Three of the most celebrated transportation startups of the past decade no longer exist in any meaningful sense. Cowboy, the Belgian ebike brand that turned heads in Berlin with its minimalist design, was sold to a French manufacturing conglomerate. VanMoof, the Dutch company that raised over $200 million and sold 200,000 bikes, went bankrupt in July 2023 and was picked up for "tens of millions" of pounds by an obscure McLaren-linked scooter company. Rad Power Bikes, the Seattle-based outfit that once claimed 25% of the entire US ebike market, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in December 2025 with $73 million in liabilities and only $32 million in assets.

These were not minor players. Together they collected hundreds of millions in venture capital - money provided by specialist investors in exchange for a share of the company, betting on rapid growth. Together they helped define what an ebike could look like and what it could do. And together they collapsed in what has become one of the more instructive cautionary tales in recent startup history: a story of genuinely great products destroyed by the wrong business model, timed into the wrong economic moment.

The background

Electric bikes - bicycles equipped with battery-powered motors that assist pedaling - are not a niche product. Germany alone has over 15 million of them in active use, roughly one for every five residents. In the United States, ebikes outsold both electric cars and hybrid vehicles combined in some years, making them the most popular form of electric vehicle in the country by unit volume. Globally, the market was valued at around $49 billion in 2024 and is expected to grow toward $87 billion by 2032, according to market research firm MarketsandMarkets.

The category is real. The demand is real. That is what makes the collapse of its biggest startups so instructive.

Rad Power Bikes launched in 2007, when the ebike category barely existed in the West. Its founder Mike Radenbaugh reportedly built his first prototype by pulling motors and batteries out of other devices. The bikes were cheap, powerful, and fitted with the fat tires and throttles that became defining features of the American ebike market, where distances are long and regulations historically loose. VanMoof began in the Netherlands in 2009, starting with a sleek non-electric commuter design before launching its first electric model in 2014. That bike featured an integrated chain, built-in GPS tracking, a kick lock, and a theft-hunting service where the company tracked stolen bikes on customers' behalf. Cowboy, founded in Belgium, followed later in the decade, popularizing torque sensors - components that detect how hard you are pedaling and automatically adjust power output - along with a replaceable battery that fit cleanly into the frame design.

In the early years, these companies were building genuinely innovative products and finding enthusiastic buyers. Rad launched its first bike via Kickstarter and sold out immediately. VanMoof and Cowboy grew rapidly in European cities where cycling infrastructure was already mature and commuters were actively looking for alternatives to cars and public transit.

The trouble began before most people realized there was any trouble at all.

What is actually happening

The era of near-zero interest rates - the cost of borrowing money, which central banks set to influence the broader economy - meant that between roughly 2015 and 2022, professional investors had far more capital than they had good places to put it. The result was that any startup with real traction got flooded with funding. Rad raised $329 million in total. VanMoof raised around $200 million. Cowboy raised approximately $140 million.

Large fundraising rounds are not inherently a problem. They can fund research, manufacturing improvements, and the kind of slow, careful geographic expansion that turns a successful product into a durable business. The problem is that VC-backed blitzscaling - the model of growing as fast as possible, undercutting competitors on price to drive them out, and only turning profitable once market dominance is achieved - is designed for software businesses where the marginal cost of adding a new customer is close to zero. It is spectacularly poorly suited to manufacturing, where every additional unit requires real components, real assembly, and real after-sales support.

VanMoof's S3 and X3 bikes illustrated the danger precisely. Feeling pressure to outpace a competitor that had also just raised a large round, VanMoof rushed the models to market before quality control was adequate. The e-shifter broke consistently. Electronics failed in rain - a meaningful flaw in the Netherlands, the company's home market and its largest. At the same time, VanMoof dropped prices below €2,000 per bike despite estimates suggesting it was losing money on every unit sold, while simultaneously opening retail stores across multiple new markets including the US and Japan.

Then COVID arrived and turned everything to eleven.

Pandemic-era demand for ebikes was extraordinary. People wanted to avoid crowded public transit. Cycling became a serious commuting option for millions who had never considered it. Cowboy reportedly nearly tripled its revenues in 2022. Rad's CEO said the company grew by 300% in a single year. But factories and shipping networks were simultaneously collapsing under the weight of global supply chain disruption. Companies desperate for inventory signed multi-year contracts with suppliers for components they barely had time to vet. The bikes that shipped during this period were, for many buyers, deeply unreliable. Warranty claims piled up. And because these brands sold direct-to-consumer rather than through established bike shops, they bore the full cost of every repair themselves.

When pandemic demand normalized - as it always does, since a temporary shock that pulls forward several years of purchases cannot sustain itself indefinitely - the companies were left with overcapacity, excess inventory, warranty mountains, and suppliers demanding payment under contracts they could no longer afford to honor.

The killing blow for US-exposed companies came from trade policy. Most ebike startups manufactured in China or Taiwan. According to TechCrunch, Trump's tariffs on Chinese imports added significant cost to companies that had built their entire business model around importing at scale and selling at volume. Rad Power Bikes' largest single unsecured creditor at the time of its bankruptcy filing was the US Customs and Border Protection agency - owed $8.36 million in unpaid tariffs.

The money trail

Follow the money in this story and you find a chain of decisions that made perfect sense at each individual step and were collectively ruinous.

Investors poured capital into ebike startups because the category was growing fast and the products were genuinely compelling. Companies spent that capital on hyperscaling because that is what investors expected and what the competitive environment seemed to demand. Prices were cut below cost because capturing market share was supposed to eventually justify the losses. Factories were expanded and supplier contracts were signed because everyone in the industry believed the pandemic-era boom was permanent - Rad's own founder said in 2021 that "a switch has been flipped" and it was "not turning off."

It turned off.

According to GeekWire, Rad's gross sales fell from $130 million in 2023 to $104 million in 2024, and then to just $63 million in the first portion of 2025. The company was valued at $1.65 billion at its 2021 peak. It filed for bankruptcy with $32 million in assets against $73 million in liabilities.

The direct-to-consumer sales model amplified every one of these pressures. A conventional bike shop buys inventory at wholesale prices and handles its own repairs. If a model is unreliable, the shop stops buying it and the manufacturer gets clear market feedback quickly. In the direct-to-consumer model, the brand collects more margin per sale but absorbs every warranty cost, every repair, every customer service interaction. When quality control collapsed under pandemic supply chain pressure, there was no buffer between the manufacturer and the cost of every broken bike.

The Dutch ebike market declined roughly 9% in 2024, while Germany's largest market fell around 2-2.5% in the same period. Across Europe and North America, retailers began cutting prices 20 to 30% to clear overstock. In 2026, years after the pandemic rush ended, bike shops are still sitting on inventory that was overproduced in 2021 and 2022. Every unit they discount to move is another unit undercutting the manufacturers trying to rebuild margins.

Who benefited? Component suppliers got years of volume orders. VC funds that invested early and exited during peak valuations did fine. Traditional bike manufacturers - the Giants and Bosch-powered brands that never abandoned the dealer network model and never stopped making repairable bikes with standard components - continued selling steadily while watching their flashier competitors burn.

What people are doing about it

The turnaround playbooks being applied to the surviving brands are strikingly similar and notably unglamorous.

VanMoof, which was the first to collapse, was acquired in August 2023 by Lavoie, the electric scooter unit of McLaren Applied - a firm known primarily for engineering Formula One technology. New CEO Eliott Wertheimer cut staff from roughly 700 to around 100. Speculative technology projects were shelved. The company stopped selling bikes entirely for about a year and focused on fixing production reliability. All of VanMoof's own retail stores were closed, replaced by a network of approximately 350 third-party bike shops that now sell and service the bikes. The new S6 model, priced at €3,300 - nearly 70% more than the problem-plagued S3 - is claimed to be at least 16 times as reliable as its predecessor, according to VanMoof's own characterization. The company has restarted sales and is generating revenue roughly equivalent to its pre-collapse levels on a value basis, though unit volumes remain lower.

Cowboy's acquisition by ReBirth Group followed a similar logic. According to Cycling Industry News, the December 2025 deal brought €15 million in new capital from ReBirth - a French group that owns Peugeot, Gitane, and Solex branded bikes - alongside reinvestment from existing shareholders. Production has restarted at ReBirth's French assembly facility and the integration is designed to leverage ReBirth's network of 95 Oxygen stores, 10 Ovelo outlets, and around 500 independent dealers. Cowboy's founder Adrien Roose has departed. The plan is operational stabilization through established retail and service infrastructure, not a reinvention of what the product is.

In the US, the path is more uncertain. Tariffs on China-made components continue to make the economics of mass-market ebikes difficult. Rad Power Bikes filed its Chapter 11 with a reorganization plan due in April 2026, hoping to sell the business, though finding a buyer willing to take on a company with $73 million in liabilities and a contested $8 million customs bill is a challenge with no obvious resolution.

The brands that avoided collapse tend to share one characteristic: they never abandoned the dealer model, never tried to blitzscale past profitability, and continued making bikes with standard components that independent shops could repair without proprietary tools.

The bottom line

The ebike startup bubble was not a story of bad products. VanMoof, Cowboy, and Rad built bikes that customers genuinely wanted, introduced real innovations, and expanded a category that needed expanding. What they could not survive was the combination of a business model designed for software applied to hardware, pandemic-distorted demand treated as permanent, supply chain chaos that wrecked quality and locked companies into bad supplier contracts, and finally a shift in capital markets and trade policy that removed the last two supports from a structure already cracking. The underlying demand for electric bikes remains intact and the market is expected to keep growing. What the next generation of winners almost certainly will not look like is a VC-backed direct-to-consumer startup racing to lose money at scale.

Timeline

  • 2007 - Mike Radenbaugh founds Rad Power Bikes in the US, building early prototypes from salvaged components
  • 2009 - Dutch brothers Taco and Ties Carlier launch the precursor to VanMoof in the Netherlands
  • 2014 - VanMoof launches its first electric model, featuring integrated design and GPS tracking
  • 2019-2022 - Low interest rate environment floods ebike startups with VC funding: Rad raises $329 million, VanMoof around $200 million, Cowboy around $140 million
  • 2020-2021 - COVID-era demand surge drives triple-digit revenue growth at multiple ebike brands; supply chain disruptions force use of unvetted components; multi-year supplier contracts signed under shortage conditions
  • 2021 - Rad Power Bikes valued at $1.65 billion at peak
  • 2022 - Interest rates begin rising globally; VC investment into startups contracts sharply; Rad revenues peak and begin declining
  • July 2023 - VanMoof declares bankruptcy in Amsterdam after losses of tens of millions of euros annually
  • August 2023 - McLaren Applied's Lavoie unit acquires VanMoof out of bankruptcy for "tens of millions" of pounds
  • 2024 - European ebike markets contract; Netherlands down 9%, Germany down ~2.5%; retailers cut prices 20-30% to clear pandemic-era overstock; Taiwanese ebike exports fall 47%
  • May 2024 - VanMoof restarts sales under new ownership with the S5 model
  • September 2025 - ReBirth Group moves to acquire majority stake in Cowboy for €15 million
  • December 2025 - Rad Power Bikes files Chapter 11 bankruptcy with $73 million in liabilities, including $8.36 million owed to US Customs for unpaid tariffs
  • December 2025 - Cowboy acquisition by ReBirth formally closes; production restarts at French facility in January 2026
  • 2026 - VanMoof operating with ~350 third-party retail partners; European and North American ebike markets remain in correction phase; global market projected to grow toward $87 billion by 2032

Summary

Who: VanMoof (Netherlands), Cowboy (Belgium), and Rad Power Bikes (US) - the three largest western ebike startups, alongside dozens of smaller brands

What: A collective collapse driven by venture capital-fueled overexpansion, pandemic demand that pulled future sales forward and then vanished, quality failures from supply chain chaos, unsustainable direct-to-consumer business models, and - for US-exposed companies specifically - Trump-era tariffs on China-made components

When: The bankruptcies and acquisitions unfolded between July 2023 (VanMoof) and December 2025 (Rad Power Bikes), with the underlying structural problems building from roughly 2020 onward

Where: Manufacturing concentrated in China and Taiwan; primary markets in the US, Germany, Netherlands, Belgium, and broader Europe

Why: The venture capital playbook that worked for software startups - raise large, grow fast, undercut competitors, turn profitable once dominant - proved fatal when applied to hardware businesses facing real component costs, warranty obligations, and supply chains that could not scale cleanly under pandemic conditions