This interview is lightly edited for clarity and length.
Michael Spencer is a serial entrepreneur who recently spent four years ramping up Model 3 and Model Y production and scaling the supercharger and energy businesses at Tesla.
Zeno is launching a sport utility electric motorcycle, a portable/swappable flexible-use battery, and a charging-plus-battery swap network across India and East Africa.
Michael is excited about what has gone into the design of all the elements in the story.
But more than anything, he is excited about the team he has assembled…
Insight EV: Michael, why enter Africa at this stage? The early starters have been there for the last 3-4 years – Spiro, Ampersand, Kofa, and many others.
Michael Spencer: East Africa has the world’s highest density of high-mileage and high-spending two-wheeler drivers. Thanks to the wide use of Bodas (bike taxis), your average East African two-wheeler customer drives 5-10 times as much daily and spends 1.5 times as much per liter of fuel as say a Taiwanese two-wheeler customer. As a result, the opportunity to create savings for two-wheeler customers in this part of the world by going electric is higher than in any other geography.
In addition, most East African countries have grids that are, on average, over 90% renewables powered and are on track to being 100% renewably powered by the end of this decade. So, the environmental benefit of getting an electric motorbike on the street here can be larger than getting a Model 3 on the road in California.
In other words, East Africa is one of the best areas to launch a battery swapping and battery as a service business, as there is a high density of high-mileage, high-spending consumers who can benefit from the cost savings and give you the density that you need to have an efficiently operating ecosystem.
When it comes to timing, we’ve been working quietly on this for over four years. We started pre-Arc Ride and pre-Spiro in East Africa and have kept ourselves under very tight wraps. We started testing over 40 electric two-wheelers across half a dozen models sourced from around the world in 2020, running them for tens of thousands of kilometers. Since then, we have gone through three generations of prototyping on the road in both East Africa and India. We’ve gone through as many prototyping and field testing iterations as any other in the market – we just held off from talking about it until we got our act fully together, knew what we were doing, and had a set of products we’re confident in to scale with.
InsightEV: You mentioned that you tested about 40 motorcycles from different manufacturers on the continent, and now you have designed your own that you’re going to manufacture. Was that a change in strategy, or was the original idea about sourcing the motorcycle from someone, and later on, you decided that maybe it’s better to design your own?
Michael: I was fortunate to play a role in the Model 3 and Model Y production ramp and energy storage and solar product development Tesla and built pretty strong competence around developing and manufacturing hardware, so I understood how difficult it was. Early on at Zeno, we started with an open mindset about whether there are products that work well for the global electrification of the standard motorcycle market. We were fairly unbiased going into it, looking for an affordable “sport utility” electric two-wheeler with good suspension that can carry 300-400 kg on it, with a bench seat, good range, and good torque that you can purchase for less than $2,000.
At that price point, we didn’t see anybody doing a proper product. High-quality European electric motorcycles retail for well over $5,000. Instead, you’re mostly left with mediocre attempts to retrofit existing petrol bike frames to work for EVs or to make motorcycles out of powertrains sourced from Asian city commuter mopeds. This would result in poorly fitted or sized hub motors, battery systems with poor center of gravity, and many other issues. You know this story well; we have seen how Chinese kit scooters have done (or failed to do rather) in India…
As a result, we realized that there was a very strong need for thoughtful ground-up product development for the mass market, 100-200cc motorbike segment globally. In India, this is the Hero Splendor up to Bajaj Pulsar / TVS Apache segment. In Africa, this includes the Bajaj Boxer 150, which is the ubiquitous bike in Africa and many parts of LatAm.
We also saw how important range is to serve the use case of the motorbike taxi (or any high mileage customer) and how price-sensitive the consumer is. This built a very strong conviction around the importance of battery-as-a-service and, in some cases, swapping batteries (which we think about distinctly). Battery-as-a-service is a business model and financial innovation, while battery swapping is an operational tool. We developed a strong conviction around the need for both batteries-as-a-service and, in some cases, pairing them with battery swapping.
When you try to use existing vehicles for batteries-as-a-service or battery swapping, you encounter many messy challenges. One of the hard engineering challenges is storing sufficient energy and power density in a vehicle to give it 150cc performance and sufficient range. If you take somebody else’s vehicle or battery and try to merge those, you are making sacrifices on the amount of usable volume you have, the connector approach, the center of gravity, and overall user experience and ergonomics.
As a result, we realized that in order to build the exact product, we thought was required – an affordable sport utility motorcycle with a powertrain that can compete with up to a 150cc vehicle and the ability to support battery-as-a-service and battery swapping – we would need to intentionally design the whole ecosystem from the grounds up. The vehicle, battery, charging, and everything else. That ecosystem approach is where there were some significant engineering challenges around how you deliver 150cc performance in an affordable vehicle that can handle heavy loads, has strong torque, and has very good gradability. Nobody had really thought about that with a clean sheet of paper around the power delivery and chassis. If we had found somebody who had done an excellent product at that point, we would have gone with them.
InsightEV: Got it. You decided to design your own motorcycle there. Was any external help taken, or did you do it all internally?
Michael: Our approach has been to build core competence and own intellectual property internally while maintaining a relatively lean team. Everyone on our team has a strong history of delivering excellent products and design engineering. People like Swaroop Bhushan, who previously led the development of Lucid’s highest-performance powertrain, and Aniket Katyarmal, who previously played a large role in building Ola Electric. Jake Butynski, our head of product, is our lead product architect. Together, Jake and I own pretty much every single decision, both mechanically, electrically, and aesthetically.
We then supplemented with one contract engineering provider to provide supporting resources and have been working with KISKA (who know motorcycles very well) on industrial design. However, the core design is guided and controlled by Zeno.
InsightEV: And for the industrialization? Are you handling the supply chain and the actual production of the motorcycle on your own?
Michael: Several senior members of our team come from Apple and played important roles in developing the Apple approach to manufacturing. As we developed our strategy for making our products real and getting them out into the world we have taken a flexible approach, focused on staying lean while ensuring control over the key parts of our product ecosystem that allow us to adapt to a constantly changing industry landscape. To do this we manage some parts of our sourcing and manufacturing ourselves internally and work with contract manufacturing partners for other parts of our product stack as and where it makes sense.
InsightEV: That’s pretty interesting. So you were in the low profile mode, as we call it, stealth mode for about three years. Then Zeno came out, and I remember you raised your first investment round only in September 2024, right?
Michael: Correct. We had an earlier smaller round that myself and several key supporters funded and then raised our first large institutional round that we announced in September. We have been fortunate to have continued inbound interest from some amazing world class venture and strategic investors since then as well. We have had some great options and opportunities for raising both equity and debt and get to be thoughtful about when, how much and at what valuation we raise new funding.
InsightEV: Coming back to the motorcycle. Is it a motorcycle or a new form factor that Zeno is experimenting with?
Michael: It is very much a motorcycle. Having worked with and interviewed over 2,000 customers across India, Kenya, Uganda, Nepal, and Bangladesh, we have strong conviction for a vehicle that gives you all of the utility that a Hero Splendor / Boxer 150 / Honda 125 does. Our tech is futuristic but our design is rooted in what people value in a vehicle today, ensuring utility and simplicity. We’re designing for the ability to carry flexibly large loads through an urban landscape or a more rural, rougher road landscape. A motorbike that lets you take charge of your life and flexibly carry who and what you need to, when you need to, as far as you need to, affordably.
While we haven’t changed the form factor within the broader motorbike segment, we are unique within the electric two-wheeler space. Most African startups are buying white-labeled products from Chinese companies like Horwin or TailG and modifying them to be swappable. We are one of the first ground-up OEMs to develop a 150cc performance comparable sport utility electric motorcycle with both swappability and fast charging as ‘native features’, so to speak.
InsightEV: Michael, what’s the go-to-market approach in Africa? Will you be a battery-as-a-service player offering swaps like all the other players?
Michael: We’re taking a very different customer-centric approach to charging than any of the other operators in Africa or India. We’re calling it our open multimodal charging network and are excited to share more about it.
Much like what Nio Automotive has done for cars in China and Europe, we have three different ways to charge our vehicles:
We have removable, swappable batteries deployed with a Zeno-designed swap station that has taken lots of lessons learned from charging solutions at Gogoro, SUN Mobility, Ola, Ather, and my time in Tesla Supercharging;
We’re fitting all our vehicles with Type 6 fast charging inlets that can be used at Zeno fast chargers (and will enable other OEMs using the Type 6 standard to charge on our network);
We also allow customers to purchase and use home chargers for slower overnight home charging.
In offering all three options, we’ve developed an interoperable charging ecosystem more responsive to consumer ( both ours and other OEM customers) needs rooted in a customer service mindset – rather than trying to create a captive market of people who have to come to limited swap stations to buy energy from us.
Our firm belief is that if you want to see the entire planet electrified, you do not do that by trapping customers with constrained charging access.
Customers who have historically owned a 150cc motorbike have purchased it for the freedom it provides. Drivers who primarily use their bike driving for Rapido, Uber, Safe Boda, or Bolt also use it six, eight, or ten times a year to take a road trip home to see the family or take them somewhere out of town. People buy motorbikes to expand their world, not shrink their world to the bounds of an urban swap network.
The closed-loop captive swap solution seen with many current operators forces consumers to decide between a petrol vehicle that has extensive utility across their lives or an electric vehicle that forces them to operate within the bounds of a swapping network, and as a result, you see limited uptake of swappable electric two-wheelers by non-fleet drivers in India. Our approach is the first to unlock that.
Our fast chargers, which charge relatively quickly, are very affordable to deploy, and we will be deploying them nationwide in Kenya this year and India shortly thereafter. With that solution, you can drive from one side of this country to the other with several stops of 45 minutes to an hour and a half to charge. You can plug in at the office and over a quick lunch break. Or, if you prefer, you can choose to charge at home, travel with a portable charger, and top your batteries up at any standard wall socket. Thus, we have a charging solution that is much more responsive to consumer needs and rooted in expanding people’s world rather than creating a captive market of people who have to come to swap stations to buy energy from us.
InsightEV: You mentioned creating a multimodal charging setup. Like Nio, would you offer customers different choices regarding leasing the batteries or buying them all?
Michael: Our flexible charging approach lets us serve different customer groups with different needs across different geographies.
For example, your typical customer in Bangalore is a young professional who might be excited about the bike’s look, style, design, and utility. But they might only be commuting 15 to 20 km every day to work and 15 to 20 km home and will be perfectly happy to ( and have the disposable income to) purchase the batteries and charge them at home, the office, or any type 6 fast charger.
On the other hand, motorbike taxi drivers for Rapido, Uber, or any Boda drivers in Africa who do 120 to 180 kilometers daily and for whom downtime is sacrilege, we can offer swapping with less than 2 minutes of downtime. Then, the same customer can use our fast chargers when they’re taking their bike to their village 250 km away from the city.
InsightEV: You mentioned that you will roll out fast chargers extensively in Kenya. Are you also planning to roll out swapping stations across Kenya?
Michael: We are already on our way to rolling out the most ubiquitous charging network, which combines swap stations and fast chargers in Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania and soon, across India.
InsightEV: Are the swapping stations smart, or are these what we call swapping cabinets with manual assistance?
Michael: We would like to call it the Zeno-style smart-swap station; it’s a self-service station, unlike a Yulu (India) or Ampersand-type (Africa) manned approach. That’s been decided after a lot of customer feedback. Over the years, we have piloted both serviced shelf-based swap stations and automated self-service ones and have built conviction around a great solution for a self-service, very flexible, and dynamically intelligent swap station.
InsightEV: India is your other market. Is it a secondary market for you, or do you have a focus on India?
Michael: We have a strong focus on India and are launching pre-orders here soon. India is the largest two-wheeler market on the planet and Africa is the fastest growing and highest fuel consuming per capita two-wheeler market on the planet, so we are very focused on both.
We have soft launched or kicked off road testing in several markets already and are subjecting our motorbikes and charging products to some of the roughest use conditions on the planet across Africa, North America and India collecting feedback from motorbike owners and test drivers who are driving over 150km a day on average and in some cases spending $15/10,000 Rupees)+ a day on fuel. We are putting our products through their paces to ensure that when we scale deliveries across African and Indian markets in the coming year ,that customers get an excellent and reliable product, distinguished from some of the recent experiences customers are having with challenging and unreliable new EVs.
InsightEV: When you’re ready, we will have a much longer conversation about India. But today, I just wanted to touch on a couple of things. India is a huge geography (for rolling out swapping stations). Are you looking at the same business model as Africa, or will there be changes?
Michael: Nobody has developed a 125cc – 150cc equivalent sport utility motorcycle in India. The closest is Ola Electric’s Roadster, but that is more of a sport bike and less of a “move your life” sport utility motorbike.
Current products in the market – Tork (RIP), Ultraviolette, and even more affordable commuter-targeted vehicles like Oben and Revolt – are sports style, not great for pillion-passenger-carrying vehicles. Nobody has developed a vehicle or ecosystem that serves the 80% of the market every year that buys a Hero Splendor, a Bajaj CT 125, or similar products. The customers who buy 100 to 150 cc petrol motorbikes in India use them for a wide variety of applications that require a wide variety of energy needs, and we’re designing a product stack that can offer them flexibility.
We also strongly believe that the best way to deploy a battery-swapping ecosystem is by seeding demand with high mileage drivers in India, just as it is in Africa. For reference, we have two former executives for the two largest ride-hailing operators in Africa on our team: Alastair Sussock, founder and CEO of Safe Boda, and Kenneth Micah, who ran Bolt Africa and Greg Moran, who founded and built Zoom Car across India has joined us recently as CFO, bringing deep knowledge about deploying mobility infrastructure across India.
If you speak to any of the large ride-hailing operators in Africa, Southeast Asia, and South Asia and ask what needs to be true for them to go fully electric, the first thing they’ll say is a vehicle and a charging solution allowing for a 200 km+ of real world range (not IDC range) a day.
Whether it’s Rapido, Uber, Bolt, Safe Boda, Gojek, Grab, or anyone else – all need a solution for owner-operators to carry respectable loads up and down hills with sufficient torque and acceleration and then deliver that performance for over 200km a day with limited or no charging time.
InsightEV: Returning to the motorcycle, we could tell from the website that you have twin 2kWh packs and a mid-drive motor. Are we right in the assumption?
Michael: You’re making some good assumptions. Yes, we have a pair of batteries that provide 4kWh of storage capacity to run a mid-drive motor.
InsightEV: Anything more to share, like motor power?
Michael: We have not announced it yet. However, you can use your deductive reasoning to share what you have deduced at this stage. What I will say is that our stock powertrain really puts the “sport” in sport utility! Over time we will be introducing lower power, more affordable motor variants and higher power motor variants in our premium models.
InsightEV: We are not in the business of sensational journalism, so it’s okay. We’ll wait for the public announcement. We’re more interested in the impact that it has on the market.
Michael: While we wait to share more about our motor specifically, I’m happy to talk about one of the other large impacts we’re having on the market. We’re very proud of how we’ve designed our battery pack and swap solution to uniquely balance peak performance, range, battery longevity, ergonomics, and affordability.
On the one hand, most existing swap solutions – think Gogoro or Arc Ride – are limited in power output and constrained to 100-110 cc equivalent performance. This isn’t high enough for many of the heavy passenger use cases we’ve seen in East Africa and India or the L5 auto rickshaw use cases across these markets.
On the other, operators who’ve designed for the higher gradability and torque needed for heavy passenger use cases have ended up with battery packs that we don’t think are scalable in a large charging network. Think battery packs that weigh 35-45 kgs and require multiple people or a trolley to be moved around.
By putting a lot of thought – beyond what we’ve seen in Africa and India to date – into how we access and manage power and our powertrain, we’ve developed the first solution that can deliver 150-cc equivalent performance in a swappable pack at affordable, competitive prices for our markets. As a result, we can serve not only the 150 cc motorbike segment but also L5 three-wheelers and light cars. At the same time, we can very easily scale down to more affordable to own and operate scooters with single-battery applications. In doing so, we’re pretty uniquely enabling electrification across various light mobility form factors.
InsightEV: You mentioned the L5 auto. Would it need more than two batteries?
Michael: In all of our testing to date, the powertrain and battery we’ve configured to support the 150 cc motorbike segment work very well for three-wheelers with just a moderate reduction in range since those vehicles only carry slightly heavier loads and operate at similar speeds.
Your average motorbike taxi in East Africa or India often carries 2+ people. So there is the driver, a passenger, and, on average, another quarter of a passenger (This is the average. InsightEV has observed Bodas carrying 1+3 on motorcycles).
If you look at your auto rickshaw use, you will see that they are also often driving slightly slower than your 150 cc motorbike taxi. They aren’t carrying as much mass as you’d think, given the heavier use application of motorbike taxis. So you have a slight range reduction, but it’s definitely not catastrophic to the point that you’re only dealing with 20-30 km of usable range.
InsightEV: Michael, are you also opening the Zeno network? Zeno batteries for other players?
Michael: Yes. Several well-respected Chinese and Indian OEMs are planning on adopting our battery or doing Zeno-compatible variants of their products for sale in markets where we’re planning on deploying swapping networks and several companies are planning on accessing our Type 6 fast charger network. We also have strong interest from some individuals and companies who are interested in franchising our swapping network and vehicles to several Southeast Asian, African, and Latin American markets.
InsightEV: Where are you assembling the batteries? In India or Africa?
Michael: Batteries are currently assembled in China at our contract production line. We’re very focused on quality and are sourcing cells from a high-quality supplier and assembling on a line that’s done tens, if not hundreds, of millions of packs. We have high confidence in quality and consistency, and we are starting up pack assembly lines, likely in partnership with a cell supplier who’s very excited to work with us in the African and Indian markets over the 18 months.
InsightEV: You’re talking of two separate battery assemblies later, one in Africa, one in India?
Michael: Yep. My background at Tesla was in manufacturing, and we have a good understanding of the volume thresholds for which it makes sense to start in-house assembly of components. Right now, we’re happy to develop excellent IP and work with contract manufacturers to deliver those products. We’ll be thoughtful and careful about how and when we fully internalize the parts of our production that are currently outsourced and where we establish that production capacity.
InsightEV: How big is the Zeno team?
Michael: The Zeno team today is around 30 people. It is very lean, which we’re very proud of (although everybody is pretty tired). We’ve taken an approach to hiring people focused on people for whom this is “not their first rodeo”. Aniket, Sagar, Swaroop, Rob Newberry, we’re a pretty “gray-haired” team.
Part of what’s allowed us to stay a relatively lean team is that we are hiring the kind of people who have managed four or five-hundred-person organizations in the past but will also happily pull an all-nighter in their garage to get the firmware written for a launch in the morning. For example, Rob Newberry, who is a patent holder on Apple Time Capsule and Apple AirPlay, was one of the lead network engineers at Nest. He’s now our head of software but also does much of our firmware coding. So, we have one of the strongest network engineering executives in the Bay Area leading our engineering team while also writing firmware for our IoT module.
By finding a team that’s more or less exclusively made up of people with pretty substantial experience levels – I’d say that, at least eight years plus – we have built a very lean team that gets a lot done.
We’re also very proud of getting as far as we have in such a short time. We have beat our timelines and our budget to date. We have investors who are scratching their heads and trying to get more money in because we have not had the typical Tesla, Rivian, Arrival, etc. story of, oops, just can we have another year and another 12 million bucks? We’re delivering on our timelines and delivering on our budgets with our very lean and hard-hitting mature team.
InsightEV: I’m sure! How’s the team split between Bengaluru, Nairobi, and the Bay?
Michael: 70% of our team is in Bangalore. So, Zeno launch parties and Zeno demo parties where we all gather and work hard and pull all-nighters and celebrate are in Bengaluru. Then we’ve got around 10% of our team in San Francisco, and around 20% of our team is in East Africa.
InsightEV: When is the D-day? When are you launching the product?
Michael: We have already soft-launched in East African markets, having started delivering a few months back. We’ll be introducing our products to the world, opening up pre-orders and starting high-volume deliveries in several markets in Q2, once we have finished integrating further feedback from soft launch customers into our production bike. Stay tuned!
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