As VC-backed e-bike startups went bankrupt, bootstrapped Lectric grew

Lectric eBikes, a Phoenix, Arizona-based company known for its practical and affordable XP series electric bikes, has launched three new brands so far this year — a Juiced Bikes relaunch, a new Juiced Powersports brand, and now a premium adventure brand called Monarc — an expansion strategy that runs counter to the wave of bankruptcies that have plagued the sector.

Together, Lectric has put about $10 million toward these initiatives, CEO Levi Conlow told TechCrunch.

“Others might be pulling back, or raising money, we’re actually deploying and investing into initiatives like this,” he said. “I actually don’t think the market is saturated right now; Lectric last month had its biggest sales month in our company’s existence and we sold almost 30,000 bikes. I’m not sure anybody has done that before, even at like peak COVID.”

It may seem like an odd time to launch an e-bike brand, let alone three.

In the past two years a slew of e-bike companies have filed for bankruptcy, shut down, or withered until they were snapped up by larger companies. Rad Power Bikes, the buzzy electric bike company that raised nearly $330 million in venture capital, was perhaps the highest-profile collapse. The company, once valued at $1.65 billion, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in December. Its assets were acquired by Life Electric Vehicles Holdings for $13.2 million.

“To me, it’s just opened it up,” Conlow said of the market after listing a dozen companies that had folded or left the U.S. market. “I think the market actually lacks a lot of worthy competition right now.”

The contrarian bet has a contrarian backstory. Conlow and co-founder Robby Deziel never raised venture capital, instead bootstrapping the business, which they founded seven years ago as childhood friends, before taking an investment from private equity firm Bertram Capital Management in 2020. What started as a scrappy startup is now one of the top-selling direct-to-consumer e-bike companies in the U.S., shipping 150,000 units in 2025.

The playbook — bootstrap, stay profitable, let better-funded competitors implode, then expand — is one that founders across hardware categories might find instructive. But Conlow is careful about how Lectric grows. Trying to sell e-bikes for every kind of customer risks diluting the brand, he said.

“What we’ve learned is that Lectric cannot be everything to everyone,” he said, before pointing to its broad product lineup, which includes folding bikes and an electric tricycle. The company sells 90% of its products direct to consumers through its website, which, dependi