By Ali Kazemkhani, CEO of Envo Drive Systems

VCs and Growth Capital Investors, Please leave Micromobility Alone!

As someone who has spent years building in this industry, from the workshop floor to supply-chain firefights and late-night CAD revisions, I say this with humility and respect:

Micromobility does not need hypergrowth. It needs patience. It needs builders. Yet for more than a decade, our sector has been pushed through the same cycle: excitement, overextension, oversized valuations, and then public collapse. Every time, the world points to another “failed company,” but the truth is more uncomfortable:

Micromobility isn’t failing; the investment model applied to it is simply not aligned with its reality. So with full appreciation for the investors who truly care about long-term innovation, I want to say, gently but clearly:

VCs and growth-capital investors, please give micromobility space to breathe. This industry grows differently. It survives differently. And it deserves a more grounded approach.

It Is Not Software — but It’s Not Automotive, Either

Micromobility sits in an odd space, too physical for the speed of software, too agile and local for the scale of automotive.

It’s not software.

You can’t fix a battery safety issue with a version update, you can’t compress a tooling cycle into a sprint, and you definitely can’t launch a factory with a pitch deck, some things just refuse to obey startup-speed fantasies.

It’s not automotive, either.

Small EVs thrive on lightweight design, modularity, frugality, and on-the-ground serviceability. They don’t benefit from billion-dollar lines or massive global platforms. Trying to force either playbook inevitably leads to trouble. Micromobility has its own physics, its own economics, and its own pace, and growth must respect that.

How Venture Capital Warps the Sector

This is not a complaint; it’s a pattern I’ve watched repeat across the world.

1. “Growth at all costs” breaks what builders work hard to perfect

When a company is pushed to scale before it has earned the right to scale, it takes shortcuts, artificially low prices, fragile supply-chain decisions, sacrificing durability for speed, launching in markets without product-market fit, and overproduction followed by painful write-offs. These choices make perfect sense inside an investor pitch; they make zero sense on a workbench where someone is trying to build a safe, reliable vehicle.

2. Valuation theatre replaces engineering

Decks get beautiful, brands get glossy, CAC slides climb, but the product, the machine under the rider, lags behind and founders feel pressure to produce optics instead of reliability, serviceability, and local adaptation

3. Big money unintentionally crushes small innovators

When a highly funded company enters a region with subsidized pricing, local builders, those who actually understand the terrain, climate, and riders, often disappear. Then years later, the big company collapses and the community is left with nothing.

Consequences for the Whole Industry

1. Consumer trust erodes

Battery fires, broken frames, abandoned customers, all of this hurts everyone, even the responsible players.

2. Local expertise gets buried

Small shops, regional builders, and skilled mechanics can’t compete with investor-backed blitzscaling.

3. Creativity suffocates

Micromobility attracts brilliant engineers and designers. But when the mantra is “standardize and scale,” true innovation becomes a casualty.

4. Diversity is essential, not optional

Micromobility thrives on variety: sizes, geometries, climates, communities. A single global template does not work. This is a democratic industry; monoculture weakens it.

A Pattern of “Death by Scale”

We’ve all seen what happens when hypercapital meets small vehicles:

Rad Power Bikes – Rapid expansion, recalls, store closures.

VanMoof – $200M raised, then bankruptcy; users stranded.

Cake – Visionary but pushed beyond sustainable execution.

Bird – Blitzscaling hero to Chapter 11.

Superpedestrian, Spin, Tier, Cowboy, Gotcha, Bolt… the list grows.

These were not bad people or bad ideas. They were simply asked to grow faster than the physics of their product allowed.

What Micromobility Truly Needs

1. Patient capital

Family offices, strategic industrial partners, and cash-flow-oriented investors understand the long game far better than unicorn hunters.

2. Engineering-first thinking

Durability, serviceability, local suitability, these are what define a winning micromobility company.

3. Respect for local markets

Micromobility scales slowly and truthfully:

city by city, mechanic by mechanic, community by community. There’s no shortcut.

A Note to Founders and Builders

If you’re creating something new in this space, let me say this, founder to founder, builder to builder:

Do not be intimidated by the giants that once looked unstoppable. Many of them are gone, not because their ideas were bad, but because they grew too fast for their foundations.

You don’t need enormous budgets, you don’t need backing from a household name, and you definitely don’t need noise.

You need:

A unique, meaningful product, disciplined execution, deep understanding of your users, and resilience in doing things the right way, that’s what actually moves the needle. If your product is genuinely good, your customers become your strongest marketers. Micromobility is one of the most democratic industries in the world, and if people value your work, they will lift you.

Conclusion 

Micromobility is small, efficient, practical, and profoundly human. It deserves investors who appreciate what makes it special, not those who try to bend it into something it is not.

Venture capital has had its attempt. The industry absorbed the lessons, and the scars, and the closures. Now it’s time to let a more grounded approach lead the way. Because the future of micromobility belongs to the creators, the mechanics, the engineers, the small shops, the riders, and the resilient founders who believe in better ways of moving, not in chasing the next unicorn.

We don’t need hype.

We need craft, patience, and truth.