Singapore Startup Beam secures $93M Series B
Beam, a Singaporean shared micromobility operator, announced today that it has raised $93 million in a Series B round to accelerate growth into new countries in Asia.
The fresh capital, which brings its total funding raised to $135 million, was led by Affirma Capital with participation from Sequoia Capital India, Hana Ventures, ICT Capital, EDB Investment (EDBI), AC Ventures, RTP Global, and Momentum Venture Capital. The Series B brings Beam’s valuation up into the triple digits, according to Beam CEO and co-founder Alan Jiang, who declined to provide exact numbers.
Beam, which currently operates e-scooters and e-bikes in 35 cities across Malaysia, Thailand, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand, aims to spread into markets like Japan, Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Turkey.
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In addition, the new capital will enable Beam to spur its deployment of a new fifth-generation Beam Saturn e-scooter, which the company intends to start rolling out in the second half of this year. The next-gen scooter will come with an updated version of Beam’s safety platform, dubbed Micromobility Augmented Riding Safety (MARS), which helps protect pedestrians and enhance local governments’ control over where e-vehicles can park or ride, said Jiang.
Existing technologies within the platform include dead reckoning and on-edge geofencing, but the fifth-generation Saturns will have a feature called Beam Pedestrian Shield, “an onboard AI camera that can instantly and accurately detect pedestrians to prevent collisions and detect footpaths to automatically reduce vehicle speed or even prevent riding completely,” according to Deb Gangopadhyay, chief technology officer of Beam.
Beam says its onboard camera with computer vision will be rolling out at scale by Q3 this year. The company initially will be piloting the onboard camera technology, which is developed in collaboration with its undisclosed R&D partner, a spokesperson at Beam told TechCrunch.
For example, American micromobility company Spin is working with Drover AI, a computer vision startup, to pilot camera-based safety systems in a few markets, and European operator Voi is doing the same with Luna in the U.K.
Singapore Startup Beam secures $93M
