The e-bike industry spent the past two years burying its darlings. VanMoof, the Dutch startup that raised over €200 million, went bankrupt in July 2023. Rad Power Bikes, the Seattle company that raised $330 million and was once valued at $1.65 billion, filed for Chapter 11 in December 2025. Its assets were sold for $13.2 million.
Lectric eBikes watched all of this happen from Phoenix, Arizona, where it has never raised venture capital and just posted the biggest sales month in its history. CEO Levi Conlow told TechCrunch that Lectric sold almost 30,000 bikes last month. “I’m not sure anybody has done that before, even at peak COVID,” he said.
Expanding while others retreat
In the past six months, Lectric has launched three new brands. It relaunched Juiced Bikes, an e-bike brand it acquired out of distress in 2025. It created Juiced Powersports, which will ship its first electric moto in August. And this week it spun out Monarc, a premium adventure brand based in Minnesota, led by industry veterans Julia Moran and Ryan Callahan.
Together, Lectric has invested about $10 million across the three initiatives. The company has 170 employees and ships 90% of its products direct to consumers through a website that draws two to four million visitors per month. It shipped 150,000 units in 2025.
“Others might be pulling back, or raising money. We’re actually deploying and investing,” Conlow said. “I actually don’t think the market is saturated right now.” After listing a dozen companies that had folded or left the US market, he added: “I think the market actually lacks a lot of worthy competition right now.”
The contrarian backstory
Conlow and co-founder Robby Deziel started Lectric seven years ago as childhood friends. They bootstrapped the business until 2020, when they took an investment from private equity firm Bertram Capital Management. No venture capital was ever involved.
The playbook, bootstrap, stay profitable, let better-funded competitors implode, then expand, is one that founders across hardware categories might study. The venture-backed e-bike companies that collapsed shared a pattern: massive fundraising, aggressive scaling fuelled by pandemic-era demand, and a post-pandemic correction that left them with too many bikes, too much staff, and too little margin.
Rad Power’s collapse was especially instructive. The company ended with $32 million in assets against $73 million in liabilities, with US Customs and Border Protection as its largest creditor, owed $8.4 million in unpaid tariffs. From a $1.65 billion valuation to a $13.2 million fire sale in three years.
Separate brands, separate teams
Conlow is deliberate about how he structures the expansion. Each of the three new brands has its own product engineering, branding, marketing, and customer service teams. They share Lectric’s supply chain and purchasing power but operate independently.
“What we’ve learned is that Lectric cannot be everything to everyone,” Conlow said. Featuring a Juiced model on the Lectric homepage would pull attention from the best-selling XP Series. “You need to be a lot more intentional. When you’re more focused, you can go really deep into that vertical.”
He even wants the brands to compete with each other. “We don’t want three brands that end up looking and performing the same. There should be healthy competition between them.”
Monarc’s opening bet
Monarc’s first product, an all-terrain trail e-bike called the Marker, ships to customers in July. It comes standard with two LG 48-volt 15Ah batteries providing 720 watt-hours each, both UL 2271 certified, an unusual offering in the sector. Other specs include a Bafang motor, Shimano drivetrain, 5-amp fast charger, and a 3.5-inch colour touchscreen that syncs with accessories like rearview radar and smart helmets.
The brand is leaning on a five-year warranty and human customer support. Conlow was quick to note that none of its brands will use AI for customer service, a pointed contrast in a year when most companies are racing to automate exactly that function.
Whether Lectric will keep launching brands is an open question. Conlow said the plate is full for now. But the underlying thesis is clear: the e-bike market’s wave of bankruptcies was not a sign of a dying category. It was a sign that the wrong companies, built on the wrong capital structure, were trying to serve it.
