Micromobility company Lime has raised $167 million in its IPO.

The nine-year-old scooter and bike company, which is backed by Uber, sold 6.68 million shares at $25 each, at the mid-point of its $24 to $26 price range. Those shares are expected to start trading on the Nasdaq stock exchange under the ticker “LIME” on Wednesday.

Lime has been considering an IPO for years. In 2021, following a $523 million funding round, CEO Wayne Ting told TechCrunch the company was eyeing an IPO in 2022. He re-heated the idea in 2023, saying that Lime was still waiting for the right market conditions.

The long-awaited IPO pegs Lime’s valuation at around $1.66 billion, just shy of the price fellow micromobility company Bird got when it merged with a special purpose acquisition company in 2021.

Lime needs the funds. In its IPO filing in May, the company expressed “substantial doubt” that it could continue as a going concern. Lime said it needs the IPO proceeds to pay around $1 billion in liabilities, more than half of which is due by the end of this year. Without an IPO, Lime told prospective investors, it would need to find other sources of financing.

Lime is riding that financial edge because the micromobility industry has proven to be fairly brutal over the last few years, even in the good times. Bird had to file for bankruptcy protection and restructure after it went public, and other competitors have either merged (Tier and Dott), been delisted from major exchanges (Micromobility.com) or gone out of business entirely (Superpedestrian).

Amid the chaos, Lime has managed to improve its revenue over the last few years. It generated $521 million in 2023, $686.6 million in 2024, and $886.7 million last year. The company also trimmed its losses from $122.3 million in 2023, to just $33.9 million in 2024, though that figure edged back up in 2025 to $59.3 million.

That growth has come largely from Lime’s ability to scale globally. It now operates in 230 cities across 29 countries. But the company is also somewhat dependent on Uber, which owns 24% of Lime, and accounted for more than 14% of its revenue last year. (Uber allows people to book Lime rides through its app in some cities.)

Sony announced Wednesday that it will stop producing physical discs for all new PlayStation games starting in January 2028, marking a move into an all-digital future. After that, every new release will be sold digitally through the PlayStation Store and other retailers. Games released before the cutoff will continue to be available on disc.

Physical copies have long been a staple of gaming culture, so for many players, saying goodbye to game discs will be bittersweet. However, Sony said the decision reflects how most players already buy and play games today.

“This is a natural direction for Sony Interactive Entertainment to adapt to consumer trends as the general preference for digital media significantly outpaces physical discs. This transition will enable us to align more closely with how most of our community prefers to access and play games today,” the company wrote in its announcement. 

According to Sony’s financial results for the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2025, digital downloads accounted for 85% of full-game software sales on PS4 and PS5, while physical copies accounted for the remaining 15%.

The decline of physical games has also been reflected in retail, with stores that once relied heavily on physical discs continuing to shrink as more players buy online. GameStop has reportedly closed more than 1,300 stores over the past two fiscal years.

The announcement comes just days after Grand Theft Auto 6 fans reacted negatively after learning that the game’s “physical” edition would include only a download code inside the box instead of an actual game disc, highlighting that a group of gamers still value collecting physical editions.

Additionally, Sony revealed on Wednesday that it’s shutting down the PlayStation Store on the PlayStation 3 in select markets later this year, followed by global closures of the PS3 and PlayStation Vita stores next year. 

Once those stores close, players won’t be able to purchase new digital content on those systems. Sony said previously purchased games and content will still be available to download for the foreseeable future.

Concerns over the impact of AI chatbots on mental health, personal safety, harassment, and disinformation have forced AI developers to implement safeguards to better control how and what their AI models are allowed to respond or do.

But concerns and worries can’t erode demand. AI offers a lot of promise, and people don’t want a faceless tech company to restrict their access to that potential. And if they can preserve their privacy while they use AI models however they want, why not?

Venice AI, which offers access to more than 200 AI models while allowing users to retain their privacy, is raking it in thanks to that demand. Just two years in, the company already has more than 850,000 unique visitors to its website, and serves more than 3 million active users and an average of 1.7 million API calls per day.

The startup hosts “uncensored,” open-source models on its own data centers, and routes queries to closed-source models, such as those by OpenAI or Anthropic. All user input is encrypted and unencrypted client-side, and routed through an external proxy before it is processed and returned, with no data stored on Venice’s own systems. It also provides end-to-end encryption on some models, though you have to pay for a subscription to get that feature.

The company is already profitable, with annualized run-rate revenues of over $70 million, its CEO Erik Voorhees (pictured above, in the center) told TechCrunch during an exclusive interview.

Understandably, investors have flocked to get a piece of that traction. Venice AI on Wednesday said it had raised a $65 million Series A at a $1 billion valuation, its first external fundraise. The round was led by crypto-focused venture firm Dragonfly, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, North Island Ventures, and others.

The overlap between Voorhees, Venice’s focus on privacy, and its new crypto investors is hard to miss, especially given the CEO’s background and past work. An early bitcoin advocate, Voorhees has founded a few crypto companies, including bitcoin gambling site Satoshi Dice and cryptocurrency exchange ShapeShift, and has long advocated in favor of preserving users’ privacy.

In fact, when a Wall Street Journal investigation accused ShapeShift, which initially didn’t require its users to identify themselves, of processing millions of suspect funds, Voorhees reportedly said: “I don’t think people should have their identity recorded to catch an occasional criminal.”

He struck a similar note when asked how Venice AI thinks about offering access to AI models in light of recent cases of AI psychosis and resulting harm, saying his team treats their service as a “neutral tool or a neutral platform.”

“This is the same principle that you have in Bitcoin, where Bitcoin, as a neutral protocol, works the same way for all people,” he said. “I think it’s actually quite dangerous from a safety perspective, for the world to enter this next phase and have everyone be constantly watched. To me that is actually much more dangerous than any particular person asking a controversial question or something that might be considered bad.”

There’s a considerable focus on giving users agency, too. Users can freely choose from AI models that can generate text, images, audio, and video — all of which vary in their performance, quality, and the amount of censorship applied. The website prominently features several AI “characters” that you can customize and chat with, and the company proudly states it offers an “uncensored” experience.

“We’re optimizing for freedom and actually respecting users as adults, which is, I think, rare these days,” Voorhees said.

The founder said Venice also works on some open models’ system prompts to instruct them to answer more openly, though it doesn’t add any restrictions to the models.

Unsurprisingly, there are two crypto tokens associated with the effort. Venice launched a token called “VVV” in early January, in a bid to attract users, Voorhees said, and in August last year added another, called “DIEM.” Users can buy VVV and then stake it to mint DIEM, which generates $1 worth of AI credits per day that you can spend on Venice. However, Voorhees said only about 8% of the company’s users pay with crypto.

The founder credited the company’s growth to the good performance of the crypto tokens, though he said the strongest driver was getting close to feature parity with ChatGPT. “When we launched, we were very far away from what ChatGPT could do, but people would use us because it was private. And today, we’re very close to what ChatGPT can do […] so as we’ve closed that gap, it’s become an increasingly compelling alternative,” he said.

Looking forward, Venice AI wants to use the fresh cash to start buying GPUs and building its own data centers so it can stop leasing GPUs and increase its gross margins.