- London-based Tyred has raised £2.5 million from Raw Ventures, Ada Ventures and angel investors, including Dwelly lead investor Anton Buzdalin, to build an AI-powered bike ownership platform.
- The company maintains around 50,000 Lime bikes across London and serviced more than 100,000 bicycles over the past year.
- Tyred is combining AI, IoT and operational data to predict maintenance before failures occur while bringing servicing, insurance, warranties and finance into one platform.
Most cyclists find out their brakes are worn when they hear the screech. Tyred wants riders to know before that happens, and it has just raised £2.5 million to build the sensors and software to do it.
The London-based startup was founded in 2022 by Lancelot Hoare, Nikita Baranov, and Daniel Bursztynski started as a mobile bike repair service and has grown into what it calls a connected ownership platform, bundling maintenance, insurance, warranties and finance into a single product.
“We’re changing that by bringing every aspect of ownership together into one connected platform. By combining real-time data with predictive technology, we can help riders solve problems before they happen and make cycling simpler, smarter and more reliable,” says Hoare, co-founder and CEO of Tyred.
A patchwork industry gets a single dashboard
Bike ownership today means juggling separate providers for repairs, insurance and warranty claims, and most riders only discover a problem once it fails. Tyred’s sensors and AI models are built to flag wear before that happens. For example, a fleet operator could get an alert that a battery is degrading days before it dies mid-route, instead of pulling the bike after a rider reports it dead.
Tyred has built the dataset to support that pitch by servicing more than 100,000 bikes over the past year and maintaining and swapping batteries on shared operator Lime’s e-bike fleet in London. It hasn’t disclosed the exact size of that fleet, and independent estimates of Lime’s total London operation vary widely.
“This investment gives us the opportunity to build the technology that underpins the next generation of cycling, helping riders and fleets keep more bikes on the road while creating a better ownership experience for everyone,” adds Bursztynski, co-founder and chief technology officer of Tyred.
The next mobility platform
Tyred isn’t the only startup rethinking bike ownership. Laka, a London insurtech, has raised tens of millions of dollars across multiple rounds, including a £14.1 million Series B, to rebuild bicycle insurance around real-time risk modelling. Zoomo has raised $100 million building e-bike fleets and software for delivery operators. Both compete on a single slice of ownership, such as insurance or fleet logistics.
Tyred’s premise is that bundling maintenance, insurance, warranties and finance together is what keeps riders and fleets on one platform, rather than solving one piece of the puzzle in isolation.
Raw Ventures and Ada Ventures, both London-based venture capital firms, led the £2.5 million round. Angel investors also participated, including Anton Buzdalin, who led the pre-seed round of London proptech startup Dwelly. The capital will fund new engineering hires, product development and an expansion of Tyred’s platform in the UK, ahead of a push into European markets.
“For cycling to keep growing, riders and fleet operators need the same level of reliability, service and support that already exists in other forms of transport. That means moving away from reactive repairs and fragmented ownership services towards a more connected, preventative model,”adds Nikita Baranov, co-founder and chief operating officer of Tyred.
The shift beyond bikes to connected ownership
The global bicycle-sharing market was worth $9.26 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach $16.44 billion by 2030, growing at a 10.2% CAGR, according to Grand View Research. The broader smart mobility category is harder to pin to one figure, but multiple industry research firms put it somewhere in the $250 billion to $340 billion range by the mid-2030s.
As cycling becomes permanent urban infrastructure rather than a weekend hobby, the question isn’t whether someone builds the operating system behind bike ownership, it’s whether that turns out to be Tyred, Laka, Zoomo or someone that hasn’t raised a round yet.
