Bird

Travis VanderZanden, who had previously served as Lyft's chief operating officer and held a senior growth role at Uber, founded Bird in Santa Monica, California in 2017 with a simple product: electric scooters scattered around a city that anyone could unlock and ride via an app, then leave wherever their trip ended. It was a genuinely new category of urban transportation product, and it caught on almost immediately in the sun-friendly, car-dependent cities of Southern California before spreading nationally and then internationally.

Bird's early growth was extraordinarily fast even by Silicon Valley standards, and it was widely reported at the time as one of the fastest companies ever to reach a $1 billion valuation, doing so within roughly a year of launching. Sequoia Capital, Index Ventures, Accel, and other top-tier venture firms competed to fund the company's expansion, and by 2018 Bird had raised $300 million at a $2 billion valuation, followed by continued growth funding that pushed its valuation to $2.5 billion by late 2019.

Bird expanded into new cities aggressively, often deploying scooters before securing formal permits or agreements with local governments, betting that establishing an on-the-ground presence would give it leverage in subsequent regulatory negotiations. That approach generated real friction: cities across the country moved to regulate, cap, or in some cases outright ban shared e-scooters over sidewalk clutter, safety concerns, and vandalism, and Bird — along with the broader scooter-sharing industry — increasingly faced personal-injury lawsuits from riders and pedestrians, eventually totaling more than 100 against the company.

In 2021, Bird went public through a merger with special-purpose acquisition company Switchback II, a deal valuing the combined company at roughly $2.3 billion and including a $160 million PIPE investment led by existing investor Fidelity. Going public via SPAC, rather than a traditional IPO, let Bird raise capital and list its shares even though the underlying business remained deeply unprofitable — a pattern common among high-growth, cash-burning companies during the 2020–2021 SPAC boom.

As a public company, Bird's financials made its underlying unprofitability impossible to ignore: it reported losses of $235 million in 2021 and $471 million in 2022, at a scale that scooter ride revenue never approached covering. Ride volumes, meanwhile, were falling — down 36% year-over-year by the time of its eventual bankruptcy filing — as pandemic-era outdoor mobility habits shifted and more cities restricted where and how scooters could operate.

In November 2022, Bird disclosed that it had been overstating its revenue figures in prior annual reports, forcing a restatement of previously reported financials. For a company already under intense scrutiny over its path to profitability, the disclosure was severely damaging to investor confidence at precisely the moment Bird most needed the market's trust — its stock, which had briefly given the company a market cap over $2 billion at its NYSE debut, had crashed to around $70 million within about a year of going public.

Travis VanderZanden departed the company he founded in June 2022, stepping back as Bird's financial position kept deteriorating. In January 2023, Bird secured a $30 million capital infusion from Bird Canada, an operator of Bird-branded scooters in Canada, in a deal that gave Bird Canada control of the board and installed new leadership — a last attempt to stabilize the company that ultimately did not change its trajectory.

Bird Global filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on December 20, 2023, in a filing that ultimately wiped out the equity of shareholders who had bought in at the SPAC valuation of roughly $2.3 billion. The bankruptcy court confirmed a liquidating plan in August 2024, which became effective the following month; under it, Bird's actual scooter operations — along with those of rival Spin, which Bird had earlier acquired — continued under a new private parent company called Third Lane Mobility, meaning the Bird brand and its scooters kept operating on city streets even as the publicly traded company that had raised well over $1 billion from investors did not survive.

Bird's trajectory is a case study in the gap between category creation and business durability: being first to a genuinely new, popular product category — and growing into it faster than almost any startup in history — did not translate into a sustainable business model, because the company never closed the gap between what it cost to acquire, deploy, and maintain scooter fleets in dozens of cities and what riders were willing to pay per trip. Going public via SPAC let Bird raise capital and access public markets years before its underlying unit economics justified that scrutiny, and the November 2022 revenue restatement compounded an already fragile financial position by destroying the trust public investors need to keep supporting an unprofitable growth story. That the underlying scooter business survived — under new private ownership, after the public entity's bankruptcy wiped out its investors — is also a reminder that a company's operating business and the corporate entity that funded it can have very different fates.