SELANA Alpha is the Netherlands' first fully legal e-scooter (interview)

A micromobility company that manufactures the Netherlands' first RDW-approved road-legal e-scooter (SELANA Alpha) and runs Fleetser, a curated marketplace for buying and selling shared-mobility fleets.

In 2019 Max Schalow and fellow student Chingiskhan Kazakhstan wanted to bring scooter sharing to the Netherlands, hit the road ban, and decided to become a manufacturer. While that matured, they co-founded Bondi e-bike sharing with EUR 135,000 from the Gelderland Valoriseert program, scaling it to eight cities and a 10-person team over two years.

When the pair tried to sell Bondi's fleet, they found no market: 'We went through a painful process of trying to find buyers. But a lot of operators don't know who to reach out to.' That pain became Fleetser, a curated marketplace where operators offload or replenish fleets — buyers are small operators starting out and mid-sized ones (1,000-5,000 vehicles) expanding for summer.

SELANA Alpha launched on July 1, 2025 with RDW approval — the first fully legal e-scooter in the Netherlands — with a 250W motor, 25 km/h top speed, up to 60 km range, NFC keycard unlocking and a digital IoT display, plus two-year warranty and insurance and registration support. Fleetser is expanding into Africa, exhibiting at Smarter Mobility Africa.

The ban was the business plan: a market with zero legal competitors rewarded whoever built the vehicle regulators would approve.

Fleetser turned the founders' own painful fleet exit into a marketplace with domain credibility no pure software team could match.

Circularity pressure is real — fleets scrapped for peanuts and degrading batteries are a recurring supply source for the marketplace.

The value-chain ladder (sharing, manufacturing, resale) gives each venture demand signals for the next.

When regulation blocks a market, building the compliant product turns the blocker into the barrier to entry — but expect to fund the wait with adjacent businesses in the same value chain.

As of October 10, 2025, SELANA Alpha is on sale in the Netherlands as the country's only fully legal e-scooter, while Fleetser ships vehicles across Africa and exhibited at Smarter Mobility Africa; Schalow says a contact in Japan with 40,000 vehicles shows the resale model 'could be done everywhere'.