Dat Bike, a Vietnamese electric motorbike startup founded in 2018 by a former Silicon Valley engineer, has raised US$2.6 million through Singapore-headquartered Jungle Ventures to fund its drive for mass green transportation in Vietnam and elsewhere in Southeast Asia.
Short charging, long battery life
Founder and CEO of Dat Bike Nguyen Ba Canh Son has a master’s degree in computer science. He gave up his high paying job in Silicon Valley in 2018 seeking to make an impact on his home community.
Starting with roughly US$1 million, Son invested in a factory and then opened a Dat Bike flagship store in Ho Chi Minh City. The first bikes were delivered to customers at the beginning of 2020. The number of buyers was initially modest at a few hundred a month, but since November 2020, things have been looking up with revenues rising 35 percent a month.
The company’s flagship Weaver motorbike was created to compete against gas motorbikes. It seats two people, which is an important selling point in Southeast Asian countries. The Weaver can be fully charged at a standard electric outlet in two hours, and cover 100km on one charge (the motorbike’s next iteration will go up to 200km on one charge). Dat Bike currently uses the same lithium-ion batteries used by the latest Tesla models. The battery has a life expectancy of 10 years. Lithium-ion is one of the safest battery chemistries available and can be dumped at recycling yards.
At the affordable price of VND39.9 million, or about US$1,712, Dat Bike’s Weaver offers three times the performance and two times the range of most electric motorbikes on the market.
CEO Nguyen Ba Canh Son said Weaver can rival petrol bikes in power and range, its 5,000W motor helps accelerate from 0-50km/h in just three seconds, its charging time is fast at just under three hours, and its brake mechanism is tailored to Vietnam’s traffic congestion.
Attracting investment
Dat Bike was certified by the Ministry of Transport as a “made in Vietnam” product because most of its components including batteries, control systems, and engines are made domestically.
This was one of the reasons Jungle Ventures decided to capitalize the company. Amit Anand, founding partner of Jungle Ventures, said, “Dat Bike is exceptional among our projects, one of the few that we decided to invest in at a very early stage. We want to back Son and help him make his dream of being the Elon Musk of the two-wheeler segment in Southeast Asia come true.”
Dat Bike is the first electric motorcycle manufacturer in Southeast Asia and demand for its products exceeds supply due to its limited capital and production scale. The Jungle Ventures investment will help Dat Bike improve products and expand production to meet the growing demand in Vietnam in particular and Southeast Asia as a whole.
“We want to transform the 250 million gasoline bikes in Southeast Asia to electric vehicles. We believe that if given a choice, everyone would pick electric over gas,” said CEO Nguyen Ba Canh Son. “It is just that the current electric motorbikes in the market lag behind in power and range, making it difficult for people to make the switch. Funding from Jungle Ventures will allow us to continue to innovate and develop the most complete electric motorcycles for users in Southeast Asia and the rest of the world.”
Dat Bike is focusing on the Vietnamese market, and will expand the store system to all provinces and cities nationwide as well as develop more new models in the future.
Hai Yen
http://ven.vn/vietnams-elon-musk-wannabe-raises-electric-motorbike-investment-44740.html