Lime was founded in 2017 as LimeBike by Toby Sun and Brad Bao. The company launched with dockless bikes — no stations, no docking systems, simply a bike you unlocked with an app and left wherever you finished your trip. The business model was per-ride pricing with no capital expenditure on city infrastructure. San Jose, California was the first city.
In 2018, Lime rebranded from LimeBike to simply Lime when it added electric scooters to its fleet. The scooter addition was not just a product expansion — it changed the economics of the business. Scooters were cheaper to produce than bikes, faster to deploy, and traveled at speeds that made them genuinely useful for short urban trips. The rebranding signaled that Lime was a mobility company, not a bike company.
The shared mobility market in 2018 had one dominant question: which city would get the first serious scooter service? Lime and Bird both understood that whoever arrived first in a city would have enormous structural advantages: brand familiarity, operational learnings, city government relationships, and the data that comes from having real users on real streets.