Following a million dollar pre-seed financing, Pakistan’s electric mobility company ezBike wants to start selling electric scooters.
The pre-seed round was funded by i2i Ventures, Walled City Co, GroundUp, and renowned angel investors in the US, including a tech millionaire whose identity was not revealed. This is Pakistan’s first round of funding for an electric transportation firm.
Profit has seen internal records from the startup that confirm the $1 million raised in the round.
Mohammad Hadi, a former investment banker, and Ali Moeen, a software executive, established ezBike in October 2020 as Pakistan’s first electric scooter sharing service. The firm claims to have onboarded over 100,000 consumers since its beginning.
“We have been able to achieve this number of users without anything spent on marketing, which is a validation of our model,” says Muhammad Hadi, the CEO of the startup.
He further claims that because ezBike scooters are electric, they cost 30% less than the average bike trip on non-electric services.
“Because of expertise in assembling, operating and maintaining electric scooters at scale, we feel we are very well positioned to address the broader market opportunity of transitioning Pakistan to electric vehicles within 2 wheelers,” says Hadi. “That does not necessarily have to happen only through a sharing service which is why the pre-seed we have raised and the uses of this capital are to launch our own brand of electric scooters which will be offered for sale starting this summer.”
“Pakistan has 22 million registered motorcycles and 2 million are sold each year. We estimate the electric vehicles market to be a $20 billion opportunity, however, despite very supportive regulatory and tax policies in Pakistan for electric vehicles, the electric vehicles in Pakistan have not been able to grow at a significant pace,” says Hadi.
He believes the expensive cost of electric scooters is to blame for their slow growth.
As a result, the money will be utilised to create its own ecosystem for electric two-wheelers, which will include an electric scooter assembly facility and low-cost lithium-ion battery production, lowering the cost of electric scooters for users.
