- Lime priced its Nasdaq IPO at $25 a share on June 30, 2026, raising $167 million.
- The listing follows a valuation crash from $2.4 billion in 2019 to about $510 million in 2020.
- Uber, a longtime partner, plans to buy up to $20 million of shares in the offering.
Five years ago, Lime looked like a cautionary tale. The pandemic emptied city streets, scooter demand collapsed, and the company’s valuation fell from $2.4 billion in 2019 to around $510 million in 2020.
Earlier this week, it priced its initial public offering at $25 per share, the midpoint of its $24 to $26 marketed range, and sold 6.68 million shares, raising $167 million, reports Reuters. It is expected to begin trading on the Nasdaq under the ticker LIME.
The listing follows Lime’s confidential filing earlier this year, which first disclosed the company’s revenue growth alongside its debt load. Chief executive Wayne Ting has framed the offering as a return to the company’s founding mission, telling prospective investors that Lime was built around a future where transportation is shared, affordable and carbon-free.
A $2.4 billion company written off
Lime, legally known as Neutron Holdings, was founded in 2017 by Toby Sun and Brad Bao, who believed cities needed a shared alternative to short car trips. The pitch was simple: networks of electric scooters and bikes that could solve the “last-mile” problem while cutting congestion and emissions.
By 2020, that pitch looked broken. With streets empty and shared transport treated as a health risk, Lime’s valuation dropped by nearly four-fifths in a matter of months, from $2.4 billion to about $510 million.
Investors who had piled into micromobility during its 2018 and 2019 boom years were left asking whether the model worked at all once the growth stopped being free.
The turning point came later in 2020, when Uber led a strategic investment in Lime and integrated its vehicles into the Uber app, allowing riders to book a scooter or bike alongside a car. That single integration did more than provide capital: it gave Lime a distribution channel it could not have built on its own, feeding it demand from Uber’s existing rider base rather than requiring it to win users city by city.
The relationship has only deepened since. Uber has said it plans to buy up to $20 million of shares in the offering, a move that ties the two companies’ fortunes together even as Lime becomes a standalone public company.
Winning while losing money
Lime is not profitable, and that tension is at the heart of this IPO. The company generated $886.7 million in revenue in 2025, up almost 30% from $686.6 million the year before. Net losses widened over the same period, to $59.3 million from $33.9 million in 2024, meaning losses grew faster in dollar terms than the year before, even as the loss margin narrowed relative to revenue.
Pricing at the $25 midpoint values Lime at roughly $1.66 billion to $1.8 billion, according to reporting on the offering’s terms. That puts the company at roughly two times its 2025 revenue, a discount to its 2019 private valuation, when it was worth $2.4 billion on a smaller revenue base, but a premium to the $510 million trough it hit in 2020.
The market is effectively pricing Lime as a mature, high-revenue operator rather than a hypergrowth startup, which is consistent with a business that grew revenue by almost 30% while widening losses rather than shrinking them.
Competition has not slowed down while Lime rebuilt, either. Voi Technology’s first bond issuance helped it regain unicorn status after losing it in 2023, and Berlin-based Tier merged with Dott in 2024 to form one of the region’s largest micromobility operators, which has since raised €85 million to expand its European fleet. Lime’s response has been operational discipline, fleet optimisation and reliance on Uber’s platform to capture a meaningful share of demand, rather than a race to add new markets.
The bigger test starts now. Lime has to show that rising ridership can translate into consistent profit, while still managing regulatory and infrastructure battles city by city. For a company that was written off five years ago, going public is not the end of the story: it is the start of the next one.
