A built platform, an unserved market, and a first city.
Scoteri has spent its development in the hard part: making scooters that obey a city’s rules, and the operations software to run them. What remains is deployment. We are talking to investors and strategic partners who want a position in micromobility in Iraq before the first fleet lands.
- Stage
- Pre-launch, platform built and hardware-tested
- First market
- Erbil, Kurdistan Region, Iraq
- Seeking
- Capital and strategic partners for market entry
- Materials
- Financial detail shared under NDA on request
The trip nobody is serving.
Erbil is a car city. It has grown outward, its districts are spread, and the journey between them is short enough to be annoying by car and long enough to be unpleasant on foot. There is no shared bike system, no scooter network, and no light vehicle option in between.
That gap is not unusual in the region. It is the norm. International operators have concentrated on Europe, North America and the Gulf. Most Iraqi cities have never had a shared micromobility service of any kind, and the ones that will get one first will get it from an operator who built for these conditions rather than one adapting a European product.
What Scoteri is.
Three parts, all built in-house, all already running against real vehicles.
A rider app
Map, unlock, ride, park, pay. Every ride ends with a parking photo the operations team reviews, and fares come off an in-app balance that riders will top up with a card.
A vehicle control layer
Scooters hold a live connection to Scoteri’s own broker. Unlocks are confirmed by the vehicle. Speed limits and riding restrictions are applied on the scooter itself, not suggested in the app.
An operations back office
Fleet register, zone editor, ride oversight, wallet and ledger, rider verification, fault reports and an append-only audit log: the software an operator needs on day one, not in year two.
Why this is the moment.
The engineering risk is largely spent
The part of a micromobility business that takes longest and fails most often, making the software actually control the hardware, is done and demonstrated. Capital now buys deployment, not discovery.
The market has no incumbent
There is no shared scooter operator to displace in Erbil. A first entrant sets the rider expectations, the parking behaviour and the municipal relationship.
Regulation is unwritten, not hostile
Cities elsewhere retrofitted rules onto fleets that had already misbehaved. Scoteri can arrive with zone-level control ready and let the city set the terms before the first scooter is deployed.
Local operating knowledge is the barrier
Identity verification, parking discipline, street conditions and municipal relationships are where imported models struggle. Scoteri was designed around them from the start.
Market opportunity.
Erbil is the first market, not the whole thesis. The Kurdistan Region and the wider Iraqi urban market contain several cities with the same shape of problem: dense enough centres, short intra-district trips, a young population and near-total car dependence for journeys that do not warrant a car.
Business model.
Standard shared-micromobility economics, adapted to how this market pays.
- Primary revenue
- Per-ride charging: an unlock fee plus a per-minute rate, set per city.
- Payment method
- Prepaid in-app balance, topped up by card from the app at launch. Card payment integration is part of launch preparation.
- Cost structure
- Vehicle capital, charging and redistribution labour, maintenance and spares, connectivity, and city-level overhead.
- Expansion model
- Company-operated in the first market; operator partnerships where local partners are better placed to run the fleet.
- Pricing and unit economics
- Shared under NDA, since they depend on final vehicle cost and city terms.
Technology.
Slow, no-ride and no-parking zones are applied to real vehicles today, from a back office that changes them without touching the fleet.
A lower top speed, applied to the scooter
- For the rider
- The scooter simply will not go faster while you are inside the area. There is nothing to press and nothing to acknowledge.
- For the city
- Set a slower limit on a promenade, a market street or a school approach. It is applied to the vehicle, so it holds whether or not the app is open.
Enforced by the Scoteri platform today.
Why the zone layer is the defensible part
A rider app can be commissioned in a few months. What takes years, and what a white-label product does not give you, is enforcement that reaches the vehicle: three zone types applied to the scooter itself, changed from the back office without touching the fleet. It is also the thing a city asks about first, which makes it the difference between a permit conversation and a polite refusal.
Operations.
Micromobility is an operations business before it is a technology business. The back office that makes it runnable already exists.
Every scooter, connected
Each vehicle keeps a live link to Scoteri. Its position and state are always known, so a scooter can be found, locked or taken out of service from the back office.
- Scooter A71%In ride
- Scooter B88%Parked
- Scooter C64%Fault reported
- Scooter D52%Out of service
- Scooter E93%Parked
Unlocked only when the scooter confirms
A ride starts with a command to the vehicle, and the clock only runs once the scooter replies.
- Unlock sent to the scooter09:41:02
- Scooter confirms it is unlocked09:41:03
- Ride timer starts00:00:00
Lights on after dark, automatically
Headlights switch on for night riding without the rider doing anything. Deployed and confirmed on real hardware.
An operations back office, already built
Running scooters well is mostly operations. The software the team runs a city on exists today.
- Fleet register
- Zone editor
- Ride oversight
- Parking photo review
- Wallet and ledger
- Rider verification
- Fault reports
- Support
- Audit log
Expansion strategy.
Deliberately sequential. A second city only after the first one works.
- 01
Prove one city
Deploy in Erbil, establish parking behaviour and the municipal relationship, and learn the real cost of operating here.
- 02
Densify before widening
Add vehicles and coverage inside a working market before opening a second one. Thin coverage in two cities beats nothing but loses to good coverage in one.
- 03
Second cities in the region
Other Kurdistan Region and Iraqi cities, entered with the operating playbook rather than a re-run of first-city discovery.
- 04
Operator partnerships
Where a local partner has the ground presence, license the platform and support them rather than build a branch.
Competitive positioning.
- Against international operators
- They have scale and capital. They have not entered this market, and their payment and verification models assume conditions that do not hold here.
- Against a local reseller of a white-label app
- A white-label rider app does not give you vehicle-level enforcement, parking photo review, KYC or an audit trail. Scoteri owns its stack and can change it for a city that asks.
- Against doing nothing
- The alternative for a short trip in Erbil today is a car or a taxi. That is the real competitor, and it is beatable on time and cost.
What investment is for.
Deployment, not development. The categories below are where capital goes; the amounts are part of the materials shared directly.
Fleet
Vehicles, spares, chargers and the tooling to service them.
Deployment
Getting the first fleet onto the street: logistics, installation, field testing.
Operations
The local team that charges, redistributes, repairs and supports.
Market entry
Rider acquisition, municipal engagement and launch.
Working capital
The runway to reach a proven unit economic in the first city.
Team.
Scoteri’s platform, meaning the rider app, the vehicle control layer and the operations back office, was built by the team directly, not outsourced. Detailed backgrounds are provided with the investor materials.
Investor questions.
No. The platform is built and has been tested against real scooters, but no public fleet has been deployed and nobody can rent a Scoteri scooter yet. Erbil is the intended first market.
Because there is none. Publishing projections dressed as results is the fastest way to lose a serious investor, so this page states the stage plainly and keeps the financial material where it belongs: in a direct conversation.
A rider app; a vehicle control layer over a self-hosted message broker handling remote lock and unlock, GPS telemetry and automatic night headlights; a geofencing engine enforcing no-ride, no-parking and speed-limit zones on the vehicle; a wallet and transaction ledger; end-of-ride parking photos reviewed by the operations team; rider identity verification; and an operations back office covering fleet, zones, rides, finance, support and audit.
Deployment rather than development: vehicles, getting them onto the street, the local operating team, market entry, and the working capital to reach a proven unit economic in the first city.
That is a conversation, not a web page. We are open to equity investment and to strategic partnerships where a partner brings distribution, fleet, or municipal access rather than only capital.
Yes, under NDA. Request investor information through the form on this page and tell us a little about your mandate so the material we send is relevant.
Municipal engagement is part of market entry and is in progress. We do not claim any approval or relationship we do not have, and we will not do so on this website.
Request investor information.
Tell us who you are and what you are looking for. We will reply directly with material matched to your mandate, under NDA where appropriate.
Important legal notice
This website is provided for general information about Scoteri and does not constitute an offer to sell, or a solicitation of an offer to buy, any security or investment in any jurisdiction. Nothing on this page is investment, legal, tax or financial advice, and no statement here should be relied upon as a forecast or guarantee of any result. Any investment in an early-stage company involves substantial risk, including the risk of losing the entire amount invested. No return is promised, projected or guaranteed. Any investment would be made solely on the basis of separately provided materials and definitive legal documentation, and prospective investors should take their own independent professional advice.