LIME RAISES $167MN IN IPO, PROVING SCOOTERS CAN BE A BUSINESS

Lime priced its long-awaited IPO at $25 per share Wednesday, selling 6.68 million shares to raise $167 million and opening at a valuation of roughly $1.66 billion. The stock began trading on the Nasdaq under the ticker LIME and jumped about 9% in the first hour, a modest but real vote of confidence for a company that, at one point, its own CEO wasn't sure would make it.

The IPO comes after a decade-long bloodbath in micromobility. Bird, the once-highest-flying competitor, merged with a SPAC in 2021 at a valuation that Lime's current valuation just falls short of, then filed for bankruptcy and restructured. Tier and Dott merged into irrelevance. Micromobility.com got delisted. Superpedestrian went out of business entirely. Lime, through a combination of Uber's backing, operational discipline, and sheer survival instinct, is now the last one standing in the public markets.

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THE IPO NUMBER

The offering landed at $25, right in the middle of the $24 to $26 range the company published ahead of the debut. Underwriters sold roughly $167 million worth of shares. More than half of Lime's liabilities, which total about $1 billion, come due by the end of this year, and the company was explicit in the IPO filing that it had concerns about its ability to continue as a going concern without the infusion.

That going concern warning is the part most companies try to paper over. Lime put it front and centre, partly because securities law demands it and partly because the truth was unavoidable: the company needed the IPO proceeds to resolve roughly $1 billion in liabilities, many of them convertible debt. Without this offering, Lime told investors it would need to find other financing, and in the current capital environment for ride-and-scooter companies, that was not a guarantee.

THE FINANCIAL TIGHTROPE

Lime's revenue trajectory is the one thing that makes the story believable. It generated $521 million in 2023, $686.6 million in 2024, and $886.7 million in 2025, a compound annual growth rate that any transportation startup would envy. Adjusted gross profit for 2025 came in at more than $400 million. But losses crept back up to $59.3 million in 2025, after several years of narrowing red ink.

The company claimed three consecutive years of free cash flow positivity. CEO Wayne Ting pointed to that as evidence that the business had matured out of the frothy investor bonfire era into something more sustainable. Ting said he only wanted to go public when he could prove to the market that Lime was a far more durable company than Bird. The numbers support the claim: Bird's post-SPAC collapse was fueled by unit economics that never held. Lime's unit costs, according to Ting, have been driven down by software, machine learning, and the kind of operations rigour that the original generation of scooter companies simply didn't bother with.

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THE CEO'S LONG ROAD

Ting has been at Lime for years, and his public posture has swung between cautious optimism and uncomfortable candour. At one point, he told TechCrunch he wasn't sure if Lime would survive the next three to four months. In 2021, following a $523 million funding round, Ting said Lime was eyeing an IPO in 2022. The 2022 window closed. In 2023, he said the company was waiting for the right market conditions. That window closed too. What changed this time? Not the market conditions, exactly, but the reality that waiting any longer meant default.