Mobike went from a $3B valuation to a tab in Meituan — a bike-share that never paid

Mobike, founded in Beijing in January 2015 by Hu Weiwei and Davis Wang, was the bike that made shared cycling a global phenomenon: GPS-locked bikes you unlocked with a phone, parked anywhere, and paid for by the minute. It was the defining product of China's bike-share boom, and the boom was funded like a war.

The war was brutal. In June 2017 Mobike raised a $600 million Series E led by Tencent, at a valuation near $3 billion, and used the money to out-spend rivals on bikes and cities. Hundreds of thousands of bikes flooded streets, then traffic collapsed under the weight of the subsidy battle and the cost of maintaining a vanishing fleet.

In April 2018 Meituan-Dianping acquired Mobike for $2.7 billion — a bailout disguised as a purchase. The bikes were never going to pay for themselves; Meituan absorbed the operating losses and the mountain of bikes, and the free-standing service began its slow dissolve into the parent's app.

On 14 December 2020 the Mobike app was discontinued and the service folded into 'Meituan Bike'. By then the German subsidiary had already gone insolvent in August 2020. The $3 billion unicorn ended as a line item inside a food-delivery app.