![]() Seed funding is used to start the company itself, and consequently it is fairly high risk: the company has not yet proven itself within the market. An early stage startup may also look for funding through bank loans, but angel investments are usually preferred. Often, seed funding comes from angel investors, friends and family members, and the original company founders. “Seed funding is a startup’s earliest funding stage. In our post, Startup Funding Stages, we define seed funding as: We are a bit behind in Australia, but there are lots of good companies working on solutions here and I think that we have customers here that want them.Seed funding is generally the earliest form of capital a startup will raise. Cost is a big one – we don’t have the same incentives as the US or Europe, such as tax breaks and exemptions from toll roads. There are a lot of challenges in general with electric vehicles in Australia. At a certain point, there’s no affordable alternative but to go to China for manufacturing, but we want to do things well before we get bigger. The game plan is to sell them online ourselves and keep it as close to home as possible. Our goal is to have amazing-looking postie bikes ready by the end of September to take to the Eco SXSW Festival, with the other Ignition Labs participants. We do have other projects that we can apply this innovation to, such as scooters, but at the moment we are focusing on getting the postie bikes right. We focused the pitch on the market potential – which is about $6 billion worldwide this year and expanding. It’s been running for three weeks and I’ve never been so busy. ![]() We were looking for good advice once we got out of university, so it was such a decision to apply for the program. The mentorship and advice has been great. The sustainability part is a nice add-on, but people are mainly attracted by the price. The second is the people who want low cost short-range travel within cities. In China, in certain areas you can only ride electric bikes, by law. There are two main drivers towards e-bikes – the first is economics. The components are cheap so we’ll keep the price point down below $4,000. We’re positioning this right at the target market of inner-city urban dwellers. Why does the public at large need this, exactly? It’s taken a lot of work, but we’re very happy with it. We’re confident we’ve cracked the problem of getting a low-cost battery that has a bit of range. It can now run for about an hour or 50km on one pack. We’ve stripped it back as much as possible, made it very minimal and given it a cool, retro look. The higher spec the bike, the heavier the batteries. You have a high performance bike but you get 15 minutes run time before it needs to be recharged, which isn’t acceptable. Won’t there be an issue with recharging the bikes every five minutes? It’s a really big solution for this bike. It has a much better performance with a lower power than what we started with. We’ve devised a system where the transmission is at a much lower current, so that the bike isn’t weighed down by a heavy battery. We’ve built three or four prototypes and hit a few dead ends with components but we hit the nail on the head with a small lightweight frame that doesn’t require huge batteries. We’re focusing on it more as a business now and making sure that we get a great product to market. They liked the fact that it was focused in the area of urban sustainability and provided clean, short-range transport for people in cities.Įverything then took off when we were chosen by Ignition Labs. We’ve worked on making an electric postie bike for the past year, ever since we got a $20,000 grant through the Big Green Idea, which is a British Council scheme. They are easy, cheap and it’s simple to get the parts. ![]() There’s more of an issue with available parts with Vespas, so we moved to postie bikes. But Sean is into old bikes and Vespas and convinced us to start on something small and manageable. We initially wanted to build electric Beetles, to create something new and cool. We are focusing all our efforts on the postie bikes. There’s also Sean Foley, who is the finance guy.Īt Chunk Industries, we’ve worked on a variety of products, but this is our first large-scale project. There’s Hugh Worthington, who is an industrial designer. Website: Concept: Creating the world’s first mass-market electric ‘postie’ motorbike We’ll bring you the other two profiles tomorrow, so stay tuned. We spoke to four of the Ignition Labs participants to find out what ideas they are working on and how they hope to make them mainstream business successes.īelow are two of the businesses – Chunk Design and Open Shed. So which start-ups are at the cutting edge of this clean tech revolution? ![]()
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