Superpedestrian to auction 20,000 e-scooters after shutting down

More than 20,000 electric scooters belonging to Superpedestrian will be auctioned off later this month, along with other equipment from the startup’s U.S. operations, after closing its doors December 31.

Two “global online auction” listings have appeared on the website of Silicon Valley Disposition, an online market for “surplus assets,” which will feature scooters and other paraphernalia from cities Superpedestrian operated in, like Seattle, Los Angeles, and New York City. The first auction opens January 23, and will run for three days. A successive auction is set to run from January 29-January 31.

Superpedestrian initially got into the shared scooter business — which it called Link — in 2020 when it acquired “substantially all” of the assets of Boston-based Zagster, part of a wave of consolidation during the COVID-19 pandemic. Though it raised $125 million less than two years ago, the company struggled financially in 2023 as it operated its shared scooter fleets in dozens of cities around the globe. Fresh funding and a potential merger were on the horizon as recently as November, TechCrunch reported last month; whatever talks had materialized fell apart. Its demise came just days before Bird, a former leader in the space, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

The startup’s leadership subsequently told employees December 15 that it was shutting down U.S. operations at the end of the year and exploring a sale of its European assets. (The status of the European business remains unclear. Superpedestrian’s CEO Assaf Biderman did not respond to a request for comment.) The workers who stuck it out during those final two weeks were tasked, in part, with retrieving the company’s many scooters from cities around the country before locking the facilities for the last time on December 31, according to one former employee.