Electric bike company Rad Power Bikes has reached an agreement to be sold to a company called Life Electric Vehicles Holdings (or Life EV) for about $13.2 million, just over a month after entering bankruptcy proceedings.
Florida-based Life EV describes itself as a “developer, manufacturer and distributor in the light electric vehicle industry.” It offers a number of e-bikes for sale on its website, although most of them were marked as “sold out” at the time of publication.
A archiving in the bankruptcy filing over the weekend shows that five entities participated in an auction for Rad Power’s assets on Jan. 22. The first bid reached $8 million, and the parties traded offers until Life Electric Vehicles emerged victorious. When calculating Rad Power’s liabilities, the total value of the offer is $14.9 million.
Another e-bike company called Retrospec had the second-highest bid of $13 million and is being billed as a “backup bidder” in case the deal with Life EV falls through. The bids were a steep discount from Rad Power’s peak valuation of $1.65 billion, which was reached in October 2021, per PitchBook. The company has raised a total of $329.2 million, according to PitchBook data.
The acquisition still has to be approved by the bankruptcy judge.
Rad Power isn’t the only company in the micromobility world to seek bankruptcy protection in recent years. The likes of VanMoof and Cake went through restructurings and found new owners. The scooter company Bird also went through the bankruptcy process.
It’s unclear what Life EV plans to do with Rad Power. Life EV CEO Robert Provost addressed questions to Rad Power. “There is still a process underway and an exciting future is planned for Rad Power,” he wrote in a message.
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TechCrunch was unable to reach Rad Power for comment. this article will be updated if the company responds.
Like many of its peers, Rad Power saw a huge boost in sales during the pandemic, but struggled as that momentum petered out.
The company has gone through multiple rounds of layoffs in recent years, juggled CEOs and most recently had trouble with some of its older batteries catching fire. The Consumer Product Safety Commission found 31 reported fires linked to the batteries.
Rad Power told TechCrunch at the time that it “firmly supports our batteries and our reputation as a leader in the e-bike industry, and strongly disagrees with the CPSC’s characterization of certain Rad batteries as defective or unsafe.”
