Why we invested: Cowboy — connected bikes for liveable cities
As the city of Paris emerged from quarantine, Parisians discovered that 1000km of streets had — overnight — been transformed into temporary bike lanes. This radical move by the Mayor’s office is a powerful signal of the mobility revolution happening worldwide as people seek faster, cleaner, and safer ways to get around in their cities — one that fuels global demand for the next generation of bicycles.
With this in mind, Future Positive Capital is thrilled to announce its investment in Cowboy, a Brussels-based company that offers beautifully-designed connected bikes. The round totaled €23m, and we invested alongside historical investors Index Ventures and Hardware Club, as well as new investors Exor Seeds, Isomer Capital and Tiger Global.
What’s the problem?
Cowboy’s mission is to contribute to the ecological transition by accelerating the adoption of electric bicycles into cities, thereby removing cars from our streets.
The global tale of mass urbanization isn’t news to anyone; cities are now home to more than half the world’s population. By 2050, this proportion will grow to two-thirds. In Europe alone, this number is expected to increase from 75% today to 84%. And despite our mayors’ best efforts to create greener cities, our concrete jungles are increasingly difficult places to live in.
Transportation generates a long list of challenges for city dwellers, most of which have far-reaching, long-term consequences. To start with the obvious, transportation is one of the largest emitters of greenhouse gases, contributing a total of 14–22% of global CO2 emissions; of those, cars alone account for 40% of transport CO2 emissions.
To reduce that number, Project Drawdown estimates that new bicycle infrastructure and electric bike usage together have the potential of reducing 3.9–10.7 GtCO2 between now and 2050. While that’s a far cry from the total number of emissions that need to be curbed or sequestered to reach our climate goals, cycling remains a powerful and accessible lever in our “carbon solutions system” that could ultimately account for 10–20% of all alternative transportation reductions.
Beyond emissions, reducing car load on our streets yields a few other major benefits.
Beyond decreasing emissions, reducing car load on our streets yields several other major benefits.
With the continued dominance of petrol and diesel cars presenting serious public-health concerns, air pollution is now the fourth-largest killer in the world and contributes to five million deaths every year (research suggests that long-term exposure to air pollution increases the risk of emphysema more than smoking a pack of cigarettes a day!). Children, pregnant women, the elderly, and people with existing diseases are particularly vulnerable, not to mention the additional impact pollutants have on mental health and worker productivity.
Similarly, noise pollution generated by cars is a critical challenge for cities. 40% of the EU population is exposed to higher levels of road traffic noise than recommended (above 55 dB), leading to sleep problems and higher levels of anxiety and stress (we’ve written about the destructive impact of stress and anxiety in our post about our investment in Biobeats here). Much of this is due to traffic congestion, which compounds into a major economic burden — the total cost of congestion in the EU is estimated at €240bn per year, or almost 2% of EU GDP.
Last, but certainly not least, cars take up valuable space in our condensed city environments. The US, for example, has 8 parking spots for every car, with parking lots covering about 30% of cities on average and collectively taking up as much space as the entire state of West Virginia. It’s not difficult to imagine how this space could be put to better use. Many cities have witnessed a remarkable transformation of urban space in the post-confinement phase of the pandemic; in the wake of government bans on indoor gathering, restaurants and cafes have reclaimed parking spots as their own outdoor extensions, infusing life into the street corners of every neighborhood. Though these extensions are temporary, they offer a glimmer of how urban spaces could be better utilized. Imagine transforming city parking spots into micro-urban farms, cycling paths, gardens or terraces — all of which would make cities palpably more liveable. Paris is already on its way there: the Mayor of Paris plans to remove 72% of its on-street parking spaces, or 60,000 spots, by 2024.
Connected electric bikes — a tale of the near-term future
As new mobility solutions continue to transform city life, electric bikes (e-bikes) have dominated the micromobility space as a potentially major disruptor of car usage.
The challenges caused by congestion and traffic are baffling when you consider that most car trips are short enough in distance to be replaced by bicycles in dense urban areas. In England, for instance, more than half of car trips are less than 8 km (5 miles), and a third of trips in urban areas such as London as less than 2 km (1.2 miles) — all easily bikeable distances. Yet only 2.5% of journeys in London are taken by bike as of 2018 (vs. 37% for private transport and 36% for public transport).
While cities like Copenhagen or Amsterdam show high levels of cycling modal share (49% and 35% of total transports respectively), the potential for significant growth in other EU capitals who still have low to moderate rates of cycling presents a tremendous opportunity:
In this context, e-bikes offer a step-change solution for city dwellers, enabling them to travel fast, effortlessly, and without generating noise or pollution, even providing a Covid-friendly alternative to crowded public transportation. While e-bikes aren’t new (the first patent for an electrically powered bicycle was registered in 1895) recent improvements and steep cost reductions in lithium-ion batteries mean e-bikes are now more powerful, more affordable, and have longer autonomy, making them much more appealing to the general public.
As a result, Europe has seen a 60% surge in e-bike production from 2018 to 2019, with sales expected to skyrocket over the next 5 years: while 700k units were sold in 2010, 3 million were sold 2019 and 8 million are expected to be sold in 2025. Deloitte estimates that 130 million e-bikes will be sold globally between 2020 and 2023.
Within the e-bike segment, we at FPC are especially bullish on the emerging category of connected bikes. Over the last 5 years, consumers have grown accustomed to exceptional data-driven service in many aspects of their lives. With built-in sensors for approaching vehicles and crashes, automated calls to emergency services, and geo-located maps that reroute users to avoid traffic and danger, connected bikes offer cyclists an unprecedented host services based on environmental and behavioral data that improve experience and safety, factoring in everything from weather to collisions to road conditions to bike lane locations.
Cowboy: why did we invest?
While many companies make electric bikes, very few make connected bikes. Of those, Cowboy stands out — in our view — as the clear category leader.
Founders & team: product-obsessed, execution-focused and experienced
Cowboy bikes are known first for their rave reviews and unusually high NPS scores, and this results directly from the team’s DNA.
Since day 1, the founders — Adrien Roose, Karim Slaoui and Tanguy Goretti — have focused on building a product that defies all expectations. Product excellence is both the highest-order filter for each important decision and the core driver of every single team — software, hardware, design, manufacturing, marketing — all of which work in tandem to create the best experience possible.
It helps that the founding team is intimately familiar with the mobility market: Adrien, the CEO, and Karim, the Hardware Director, previously founded Take Eat Easy, an urban food delivery company that depended partly on cyclists for their deliveries, while Tanguy, who leads software, served as CEO of Djump, an early rideshare company. All three co-founders are entrepreneurs through and through, marked by previous experiences that strengthened their resolve to build a fast-growth but sustainable company (a trait that resonated strongly with us), and bring a highly complementary mix of skills, perspectives and experiences to the table.
In addition, they have surrounded themselves with outstanding talent — individuals such as VP Finance Alexander Cram, who was previously VP Finance at Onfido and brings more than a decade of experience in financial management; VP Manufacturing Vincent de Gaultier, an aeronautical engineer by training with close to 15 years of experience in manufacturing (including nearly a decade at Toyota); Charles Van Haverbeke, an engineer by training who most recently led operations for Uber in Belgium; and CMO Benoît Simeray, who brings 20 years of experience at companies like TomTom and Jawbone, where he most recently served as the SVP Global Sales & Channel Marketing.
Innovation focus & product differentiation
Their obsession with product has created a bike like no other, paired with a service layer that meaningfully expands an already outstanding cycling experience. It’s only by signing up for a test ride that you’ll fully feel the difference.
Instead of purchasing off-the-shelf components like most other e-bike makers, Cowboy designed their aluminum frame from scratch, re-imagining every detail — from how the battery is positioned (and the resulting weight distribution and balance) while still being fully removable, to the integrated lights with safety-first breaking notifications, to the torque sensor that governs the automatic and seamless kick of the electric drive.
The founders also applied this same meticulous attention towards developing a software layer as important to the experience as the hardware. Sensor-based automatic unlocking and movement notifications mean you no longer need to worry about your bike getting stolen, while a wide selection of other data-driven functions allow you to navigate your route with the user experience that parallels that of Tesla or Apple. With these design-centric sensibilities, Cowboy creates a gateway to exploring cities, and commuting altogether, differently.
Finally, Cowboy places customer service at the core of their product offering. With the push of a button the Cowboy customer service team is available for any inquiries that may come up along your journey, accumulating 5-star reviews across the board. And the team is continuously pushing new user-forward services all the time, such as test rides, EasyRider insurance, and easy-to-book at-home repairs.
The result is a world-class product and a community of superfans: passionate and delighted cyclers across varied demographic groups who aggregate around several of Manfred Max-Neef’s fundamental human needs — participation, recreation, creation, identity, freedom — and have become natural brand ambassadors. The greatest indicator? Today, recommendations and referrals make up a significant portion of new customers.
With a bold, brilliant product that has ignited a devoted customer base, Cowboy is already experiencing electric growth, and embodies all the core pillars needed to propel them to the front of the pack.
At Future Positive, we are seeking to support 20 iconic European companies that apply technology to solve a global need. Cowboy is one of these. If you’re interested in what we’re doing, please get in touch.
