Taur bets owned scooters beat shared ones, starting with a front-facing ride (interview)

A premium electric scooter designed for daily road commuting, with its own electronics, firmware and app, priced at $1,495.

About $5.2 million, including a $3.3 million seed round from Trucks VC.

Co-founder Carson Brown spent four years commuting on an electric unicycle he helped build at Uniwheel, learning what makes riders feel safe rather than like 'second-class citizens' on the road. He and his co-founder founded Taur in 2019 with a preorder campaign for the sleek white flagship vehicle.

Per Brown, owned scooters are 'actually growing year on year exceptionally well' even as Bird and Helbiz struggle publicly. Taur runs lean — its own electronics, firmware, design, app and marketing — and its app went live in the App Store, planning journeys around range, weather and terrain because 'the main thing people care about with transportation is predictability'.

Brown says shared scooters put new riders on janky vehicles and then banned them from where they felt safest — sidewalks — teaching the market the wrong lesson.

Finance conflates the vehicles with Bird and Helbiz's public struggles, he argues, when the owned-scooter market keeps growing.

Downmarket scooters are 'ship-and-forget' commodities; Taur treats aftercare as the difference between a toy and transportation.

Integration is the roadmap: range, weather and terrain data in an app to make journeys predictable enough to replace car trips.

When a category's failures define it, brand is the strategy: the winning product has to make people want the thing, not merely tolerate it.

As of December 2022 Taur was gearing up for its first launch in Los Angeles with about $5.2 million raised; no shipping volumes or sales figures were disclosed in the interview, leaving the brand-as-category-leader thesis unproven at scale.