Zeus, the Irish e-scooter rental startup, launched its services in Malaysia, its first Asian market.
The Dublin-based company, which sells electric scooters for sharing in cities, launched its vehicles in Kuala Lumpur just before New Year’s Eve.
Since its inception in 2020, Zeus has expanded its services across Europe and is active in dozens of cities in Germany, Italy and the Nordic countries with 3,000 scooters on the roads.
“If you look at micromobility globally, it is growing rapidly in Europe. It’s probably less fast in Asia, ”said CEO Damian Young.
“The idea of micromobility is to reduce CO2 emissions, relieve cities and so on. Asian cities need to move more aggressively towards more sustainable means [of transport] in cities.
“Kuala Lumpur is more developed and we thought we would start entering an Asian market from a more developed city.”
Zeus started with 150 vehicles in two districts of the Malaysian capital, which has a metropolis of almost 8 million inhabitants. Around 1,000 people registered in the first few days.
“Sometimes in a new program you see a very positive increase at the beginning – where people want to try it, because it’s new on the road and things like that. We also had the advantage that we came in on New Year’s Eve, so there were probably more people on the street. “
Zeus has partnered with a Malaysian company called Oogyaa to handle on-site operations. It will face competition from Beam, a Singaporean company, in the city.
The Irish startup raised € 2 million from investors last year, including former CEO of Europcar Ireland, Colm Menton.
“We are currently in the process of raising further funds for expansion in 2022. The focus in the first quarter of 2022 will be on completing this funding strategy, ”said Young.
“We want to expand further to Sweden, Norway and Germany and have a number of other locations in Italy. We’re going to be looking at the Asian market to see if there are any opportunities for us to expand there, so we want to almost double the fleet in 2022. ”
