Alan Jiang had seen the numbers before he saw the scooter. Working for Uber across Asia, he noticed that roughly four in ten trips were shorter than three kilometres. A car, he came to think, was the wrong tool for those.
He had come to this by an unusual path. Jiang studied economics at Yale, worked as a consultant at Exeter Group, and in December 2012 joined Uber, where he ran launches in China, Malaysia and Vietnam until early 2017. Then he joined ofo, the bike-sharing company, as head of Southeast Asia. He had now been inside two of the most aggressive growth machines in modern transport.
The plan was Singapore first, then Malaysia, Australia and South Korea.
By May 2018 he was out of ofo, a company that would later collapse. Months later he had a new one. He had a ready-made partner: Deb Gangopadhyay, a Yale classmate who had built a marketing automation stack at his own startup, Push Nova, and who became Beam's CTO.
In October 2018, Beam announced a US$6.4 million seed round from Sequoia India, Founders Fund, ZhenFund and Class 5 Global. The plan was Singapore first, then Malaysia, Australia and South Korea.
What nobody could easily plan around was the rulebook. Governments across Southeast Asia changed their minds about e-scooters repeatedly. Singapore tightened rules; other cities banned and unbanned. In 2020, Beam raised US$26 million from Sequoia India and Hana Ventures, targeting South Korea, Australia, Malaysia, New Zealand and Taiwan, and it made a point of becoming Climate Neutral Certified after measuring and offsetting its 2019 emissions.
Then came the big cheque: US$93 million in 2022, led by Affirma Capital, with operations in 35 cities. By 2023, the company was talking publicly about growth and profitability, a rare pairing in a business that had burned through investor money everywhere.
In July 2025, Beam agreed to merge with Neuron Mobility, creating one of the largest scooter operators in the world with more than 100 cities. Neuron's Zachary Wang would be global CEO and Jiang CEO of Asia. A founder who had once run a market became part of one bigger one.
There is a useful instinct in his path. Jiang did not start from a scooter. He started from a trip-length chart and a question about the right vehicle. Founders in crowded categories could do worse than start from a number only they have seen.