The pandemic has begun in an explosion of e-bikes. But like so many other pandemic trends, this boom didn’t last.
Last year, e-bike startups VanMoof and Cake filed for bankruptcy amid a backdrop of micromobility doom and gloom. Tier and Dott merged. Super pedestrian closed shop. Bird also had to undergo restructuring.
All these startups may have had different goals, but their problems were quite similar. Bloom, a new Detroit-based get startedbelieves it has the answer: take all the hard, behind-the-scenes work and let these startups focus on exciting things like product design and branding.
It’s an idea that founders Chris Nolte and Justin Kosmides are so passionate about that they packed up and moved to Detroit to build it — Nolte with his 1-year-old and his wife, and Kosmides with his four-legged companion Artie.
It’s also proving popular. Their customer list is as long as a CVS receipt.
“Everyone is trying to reinvent the wheel,” Nolte tells TechCrunch in a recent interview. “But the reality is that there are proven systems and people are wasting a lot of money making mistakes, making wrong decisions.”
The “stupid and scary” flood of VC money into the space in recent years has caused a lot of waste and collateral damage, Kosmides tells TechCrunch. Bloom is the couple’s answer to cleaning some of that up.
Established last year, blossom plans to offer a few core services: contract manufacturing, assembly, shipping and logistics and service. Each of these are tasks that startups would previously have had to find individual partners for or take on in-house, which drive up costs and put pressure on the bottom line. It’s those extra businesses that can doom a startup.
“I remember saying, ‘who’s crazy enough to listen to this crazy idea I have,'” Kosmides exclaimed. “And I went to Chris, and I dropped him, and he said, ‘Oh, I’ve been thinking about this for so long.’
It may have seemed crazy at the time, but Nolte says about 30 companies are set to start working with Bloom in the near future. Kosmidis says there are more than 100 in the pipeline ranging from startups just past the prototyping stage to “very mature” players.
Much of that will happen at a production site in Michigan, though the duo plans to work with partners in California, Ohio, South Carolina and New York. The goal is to launch a 200,000-square-foot facility in Detroit with distribution and assembly capabilities.
They’ve accomplished this with minimal outreach and a team of about 10 people — though they plan to roughly double that headcount as they close their first round of funding.
If all goes well, Nolte and Kosmides hope to not only help these companies build better businesses, but also create more standards for an industry that is currently very fragmented.
A shared passion
Nolte is a veteran of e-bikes. In fact, he got into e-bikes when Barack Obama was still president.
He is also a true veteran. Nolte served a tour in the US Army in Iraq, where he drove fuel trucks. Then he learned about pedal-assist e-bikes after a back injury. He loved technology and the idea of helping the country move away from oil dependence.
“We are constantly dependent on foreign oil,” he says. “I really started to believe in this idea that using more human-scale transportation could help alleviate the need to participate in these [conflicts].”
Nolte began as an early leader in the so-called space Propel Bikes. He also started a YouTube channel in 2019 to educate people about the industry.
“I ended up doing a lot of factory tours” for the channel, he says. So I thought, why are there so many factories in Europe, but actually virtually none in the US for bikes and micromobility?’
Kosmides also co-founded an e-bike company called Vela in 2020, after nearly 10 years at Barclays Investment Bank. He remembers looking at the micromobility industry and thinking, “We’re funding these companies and these vehicles all wrong.” (Vela is now operated by a new team trying to leverage Bloom’s network, he says.)
The industry was “overfunding companies that, maybe their Instagrams were really good and they were really good at marketing, but their product and their growth and their sales just weren’t there,” he says.
Last year, the two realized they were both looking for ways to solve the problems that were beginning to plague some of the more well-known micromobility companies.
The duo found a foothold with Newlab in Detroit’s new mobility innovation district Michigan Central.
It’s only been a year, but a lot of blood has been spilled since they set out to start Bloom. One of the most notable failures occurred at premium e-bike maker VanMoof. It filed for bankruptcy last July, leaving thousands of customers unsure about the functionality of their connected bike. Scooter-sharing company Bird, once valued at more than $2 billion, filed for bankruptcy in December. (Both companies eventually emerged from bankruptcy under new ownership.)
The trouble continued in early 2024, when boutique electric motorcycle and bike outfit Cake filed for bankruptcy so suddenly that it sold its US inventory to a Florida mobility store owner. (This man is now one of Bloom’s clients.)
All this devastation meant the timing was perfect for Bloom.
“We wouldn’t have been able to do this two or three years ago. Everyone was concerned about getting the products off the shelves as quickly as possible,” says Kosmidis. “But now we live in this moment where everyone is asking, ‘How do we not make the same mistakes?’
Image Credits: Dust Moto
Bloom customers
One of the first to jump on board with Bloom is, perhaps unsurprisingly, a startup that wants to make products for thrill seekers.
Colin Godby co-founder Dust Moto in 2023, in an effort to not only contribute to the electrification of dirt bikes, but also to fill a void by creating an American brand in the space – something that hasn’t really existed thanks to the dominance of Japanese brands like Honda and Yamaha.
So far, Dust has only made a few initial prototypes. But they are contracting with Bloom to use its Detroit manufacturing facility to build the next batch of bikes for production. Dust will also leverage Bloom for final assembly, quality control and fulfillment.
The difference of having Bloom’s help in all these parts of the process versus going it alone or finding individual partners, Godby says, can be measured in the millions of dollars.
“Instead of having to raise $40 million to build our first dirt bike, it’s on the order of $5 [million] to the $10 million raised to be able to bring this amazing product to market,” he says.
It’s also less burdensome.
“If we handle it, it’s all on us, you know what I mean? Like, I need to hire more people, we need to work more hours,” says Godby. “If it’s shared with Bloom… like the success of their company depends on them being able to deliver.”
This trust was not immediate. Dust started before Bloom had actually interacted with many potential customers. After their meeting late last year, Godby says he was wary of placing “startup risk above startup risk.” But the idea clicked when he realized how other industries rely on these types of middlemen.
“Honestly, if I think about the most fun way to spend my time in Dust, it’s not to build a production environment, you know?” He says. “And you look at the different mature industries, whether it’s aerospace or automotive, tier one suppliers and all those things, that’s how the game works.”
Scott Colosimo is at the other end of the spectrum when it comes to Bloom’s early collaborators. He spent over a decade as the CEO of a global motorcycle company called Cleveland CycleWerks. Colosimo tells TechCrunch that he was trying to “softly transition” from a gas vehicle company to an electric one.
“It became very apparent, very quickly, that it’s like taking a baker and turning him into a surgeon,” he says. “It’s just different.”
He left the gas motorcycle business entirely and started Land, which is nominally an electric motorcycle company. But it’s also, somewhat covertly, an energy company too, built around the connected, removable battery that powers bikes.
The land is headed that way because Colosimo says there’s a huge opportunity, especially given the often dismal state of e-bike batteries. And Bloom, he says, makes it much easier to try.
Colosimo says he’s talking to Bloom about building future bikes, mostly because Land already has a facility in his hometown of Cleveland, Ohio, equipped and ready to build the first ride. What he really wants to do with Bloom, then, is scale the battery platform he designed at Land and make it available to other companies.
“If we lived in a perfect world, I’d love to put $100 million in a bank account and focus on batteries, so in three years, we have a viable product,” he says. “VCs aren’t willing to put up $100 million in the hope that you’ll be a unicorn in three years. So the vehicles we’re building right now are very much our own VC. Currently, vehicles have a small profit margin. It helps push the battery platform.”
“Right now, for e-bikes, when the batteries are bad, you throw the whole damn thing away. It’s not sustainable,” he says.
In turn, Colosimo says he refers a bunch of other prospects to Bloom. “I just started saying, ‘Hey, if you don’t have your build figured out, there’s Justin and Chris, and there’s this team—they do what you need,'” he says. “If that wasn’t an option, it was: They’re going to everyone in China.”
Image Credits: Land Moto
USA! USA!
While it’s an enticing narrative, Nolte and Kosmides say Bloom isn’t just a nationalistic production play. It’s more about meeting the obvious needs if companies like the ones they’ve already run are going to succeed at scale — or have a chance to try something new on a smaller scale.
“It’s not a set, like, ‘let’s do it in America because America is the best,'” Nolte says. “So many companies would love to have options for domestic assembly and manufacturing. But there’s very little out there.”
Kosmidis, who says he was touring European bike factories when the whole “crazy” idea first hit him, says he remembers thinking, “Why aren’t we making a basic amount of this in the U.S.?”
Now the hard work begins.
“We’re not trying to compete with Asia,” Nolte says. “But I think we have to give it our best shot to be competitive in those different places. And if we’re going to do that, we really have to go all out.”
