At InsightEV, we eagerly follow E2W startups. We track and stay in touch with more than 200 startups across the world, regularly adding more to our list. The attention is greater if the startup in question promises a 200-200-200 (200 PS, 200 kg, 200 mph) hyperbike. If something like that ever hits the road in production form, it would blow the litre class superbikes out of the water.
Damon promised that, and for the last few years, the world and 3,000 deposit holders have been holding their breath for that. With USD 75 million (USD 91.5 million if we count the post IPO fund raise too) in investments raised over eight years, Damon should have been able to put the Hypersport on the road. That is a lot of money for developing and industrialising a motorcycle, however cutting-edge it may be. Somehow it wasn’t enough, and the company was always looking to raise capital, with series production of the Hypersport always ‘just around the corner’.
What made the Promise of the Hypersport special?
The Hypersport’s biggest calling card was the specification and performance numbers, achieved by using a structural battery pack with an integrated motor. Damon named the pack and motor integrated unit, Hyperdrive.
Structural packs are not unique. They are a great idea, but end up being a slippery rabbit hole that manufacturers gleefully dig themselves into. The inspiration comes from ICE motorcycles, where manufacturers decided that instead of the frame carrying a heavy multi-cylinder engine, the engine can be the frame, and you can bolt on sub-frames to the casing. Many high-powered multi-cylinder machines use that.
Then someone looked at the battery pack and said hmm…
The problem is that the engine is a bulk of metal engineered and hardened to withstand thousands of internal explosions every minute. With some engineering, it can certainly work as a stressed member. The same cannot be said of battery packs. They are filled with cells that should not take any stress. So the structural part of the pack is really the casing and any internal structural plates you may put in.
Motorcycle designers believe that the ideas can be copied into electric motorcycles, and so we have many motorcycles that use structural battery packs. Some of these are in production, like the CF Moto 300 GT-E, the CanAm Pulse/Origin, the Savic C-Series, and the Livewire S2s. Some others, like the Fuell Flow, the Horwin Senmenti, the Ola Diamond Head, and the Damon Hypersport, have not yet made it to production.
A problem that we have noticed with structural packs is that they beef up the motorcycle. The CF Moto 300 GT-E weighs 222 kg with just a 5.29 kWh pack, the Savic tips the scale at 280 kg with a 16.2 kWh pack, and the Livewire S2 has a 197 kg weight with a 16.2 kWh pack. The bulge is likely because the pack ends up over-compensating for structural strength with thick-walled castings.
Damon got around the problem by really going strong on the engineering, fine-tuning every component possible. That’s what we heard in a discussion we had with Jay Giraud (CEO) and Derek Dorresteyn (CTO) in November 2024.
InsightEV – Global Electric Mobility
Damon’s structural pack concept was interesting: it used 3 mm thick aluminium HPDC castings to package the liquid-cooled battery and electronics, working as an exoskeleton. The cooling plates also acted as structural members. The bottom section integrated the motor casing as part of the structure. The Hyperdrive’s ultra-thin precision castings kept the weight low and restricted the Hypersport to around 200 kg. The real weight was never finalised as the motorcycle did not reach homologation.
Arguably, the metallurgy was painful. Fairly large-sized castings with 3mm thickness are not easy to do, and specialist suppliers like Switzerland-based Aluwag would have been needed.
Which would have shot the BoM cost…
Guess that doesn’t matter now.
The pack used 21700 cylindrical cells, and Damon had announced an agreement with Molicel for high C-rate cells. The water+oil cooled motor was claimed at 150 kW with a reduction gearbox integrated in the casing.
The other big thing that caught media attention was the Shift, the motorcycle’s on-the-fly adjustable rider ergonomics. Previously, the company had put a (CGI-generated?) video on its website, showing the Shift in action. This was a motor and cam-driven system that could move the footpegs and adjust the handlebar height on the go so the riding ergonomics could change between a supersport nd a naked motorcycle. We always thought that the design and packaging of the motors and cams would be difficult. No one outside Damon ever saw the Shift in operation.
Actually, apparently, only one person outside Damon had ridden the motorcycle, though several people have seen the prototype in action.
Damon also cooked up a naked version of the Hypersport, named the Hyperfighter.
Jay Giraud had co-founded the company with Dom Kwong. Over the years, Damon’s pitch to the investors had centred around its Co-Pilot software, a camera and radar ARASystem that claimed to improve rider safety. Damon said the Co-Pilot system was close to the founders’ hearts. Like most of the other systems on the Hypersport, it is difficult to say how developed the CoPilot has been.
Also, the world moved on while Damon kept honing the Hypersport, and there are now multiple ARAS systems in operation in top-end motorcycles with various degrees of sophistication. Damon’s system may have been more advanced, but it doesn’t exist, and the novelty has worn off.
Damon ver 1.0 and ver 2.0
When Damon hit the Nasdaq in November 2024, it should have been the start of the final leg of the journey to series production. However, Damon’s share price collapsed immediately, like every good SPAC, and kept on crashing every day till it came very close to zero. In the end, Nasdaq chucked them out in May 2025, and Damon would move its shares to the OTC Pink Current Market.
But before that, Damon had chucked out its CEO, Jay Giraud, in early December, replacing him with co-founder Dominik Kwong. The company also appointed serial entrepreneur and investor Shashi Tripathi as the chairman of the board. Kwong had earlier left the company in 2023 and came back to take over as CEO in December 2024.
For clarity purposes, let’s discuss Damon under Jay Giraud as ver 1.0 and that under Dom Kwong as ver 2.0.
Management Upheaval
Giraud had been the CEO and face of Damon for a long time and has now sued the company for past dues. Jonathon Klein of Rideapart has an excellent piece on the current happenings. He does not paint Giraud in a positive light. The story is so murky that it is difficult to paint anyone associated with Damon in a positive light.
Giraud was ousted in early December 2024, with Kwong taking over.
InsightEV – Global Electric Mobility
However, the management upheaval would continue for many days, and within a quick interval, Amber Spencer, the Head of Marketing at Damon, and Derek Dorresteyn, the CTO, would depart (or were asked to) as well.
The case of Amber Spencer is special as she is Jay Giraud’s partner. Sections of Damon’s investors, particularly Andy DeFrancesco of the House of Lithium, had made allegations in writing pointing out the nepotistic conduct of Giraud.
Flurry of events in Damon ver 2.0
Since Dom Kwong took over, there have been a constant stream of announcements from Damon. Most of them have been painting a picture that the company is moving ahead on a well thought out path, and all is well. What has been missing is any announcement about the Hypersport or any assurances to the 3,000 deposit holders. Or any refunds.
Here is a summary of everything Damon announced in the ver 2.0 avatar.
What started it all. This is from Dec 05, 2024
Feb 18, 2025: The company announced four distinct potential revenue verticals – Data Intelligence, Personal Mobility, Licensing and Engineering Services, and Special Projects. The company also announced the Q2 2025 numbers, and we could not make any sense out of them.
Mar 20, 2025: Damon Inc. Announces Pricing of Upsized $16.5 Million Underwritten Public Offering. The company raised funds at USD 0.13 per share, further eroding shareholder value.
Mar 21, 2025: Follow up announcement from the above that the fundraising has been completed.
Apr 03, 2025: Damon Accelerates Development of HyperSport Race Electric Motorcycle with Renowned Italian Engineering Firm – Engines Engineering. Damon ver 2.0 started talking about The Hypersport Race program, a program aimed at validation of system modules developed by Damon.
“The HyperSport Race program provides an optimal platform for rapid validation of our HyperSport technology stack. This focused approach allows us to test our proprietary HyperSport electric powertrain architecture, advanced battery management technology and AI-enabled safety systems under extreme conditions, generating crucial data to advance our technology development.”
-Dom Kwong, Interim CEO, Damon.
Inexplicably, they also mentioned investing USD 10 million in developing the Hypersport Race, roping in Engines Engineering (EE). No, EE did not get the USD 10 million; otherwise, Alberto Strazzari would have extracted more money from TVS.
So, Damon ver 2.0 was spending another USD 10 million on validating the systems of a motorcycle that had already seen an investment of USD 75 million under Damon ver 1.0?
Stay with us.
May 16, 2025: Damon Announces Plan to Resume Trading. Actually, it should have read, Damon is forced to stop trading at Nasdaq after the company erodes all shareholder value. This was actually the announcement of them moving to the OTC Pink Current Market.
May 19, 2025: Damon Provides Operational Business Update and Reports FY25 Q3 Results. An update to set the context as Damon starts trading on the Pink Market.
May 20, 2025: Damon to Begin Trading on OTC Under the Symbol “DMNIF”. They started trading.
May 28, 2025: Damon Completes First Major Milestone in HyperSport Race Program with Engines Engineering. Damon ver 2.0 laid out a plan to develop the Hypersport with timelines going into Q2 2026. This is fast development by any measure but again no explanation why they were developing a motorcycle that was supposedly already developed.
For the sake of brevity, we skip a couple of announcements which were Damon ver 2.0 talking up the new initiatives.
Aug 11, 2025: Damon Inc. Achieves Key Engineering & Design Milestone for Next-Generation Performance Vehicle Platform on HyperSport Race. A host of development goals achieved, including the digital modeling of Class B surfaces.
Aug 19, 2025: Damon Evolves I/O Platform with Advanced Machine Learning for Adaptive Rider Performance. Further talking up the development of the Hypersport Race platform.
Aug 26, 2025: Damon Inc. Begins HyperSport Race Clay Modelling, Unifying Its AI-Enabled Platform with Advanced Hardware Design. This was flabbergasting. They started the clay modeling of a motorcycle that already had at least one semi-developed prototype in place.
We again skip a couple of announcements to stay on the actual story.
Sep 17, 2025: Damon Announces $30 Million Reg A+ Offering to Advance Its Personal Mobility Products and AI-Enabled Connected Vehicle Strategy. Obviously, so much action needs money.
Sep 23, 2025: Damon Successfully Completes HyperSport Race Clay Modelling, Progressing Toward Combining Its AI-Enabled Platform with Advanced Hardware Design. The clay modeling is completed.
Sep 30, 2025: Damon Provides Operational Business Update and Reports Fiscal Year 2025 Results. The results were inconsequential but the important information was that the company was left with USD 2.5 million in cash.
The important bit that the media picked up was from the SEC 10-K filings which mentioned that Damon was left with 11 full-time employees. Out of these 11, there is the CEO, the CFO, and a couple of other senior executives, leaving Damon ver 2.0 with, at best, seven engineers.
A couple of days before the end of September, TVS acquired Engines Engineering so e have no idea how the new Hypersport Race would be further developed.
So, at this time, we have no idea how Damon plans to develop the Hypersport Race and get it to production.
But the Hypersport Race is not intended for production
One of the announcements by Damon Ver 2.0 was the start of development of the HyperSport Race 2.0. They also announced roping in Italian development specialists, Engines Engineering, for the job. No explanations were given, and we construed it as a racing version of Damon’s still under development HyperSport superbike.
What we did find a bit confusing was why the company was re-developing something that Damon ver 1.0 claimed was close to the tooling stage?
The two press releases from Aug 11th and Aug 26th are the most important.
The first was this press release from Aug 11th:
The release talks about
These CAD drawings indicated a complete omission of the Hyperdrive design. Here, the company was developing a new conventional frame with a double-sided swingarm. The Hypersport had a single-sided one.
Further, this bit of the announcement was worrying:
Damon Inc. (OTCID: DMNIF) (“Damon” or the “Company”), a designer and developer of electric motorcycles and other personal mobility products that seek to empower the personal mobility sector through innovation, proudly announces the successful completion of its Engineering and Design Concept Development phases for its next-generation performance motorcycle, the HyperSport Race, built to serve as a technology demonstrator for Damon’s advanced electric powertrain, AI-enabled safety systems, and Damon I/O data intelligence platform.
Ummm…they are planning to spend USD 10 million on a technology demonstrator?
Then, from the Aug 26th release, here is the clay modeling on the new Hypersport Race.
The clay modeling seemed to be done on the same frame attributes. This would be the third styling version of the Hypersport.
Legal Cases
To make matters worse are the legal cases against Damon. Jonathan Klein of Rideapart in the aforementioned piece points out that Damon is now battling three legal cases.
The first is from Jay Giraud, ex-CEO. Giraud states that he’s owed back pay and bonuses that were never paid, and were promised in his settlement. Damon denies, and the case continues.
The second case is from Andy DeFrancesco of the House of Lithium, one of the investors in Damon. As per DeFrancesco, he is owed over USD 3.2 million in stock that the company has refused to issue.
The third case is from the SEO company Moz. No, it is not for SEO services. Apparently, Moz owns the office space that Damon leases, and the hyperbike manufacturer has been irregular in paying rent and owes a significant amount now in unpaid dues.
The Way forward?
“It’s a difficult situation.” is a bit of an understatement. Damon wants to raise another USD 30 million but may not find backers. The Hypersport is dead. The Hyperdrive seems to be dead, and that was 98% of the Hypersport promise. The new, difficult-to-explain, technology demonstrator needs investment and people. With TVS now owning Engines Engineering, we have no clarity if EE is still on the project.
Meanwhile, there is no communication on issuing refunds to the 3,000 bookings that Damon supposedly has.
