Spin wants to expand in Portugal and hires general manager
Vitor Mota's appointment is part of the company's expansion strategy in Portugal, where it has been present since September.
Spin, the micromobility unit of Ford Motor Company, has just appointed Vítor Mota as general manager for the Portuguese market. This comes after the company announced last September that it was expanding its micromobility services in Europe to the Portuguese market, offering its e-scooter service in Matosinhos. The appointment is part of the company’s expansion strategy in Portugal.
With a degree in Applied Mathematics from the Faculty of Science at the University of Lisbon, Vítor Mota began his career in consulting at Mercer, as an analyst, and later at Deloitte, where he was involved in and led several projects, focusing mainly on the area of mergers and acquisitions.
In 2019, the professional was invited by CIRC, a German micromobility startup, to take responsibility for operations, having led the launch of this brand’s scooter service in more than 10 Portuguese cities. This was followed, between 2020 and 2021, by two startups in the home delivery sector, Eat Tasty – as head of operations – and, more recently, Gorillas, where he was one of the people responsible for launching the company in Spain.
Now it takes over Spin’s leadership in Portugal, a market where the company has already made, in September, an initial investment of over €350,000 to provide 200 e-scooters in Matosinhos.
The agreement with Matosinhos also involves Spin’s integration in the AYR project, a platform developed by CEIIA that will quantify the CO2 emissions saved by users of the company’s scooters in the city. “The goal will then be to reward the option to travel by e-scooters, transforming the emissions saved into AYR credits. Users can then redeem these credits on other assets in the city, getting for example discounts on cultural events, on material goods,” Spin explains.
Based in San Francisco, Spin was the first shared micromobility company in the US and is the only company in the sector without venture capital funding. It currently operates in 70 cities and 25 university campuses worldwide and employs around a thousand people. In Europe, the company also has operations in Germany, Spain and the United Kingdom.
