We call Stark the top of the pyramid.
At the bottom are the cool runabouts from Sur-Ron and Talaria, joined now by Niu, Tromox, Zero, and many more. They are not serious off-roaders but easy-to-ride electric motorcycles that can be used anywhere, even though they are the happiest in the urban environment. Is there space between the two?
Colin Godby, the CEO of Oregon-based Dust Moto, thinks so. He is self-assured and comes with experience. Colin and his co-founders, Neil and Jarett, were together at UBCO earlier, so they have been around in the E2W industry, understand the customer, and identify the opportunities.
InsightEV: Colin, it's good to have you here. We've been getting a lot of positive vibes about Dust Moto, and we're intrigued by the Hightail. From what we have seen, it looks fascinating, nice, and well-finished. Can we start with the story behind Dust Moto? How did you guys come about, and where did the dream start?
Colin: Thanks for having me here. Dust was founded in 2023. Our founding team all worked together at UBCO, and that business experienced a change in strategy. Within my role at UBCO as chief product officer, I was tasked with developing the longer-term product roadmap and overall product strategy. A big part of this was surveying the market landscape and the competition and identifying potential opportunity spaces.
At the time at UBCO, we focused on our 2x2 utility-based vehicles. Still, we saw the rise of the lighter e-motos in the form of Sur-Rons and Talarias coming from Asia, as well as looking back to the period of Alta, and knowing that there's this opportunity in the higher performance space. We saw that recreation was growing rapidly, and with the availability of this (EV) technology, lower voltage systems, and very torque-dense kind of ridable platforms, more new riders were jumping into riding on two wheels than we had seen previously.
At UBCO, we discovered an adjacent space to the utility two-wheel segment: recreational off-road two-wheelers. Interestingly, when working on this program at UBCO, we identified the midweight class, where we looked at the original KTM Freeride and where the Cake Kalk was landing, as the most interesting for us.
In comparison, the real kind of small, lightweight bikes may be novel, fun, and easy to jump on when you took them off-road, but the performance wasn't delivering what many true off-road riders wanted. The midsize bikes got you most of what you needed: enthusiast off-road road riding, but with some unique benefits in weight and compact sizing, making them more approachable for various riders.
So we started to work on a prototype at UBCO in that class but ultimately shifted strategy. When we departed, we realized that there was still a massive opportunity that no one was hitting. In the meantime, we saw Sur-Ron build the Ultra Bee in a similar class, and then Stark announced the Varg and started to ship by 2023. This was when we were departing UBCO and starting Dust, so we had a bunch of new data points to reference.
The premise of Dust is that this midweight vehicle class is quite interesting in terms of the available audience. We could make it an American brand as there's no current brand leader in the off-road electric segment. We could make it more performance-focused and more aspirational in how we built Dust.
Then, we also saw opportunities to tell the story. Motorcycling is a lifestyle choice, but there's little storytelling about how these bikes and brands are built. In the age of content platforms being so important, we said we could build a platform around storytelling and sharing the journey as no one else has done this before.
That was another key pillar for us when starting Dust. We wanted to give more access than is typical in developing a product like this.
InsightEV: That's interesting. You guys were at UBCO, and they made some interesting 2x2 utility motorcycles. Some other day, I would have assumed that an off-road motorcycle was a natural progression because utility and off-road are the use cases that fit well with electric mobility. But do you think the market is big enough for everyone? How big is it, and is it something of an opportunity where you see that everyone who's got an ICE off-roader could move to electric?
Colin Godby: So the first part of your question is how much of the existing ICE dirt bike owners would go towards transitioning to electric. There's a sub-segment of existing ICE owners who ride dirt bikes and are interested in an additional bike, a quiver edition. This is like adding an iPad when you already own an iPhone. There are benefits to having an electric bike in terms of accessibility for riding and ease of use and maintenance, but you might still want to keep the big gas bike for racing or bigger enduro rides.
Let's say 10-20% of existing owners would add an electric motorcycle in the near term. Over a longer time horizon, the benefits of electric, coupled with improved battery technology, will start to make significant inroads to converting existing gas bike owners over to electric. I am talking more like a 10-year horizon. The technology and battery capacity trade-offs are not quite there yet to make that a strong argument for most owners. Most hardcore dirt bike owners are looking for some benefits that exist exclusively with gas, but it gets better as electric technology improves. Over the 10-15-year horizon, we start to take meaningful market share from the ICE side of things.
Let's also acknowledge that over the last 20+ years, ICE dirt bike sales have been flat. We peaked in the early 2000s, and at the peak of COVID, we reached that similar point, but there's a trough in the middle. Post-COVID, it fell off again. So that tells me while there’s a fantastic established consumer base, and we're talking about millions of riders, there's an opportunity for growth because during the same period, other outdoor activities, whether boating, camping, mountain biking, skiing roughly, those industries have tripled.
So I go back to first principles and say that motorcycles have existed since before the light bulb, and people enjoy riding. There must be something fundamentally good and enjoyable for a human to ride on two wheels. That's the sense of freedom, the feeling of flying, and being able to enter a flow state mentally when you're on a bike. With those first principles saying there is inherent good to riding a dirt bike, and the industry has not grown over the last 20 or 30 years, what is preventing that growth?
I believe the user experience, the friction in learning, the maintenance, and the reduced riding opportunities have limited growth. That means this potential audience is not currently owners or riders. They keep accumulating and are adjacent in mountain biking, action sports, and outdoor hobbies. They are primed to become new riders with the right technology. Over time, it will be even more interesting to have an opportunity to help double or triple the number of riders riding off-road two-wheelers because of updated technology, user experience, and brand access. The brands we talk about are many existing off-road two-wheeler companies that specialize in what they pitch. All their ads show riders in a certain gear and are about racing. I think we have the opportunity to make it more of a lifestyle brand, similar to other action sports that reach beyond the racing and hyper-enthusiast segment, the extreme core. That means there's an opportunity to double or triple the dirt bike audience over time. Since these new riders will likely not buy gas bikes at the start because we know all those limiting factors, there's a significant near-term opportunity to grow electric sales from new riders.
So, the final part of your question is whether there is enough market opportunity or market share.
We believe the table's not set in terms of who owns the market when it comes to recreational off-road two-wheelers. There's a lot of noise regarding brands replicating that low-cost lightweight Sur-Ron, Talaria type of experience. There's one key player at the upper end of the spectrum in Stark. But when you look at an objective level, besides us, there are not too many players in the middle market focused on performance, brand, quality, and reliability.
So, if we move quickly and deliver on our goals, we can scratch out a significant market share as things settle out. There will be much consolidation on the market's lower end. There are too many brands, too much noise, and too much race-to-the-bottom in terms of cost to have a new key entrant enter that lower space.
But the opportunity space is in the middle for us. Going to battle with Stark is tough. Like you initially said, they've got resources and good momentum and are focused on performance, and race is their storytelling. We should instead go into our own unique space, which may be a good segue to one of your early questions: How are we different?
InsightEV: I didn't realize…While I knew that the dirt bike industry had stagnated, I didn't realize that the boating and other outdoor activity industries had tripled in that time. That's strange and worrying. In Europe, we’ve seen performance biking primarily for males 45+. Is that the case with off-roading in America, or do you find a younger audience coming to the market?
Colin Godby: If you look independently at all those adjacent sports and outdoor activities, there's typically some technical catalyst helping them hit growth. So the skiing equipment, with larger side-cut skis or wider skis for riding power, made it much easier for a standard human to go up on the big ski hill with good snow and have fun. Skiing back in the 70s was much harder to get good at.
In mountain biking, we now have good hydraulic disc brakes, good suspension, good geometry, and better tires. This has allowed many more people to get into the sport with an easier learning curve, so it's more approachable, and that's the key to growth. You look at why we have cell phones and other gadgets: everything's oriented to make our lives easier, reduce friction, and be more convenient. Humans go towards activities that are easier to learn and participate in. As an inverse, anything that has higher friction or more effort means people will ditch that for what's more manageable and closer to hand.
That's why motorcycling has stagnated while outdoors has grown, as there's a lot of equipment and a lot of work to get out and ride compared to these other much easier activities that have gotten easier over time. In terms of how we think about the age of participation, what's super interesting about the Sur-Rons is they're not entering into power sports or off-road two-wheeled recreation from the traditional means, which is like, dad taking son to the powersports shop, buying their first dirt bike, and then going, to the trails and learning how to ride together.
These kids buy Sur-Rons and similar bikes and run them around the neighborhoods. They're a more urban kind of experience, but the net result is more kids under 18 learning to ride two-wheelers with a throttle in the US than there have been over the past decades.
One of the key things we're trying to do is bridge that gap between the e-bike/emoto customers, these kids that are under 18, and bring them into powersports. Because I feel like the narrative that everyone talks about, especially Harley-Davidson, but a lot of these other incumbents, is we've got an aging customer demographic. How do we get more young riders in so that we have a long, healthy life ahead of us? If you can bring these e-bike/e-moto kids into the sport, they would be throttle-capable and comfortable on two wheels. You get them on a track or in a real off-road environment, and they're great riders. They're primed to keep going up the food chain to bigger bikes. So, the future is bright for off-road two-wheeling, even gas bikes. One of our target roles is to be that bridge.
Can we build a brand? How do we connect with our audience on the marketing side and the product, and what are the performance capabilities and ease of use bridging both directions? We speak enough core moto to excite the industry but also about enough lifestyle to excite these new e-moto kids. We're finding that balance as a sort of the shepherd between the two elements. We've had this realization over the last couple of months. We've had a lot of conversations with some of the other interesting EV incumbents that may be more road-focused, and there's some interest in what's happening in our space.
People realize that the theory or hypothesis that we can get people to ride 500-lb street bikes just by making them electric is flawed. Just because you turn a 500-lb street bike electric doesn't mean you stop worrying about cars crashing into you or that vehicle is easy to ride. No, these lightweight off-road vehicles are the progression into bigger bikes. Even in the developing world with the scooters and mopeds, everyone grows up on them. That means they become comfortable on two wheels and throttle, then they can transition into larger motorcycles, travel the world, and get on the bigger BMWs.
But if you try to throw someone straight onto a BMW 1300 GS, that's a mess. Yeah.
InsightEV: Yep, that is true there. I've always wondered why big names like the Hondas and the KTMs have held back from electric off-road motorcycles. Honda has been testing this prototype for a long time, participating in competitions, and doing everything except launching it on the market. Yamaha is doing the same. They eventually ended up investing in a French startup, EM. Kawasaki, we haven't heard anything. And KTM, they've now been in a lot of trouble. So, how will the Freeride development happen from here? But electric is mainly dominated by - the most prominent name we keep talking about is Stark. But Stark, till two years back, before the Royal Enfield relationship, was a startup and there are so many players trying electric motocrossers. What makes electric off-roaders so fascinating, so interesting for startups?
Colin: Why do we put ourselves through this pain? I think there are some similarities to the conversation about why Tesla was successful in rapidly changing minds, why it took some of the larger players so long, and arguably why they still have a 5-10-year lag on development. Why does Tesla have such a head start?
Clayton Christensen, in The Innovators Dilemma, talks a lot about this: these larger public companies are designed to maximize profitability and minimize risk. Shareholders want to see dependable, predictable performance. The best way is to have a fully integrated supply chain and distribution channels with dealers and trained staff, and keep doing similar things to what you've already been doing.
Upsetting the whole value proposition and technology stack is a lot of work, and when you look at these tens of thousands of employee-type companies, it's a massive burden in terms of training and change. I had a conversation with a senior leader at a German carmaker about their EV development, and he was like look, the reality is we have supplier agreements spanning 10 years on some of these parts for combustion engines. So, it even comes down to the level of negotiations and their financial commitments; you can't just turn the cargo ship immediately and say, "No, we're focusing on electric."
The other piece is electric two-wheelers have not proven themselves as a market. There are interesting elements - Gogoro or the Sur-Rons that are like, there's a possibility, but there hasn't been one clear winner. That makes it hard for these bigger companies to commit because they haven't seen it completely take over their existing proven sales channels. That's the heart of the innovators' dilemma. You have to be willing to disrupt yourself. You must be willing to spend the money to prove yourself wrong, and that's hard for many organizations, especially in this current market climate.
It's a down market for all-power sports. They're sitting on inventory: name a big incumbent player and they're sitting on inventory or working around. The common question is how do we make the organization lean? Their stock prices are down, so the shareholders are like, okay, how will you turn this up with some profit? That's a recipe for, hey, we just don't want to take up new risk.
Mugen, the sister company of Honda, has been playing with the Honda electric bike, which was never even fully sanctioned by Honda initially. That was a family project. Similarly, KTM's been playing with it, but you have Pierer himself saying electric doesn't matter for us. It's all two-stroke and four-stroke.
They know that it's essential to understand the tech. They're not sure when it's going to hit. For a startup, we think more about potential and opportunity; our job is to think about the long-term vision because we have nothing to lose. We don't have existing sales that we have to protect. So we can move quickly and experiment with more early tech because we're not beholden to the supply chain and staff associated with manufacturing. Our understanding that things can move quickly means we're more primed to do it.
The other side is just opportunity, too. You look at the gas market; it's a set table. There are the big four Japanese players, and then there are the big Austrian players, and then there are some small players. There's not a lot of space for a new startup to jump in there. But in electric, there's no winner. There's a lot of space to carve your niche.
Me, Jarrett, and Neil, the three co-founders, had similar experiences, which is not coming from hardcore dirt biking while growing up but more from mountain biking and having a general motorsports focus than hardcore dirt biking.
When we jumped on electric, there was an aha moment for all of us, which you've probably seen with people who have never ridden electric two-wheelers. You jump on, and it feels magical, and your skill set automatically levels up. From our perspective, we saw this as a magical enabler or sort of a cheat code for new riders. A lot of the incumbent industry doesn't quite see that in the same perspective as someone like us who came from outside the industry.
InsightEV: Let's talk about the Hightail. I've seen several emotos from other startups, and the Hightail looks different. It looks very well-finished and very nicely designed. How did the design and development process start, and where are you now?
Colin Godby: We targeted the mid-size class. It's essentially a full-size motorcycle to anyone if you didn't tell them the seat height is 2” shorter than a full-size Stark or a 450. People would throw a leg over it and say it feels like a full-size dirt bike. But it has a shorter seat height so that most people can get their toes to the ground. The weight is designed to be 100 kg or less, so it's a lot lighter.
There is a lack of rotational inertia in the crankshaft, and it corners better. We wanted to build on that. So, we said, "Let's lean into that idea and try to make it the nimblest, best cornering dirt bike out there." Electric is fabulous in terms of torque and power, but it has limits because of the lack of a gearbox. So, we aimed to make this the fun-nest bike under 45 mph and not worry about trying to compete in any class that has to go over 50mph in a serious fashion.
Yes, our bike will do 70+ mph, but the fun part about riding these bikes is under 45 mph, and let's not try to go racing in the big bike classes because we know that physics determines power consumption is related to velocity squared. Aero drag is really bad on motorcycles, and if we're trying to compete with 450s that will easily do 60+ mph all day, we'll kill batteries. So, let's just stay away from that racing conversation and focus on fun.
We want to make a very high-performance machine that lets our riders send it over big jumps and ride hardcore terrain well. That means high-quality suspension, power similar to a 250cc four-stroke, and the right ergonomics and geometry to feel stable at speed. We also said this is more about fun, so we gave it a swappable battery in case people want an extra pack. We sized it to keep the weight down and cost as much as possible, saying this is a different class.
It's not designed to replace your big bike and go racing like a Stark. It's more just how we can make the most fun bike and highlight the electric benefits: quiet so you can ride more areas in your backyard or on single tracks that might be shut to a gas bike; easy to maintain, so it's like a power tool. You just go out in your garage and pull it off the plug and ready to go. Then super simple on-the-ride modes so that a new learner can use it. You grow with the bike - you can use the same bike to learn how to ride and then the same bike every day. That's been our approach.
We are seeing that a lot of the lightweight bikes - the Sur-Ron class - have been upgraded, and a lot of people are throwing money into the upgrade scene, putting them into sort of the $10k-14k range with the upgrades. We are also seeing a lot of people comment that the Stark is insanely powerful and maybe not necessary.
We said, okay, we can meet those two things in the middle.
That’s kind of who we are and how we developed the Hightail. You picked up on the design aesthetic. I think that's been important to us. So much of dirt biking has been about a bit more radical aggressive styling associated with racing. Because we come from outside the motorcycle industry, we appreciate good consumer products, automotive, and bicycle industry design. There's more sophistication and elegance in those products than off-road dirt bikes typically do. We said if we want to reach a broader audience that is not already into dirt bikes, including women and younger riders, we must be intentional about the design aesthetics and make it desirable.
We looked at Cake as an interesting example in terms of going all in on design but we took (their failure) as a learning that it was probably too polarizing. It didn't convey its ability to be ridden hard off-road very well in the design aesthetic. So we said we’ve got to find that balance - clean, modern, really nice looking, but also fast and capable off-road.
InsightEV: What about the core components? The motor? Did you design it in-house, or is there any external help there?
Colin Godby: We've been managing this whole project with a really small core internal team. Because of our history at UBCO and the background in product development, our networks are pretty deep. The industry has this tendency to hire a massive design and engineering team internally. We've got to touch every single bolt and design it ourselves. Not only does that take more time, but it also means a lot of overhead costs in the early R&D phase. By the time you get the product to market, you're spending 10+ million dollars just because you've built out this big team.
We wanted to try to develop the bike as pragmatically as possible. So, wherever possible, use off-the-shelf fitments for things like wheels and brakes, suspension, bearings, and pins. We said these are already solved problems. People have been making great products in these spaces. We focus our time on what I would say is the recipe. Similar to a good restaurant, it's not necessarily always about some crazy single ingredient that they're using, but how they prepare the recipe in harmony with all of the ingredients. That's kind of our perspective - all the elements have to work well together. So, we put a lot of time into the overall architecture, ergonomics, and kinematics of the suspension so that when you get on the bike, it feels comfortable and right. I think that's a big differentiator for Dust that we are close to the customer and can ride and have the ability to test versus some of these designs coming from overseas that don't have a strong basis in the community.
What feels right on the throttle? What feels right in terms of the ergonomics or cornering tendencies? So we've been maximizing that top level and dove into the specifics around battery and motor gearbox, especially to put that next level of detailed design work. We developed the chassis and body plastics with the help of some external engineering groups that are deeply experienced. Then we added experts in battery and motor-gearbox development to build our kind of proprietary custom basis. We're not inventing anything (brand new). I wouldn't say we're a powertrain technology company.
There are some other people who are taking that approach and saying we're going to win by having the best possible powertrain by inventing the highest voltage or fastest spinning motor. We're not pushing boundaries in that sense, but what we're doing is maximizing the gearbox design so it's as efficient, quiet, and durable as possible for our application.
We have developed the battery to use automotive functional safety principles. It's safe and reliable, and we minimize warranty costs, so that's kind of been our approach - to go as deep as it’s necessary, leverage external experts to help us get there faster, and at a little bit more approachable costs so that we can try to get to market without sort of a massive team.
InsightEV: Can you go into more detail about the motor and the gearbox? How fast? Share some of the numbers around them.
Colin Godby: We're working with a partner who is providing a unique motor design. We're not fully locked in, so I won't be super specific about it, but it features unique details in a proven architecture. It's an in-runner motor design, but some smart things are being done with the stator coil winding and cooling that let us push a bit more current to maximize torque and power. So, we're looking at 60 Nm+ out of the motor shaft, peak over 32 kW, and at a top speed of 12,000 rpm while keeping weight and volume down.
I wanted to run a faster motor so that you still have motor inertia and sensitivity available to overcome stall at lower speeds. That means we had to run a higher reduction on our gearbox. So, we have a 3.4:1 reduction on our gearbox, which is higher than many simple reductions on these sorts of applications. This coupled with a standard sprocket ratio - 14:48. So in total, it's close to a 12 to 1 reduction. So that lets us get over 650Nm to the wheel. The reduction is on the rider’s right, with a prop shaft crossing the bike to place the output where is typical for most dirt bikes, maintaining the proper inertial feelings and suspension kinematics.
But because the motor is able to hit up to 12,000 rpm, it also means we can stretch to over 75 mph and have peak powers at the motor side of things over 32 kW/ 42 PS. It's quite power-dense. One of the things that we were working to do was package it nicely. This is also a different thing. There are good reasons to integrate the battery and motor into the structural frame or make them stressed members. You can be more efficient with weight, and the packaging can be compact.
We decided not to go that path. We went with a traditional steel kind of cradle frame design for a couple of reasons. First is that we have a swappable battery. We couldn't make the battery a stressed member if it was designed to come out.
Second was in terms of confidence and speed to market. We knew we could make a bomb-proof, efficient, and optimized cradle-design steel frame, and we knew we could make a motor gearbox unit. Once you start to stack those together as a fully integrated system and say, "Okay, now we’ve got to run all this testing and reload to make sure that the loads from riding don't blow the gearbox apart,” it's another step of complexity that we didn’t want to dive into.
So, we made an awesome modular motor gearbox that bolts into the cradle frame, much like a traditional dirt bike might be, that kind of makes it faster. But one of the reasons we had to make everything a bit more compact was to fit the motor gearbox module into the frame without having, as you notice, the down tubes super far forward; they're pretty slim. They're not bulging like a big belly or chin on the bottom. One of the main challenges was to get that motor gearbox packaged nicely inside of the frame rails. So, make it narrow and compact.
InsightEV: The whole machine gives a sense of compactness in how it has been put together. You mentioned that going swappable was intentional that way, and I fully understand that gives more freedom to the rider. Are you assembling the batteries yourself or using an external vendor for that?
Colin Godby: (We have a vendor) It's here state-side to help us develop the battery on an existing BMS platform. So we don't need to write the BMS from scratch. It's based on proven state of health and state of charge algorithms used in applications such as light electric vehicles. We're customizing the BMS to fit our form factor, hitting our performance targets, and then using cylindrical cells in a proven layout using laser welding. So, we’re not pushing into advanced battery technology but using proven, high-quality, and intentional design details.
There's an interesting difference if you can get a mass-scale commodity battery pack from Asia on one side of the spectrum, or you can have a fully integrated design like you'd see on a Lucid on the other. The answer sometimes lies in the middle. The middle ground is pushed in terms of how you connectorise, the thermal management, thermal runaway protection, and propagation protection, and things that maybe some of our other battery suppliers might not do.
At the same time, also not be too crazy about it.
InsightEV: Very well said. Are the cells used in the battery in cylindrical format?
Colin Godby: Cylindrical 2170 power cells. So premium power cells not coming from Mainland China.
InsightEV: The Hightail is off-road. Any plans to go street-legal?
Colin Godby: One thing in our research, even in the early days at UBCO, is that many people considering buying an electric dirt bike do like the idea that it could be street-legal for running around town. It gives it a bit more of a multi-purpose flavor and then it allows them to justify it more to add it to the garage.
We want to build the best possible off-road bike first. We understand the challenges and associated tasks with homologation. In the US, it's not incredibly hard. Europe's a bit more of a detailed process, but what we're doing is developing the powertrain battery and integrated systems in a way that we can get into ECE and kind of low voltage directive homologation things as needed for Europe.
So the idea is to get products rolling out the door fast, selling them, and then follow with a road legal version on the Hightail platform, a bit later. For us as a brand, road legal will never be our primary target. If that makes sense, road legality is more a feature than an endgame. We don't want to be the brand focused on selling the most road-legal bikes. We want to be the brand selling the most fun off-road bikes, and then expanding into road legal allows us to satisfy more customers.
InsightEV: Wondering that you are not only developing a bike, you are also creating a brand. It's two things happening together. What has been the story, and how do you like the response?
Colin Godby: Building a brand is so interesting at its very basic level. A brand is how a consumer feels about a company, right? It can be quite ethereal and subjective. Some brands are aesthetic and marketing-based. It's more about storytelling and emotions and feelings. Then, other brands are built purely by their product capability. It's an amazing product; they don't have to work hard (on storytelling). Tesla is an interesting example of that - in its early days, it was purely focused on the product. They didn't spend money on advertising, and they built a brand because of their technical leadership.
We see it as the amalgamation of all the factors and something we want to work hard on because this isn't a pure technical innovation play. Some people can spend more money and bring higher-tech solutions to the market. We don't think it should be all about tech for us.
We also think that there's actual meat on the bone here regarding the product experience and capability, reliability, quality, and performance that it shouldn't just be about visual, emotional storytelling. We want to be more durable than that. When we think about the brand, one of the halo brands we look towards is Porsche. They make amazing products that are accessible to lots of people. Its visual aesthetic is very intentional and refined, and it evolves. They treat their customers well, and people who are Porsche customers feel a certain way because of that ownership experience. I think that's kind of the holistic view of brand development.
There have been electric vehicle startups that haven't focused on creating a comprehensive brand and just focused on the technical side, and that hasn't proven to be the winner for them because they've been disrupted on the technology side or have just spent too much money on development and ended up running out of cash. Our approach was even before we had any designs to show how we could start to build our brand, and so we started to do that with our newsletter and our social media, and we also started that by bringing on our crowdfunding backers. Basically, this build-in-public approach tells the story of how a bike and a brand can be built.
The decisions that we're making, the ambassadors that we can bring a part of it, create a kind of network effect with these crowdfund backers, sharing it with their friends, and building compelling content more organically. A lot of our stuff is not super polished or at a high production level. Still, the quality of the product design and the way it can be ridden the people that are writing it and the story about development and accessibility of our team tells the story that we can be aspirational in terms of building something that's relatively cool. We can be technical and performance-minded, but we're also approachable and accessible. If we distill it into three segments for us: it's performance, it's fun, and it's the approachability. That's kind of what we want our brand to be taken as - not too serious but also serious enough, where we can execute on the technology and the experience side of it.
We've raised investment. So, we crowdfunded our initial Founders 50, which allowed us to get traction with backers and even a little bit of cash flow. We raised a friends-and-family round-off in the summer of 2023. With that, we were able to do our initial development phase and build our alpha prototypes. You can see this pattern. It's all milestone stage-based. We built those prototypes. We showed how awesome they are, built some content and more following, and then went back to raise a little bit more on crowdfunding, which allowed us to raise a little more this last year in our pre-seed fund. We leveraged Wefunder for crowdfunding for equity raises as well.
So, a big piece of this is giving access, whether that's access to an early bike to help support the brand, or access to be an equity holder in a business and invest. We wanted to give this opportunity to our followers as much as possible. But at the same time, acknowledge these are intensive products and businesses to make, we will need to take private capital to get us over the line.
We will be sourcing the bike globally. I think the nature of just being competitive on price is that we can't be dogmatic on location. We have an internal focus to do as much as we can here state-side. Longer term, I share the vision with the tech industry to try to, bring more manufacturing strength back to America. I think it will make our economy healthier.
But the reality also is that the supply chain doesn't exist right now to do a complete bike in an effective way in the US. So we want to globally source. We're going to pick and choose the highest performance for the cost, and then we're going to do the final assembly and fulfillment from the US.
We're going to get bikes brought in at some level of subassembly, kit those together, assemble, tension all the bolts, check the wheels and tension spokes, get the alignment perfect, get all the handlebars set up, make sure that the powertrain are connected properly, the software is updated properly, and everything looks great. It has that white glove sort of level of attention before being shipped and fulfilled from here.
That’s also our approach for the battery - we're working with a state-side vendor on the battery side of things. In the early days, we saw a lot of businesses with battery issues, and the worst thing possible is to load up a shipping container with a ton of batteries, have them land at your final destination, and realize that all of them have some issues. You're kind of stuck in terms of the massive amount of capital tied up in these batteries, and you can't do anything about it because your supplier is somewhere else over the ocean.
So, that's been important for us. We know that it's so critical to have a reliable, safe, and performing battery. So, we want to lean into that being more localized, especially in the early phases, to prove it all out, make sure that we don't have any quality gremlins, and everyone's super stoked with how they're running. Then we can kind of build scale from there.
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