Yahoo Finance Citymapper losses widen to £7.4m as travel app struggles to cash in on popularity
Citymapper’s losses have widened to £7.4m as the travel app struggles to turn its popularity into revenue growth.
The London travel start-up, which developed a mapping and transport app used by millions, reported revenues of £5.1m in the year ending in December 2021, down from £5.4m the previous year.
The company went further into the red during the year as losses increased to £7.4m, up from £6.4m.
Founded more than a decade ago, Citymapper has never made a profit and has run multiple experiments to turn its much-loved travel app into a money-making business.
The business now makes money through referrals for taxis, e-bikes and scooters that users can pick and pay for through its app.
It also has a subscription-based travel card in London, Citymapper Pass, that starts at £40 per week and provides unlimited travel in Zones 1 and 2 and £10 in credit to spend on ride-hailing services and e-bikes or “Boris bikes”.
Companies House accounts for Citymapper showed it had raised £4.3m in convertible loans to fund its business throughout 2022. It was most recently valued at £200m on the back of a 2021 crowdfunding round where it raised £6m from thousands of investors.
Backed by tens of millions of pounds in funding from investors Index Ventures and Balderton Capital, Citymapper was launched a decade ago by founder Azmat Yusuf after struggling with London’s bus timetables.
It has since expanded to cover London tubes, trains, taxis, bikes and scooters and launched in every major city in Europe. Its accounts state it now has a presence, using a mix of public and private data, in more than 500 cities.
But the app, which has tens of millions of users, has had difficulty turning popularity into revenues.
In 2017, it launched a bright green branded Citymapper Bus in London to try and fill the gaps in Transport for London’s service.
It shut this down, however, and instead launched a service working with minicabs to create a service to compete with Uber.
Its most recent initiative is a series of travel cards and a subscription to its app.
Citymapper said revenues from its Citymapper Pass subscription service had “continued to be impacted by Covid-19” during 2021 with movement restrictions and working from home.
However, its app enjoyed all-time high engagement in the latter half of 2021, the company said.
