A Brentwood-based investment company that owns the once-hyped Segway has sold rights to the electric scooter to its Chinese rival startup, officials announced Wednesday.

A Brentwood-based investment company that owns the once-hyped Segway has sold rights to the electric scooter to its Chinese rival startup, officials announced Wednesday.

Summit Strategic Investments (SSI) sold the two-wheeled vehicle to Ninebot for an undisclosed amount, Ninebot Chief Executive Gao Lufeng said at press conference in Beijing on Wednesday.

Ninebot, which makes similar electric scooters, has secured $80 million in investments from two other Chinese-based capital firms, Lufeng said.

SSI CEO Roger Brown told Brentwood Home Page on Wednesday the sale stems from a claim he filed with the International Trade Commission that Xiaomi, the firm that owns Ninebot, violated SSI’s patents for their product.

“Their lawyers understood our action had real merit,” Brown said. “So they just came out of woodwork and asked if we would sell the company. We said, ‘No, it’s not for sale.’ But then they offered a price that was extremely attractive.”

Brown said of the more than 50 companies he has owned, Segway was “by far the most fun” he has managed. He also said that through SSI’s efforts, Segway for the first time generated profits.

“Since it was started, it has never made a profit ever. However, once we acquired it we were able to turn a profit in both the first and second year. For the first time, really, we proved Segway could be a sustainable organization and company, and generate real tangible results.”

Created in 2001, the Segway scooter hit the market with a lot of fanfare. In a December 2001 Time magazine report entitled “Reinventing the Wheel,” Apple CEO Steve Jobs said the personal transportation vehicle was “as big a deal as the PC.”

In that same article, Segway creator Dean Kamen, who designed the vehicle in New Hampshire, said his invention would “be to the car what the car was to the horse and buggy.”

However, as New York Times journalist Paul Mozur wrote this week in his article about Wednesday’s acquisition, the scooters’ sales sale never really took off, and the product failed to live up to its hype.

“Too speedy for sidewalks, too pokey for roads and too expensive for regular consumers looking for an alternative to walking– with a goofy pogo-stick aesthetic to boot — the self-balancing electric stand-up scooter is a niche product in the United States,” Mozur wrote.

“It has also been widely mocked in American popular culture as an emblem of sloth.”

Mozur said that in China, the Segway is taken more seriously, with tourists, police and every day commuters using the Segway or similar type scooters.

Summit Strategic Investments in 2013 acquired Segway after its previous owner, British entrepreneur Jimi Heselden, died in an accident when he drove the Segway off a cliff in West Yorkshire.

The Nashville Business Journal at that time quoted SSI’s Brown as saying Segways had an “amazing” growth potential for a company with more than 250 distributors and dealers throughout 80 countries.

“It’s unique, it’s profitable and it’s worldwide. We can triple or quadruple the sales of this company with very little effort,” Brown said in 2013.

Jonathan Romeo covers Brentwood for Home Page Media Group. Contact him at jonathan@brentwoodhomepage.com.