.

The gap was obvious and the solution was awkward. Public transit doesn't reach every doorstep. Owning a bike means storing it, maintaining it, and praying it survives the night. What the short trip needed was something you could grab, ride, and abandon - responsibly - without ever thinking about ownership. Easy to say. Brutally hard to operate at the scale of a city, let alone hundreds of them.

Two VCs, 125 bikes, and a hunch

In January 2017, Brad Bao and Toby Sun - both alumni of Fosun's venture arm - launched LimeBike. The first deployment that June was almost charmingly modest: 125 bicycles at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. The bet was that if you made shared, dockless rides effortless enough, demand would not need to be manufactured. It would simply show up.

It did. By 2018 the bikes had grown an electric sibling, and the scooters - the Lime-S - arrived and promptly stole the spotlight. Andreessen Horowitz led a $12 million seed; within two years Lime was a unicorn, then a $2.4 billion company. The bet looked won.

Then 2020 happened. The pandemic shut down rides across two dozen countries overnight, the easy-money scooter gold rush collapsed, and Lime's valuation cratered to about $510 million. Wayne Ting, a former Uber executive, took the CEO seat from Bao and inherited a company that had to prove the idea could survive contact with reality. In the same stretch, Lime acquired Uber's struggling Jump bike-and-scooter unit - and Uber, in a twist worthy of a sitcom, became Lime's largest shareholder.

One app, two wheels, swappable everything

What Lime sells is deceptively simple from the rider's side: open the app, find a vehicle on the map, scan, ride, park, pay. Underneath that tap is a hardware company pretending to be a software company - or maybe the reverse. The Gen4 scooter is built less for flash and more for the unglamorous virtue of not breaking. Its battery is interchangeable with the Gen4 e-bike, so one charged pack can power either machine, which is the kind of boring engineering decision that quietly saves a fortune.

You can also book a Lime straight from the Uber app, which is less a feature than a peace treaty: the company that failed at scooters now routes riders to the company that didn't.

The numbers stopped being a fairy tale

Micromobility earned a reputation as a money pit, and for a while it deserved it. Lime's counterargument is its income statement. Revenue rose from $686.6 million in 2024 to roughly $886.7 million in 2025 - about 29% growth - while ride volume climbed close to 30%. More telling for skeptics: the company has now posted positive free cash flow three years in a row, reaching about $103.8 million in 2025.

Carbon-free, or it doesn't count

Plenty of companies bolt sustainability onto a deck. Lime stapled it to the balance sheet. It became the first micromobility company to set a net-zero carbon target approved by the Science Based Targets initiative, covering not just its own operations but Scope 3 emissions across its supply chain - the hard, honest kind to count. The goal: net zero by 2030.

The operational version of that pledge is unglamorous and a little obsessive. Lime says it recycles roughly 97% of the materials in a retired scooter. Its vehicles are designed to last longer specifically so fewer of them need building, because the greenest scooter is the one you didn't have to manufacture. In several cities, the per-kilometer carbon cost of a Lime trip now undercuts the subway. That is either a triumph of engineering or an indictment of subways. Possibly both.

The boring future, finally arriving

Micromobility's loud era is over. The scooters that once cluttered sidewalks and headlines have become infrastructure - the kind of thing that works best when you stop noticing it. Lime's wager for the next decade is that cities will keep trading curb space and car lanes for shared electric vehicles, because the math on congestion, emissions, and cost keeps pointing the same direction.

An IPO will test how much the public believes that. A green scooter is easy to mock and easy to love; a public company has to be neither, just durable. If Lime is right, the short trip - the two-mile errand, the last mile from the train, the late ride home - quietly stops belonging to the car.