Ridepanda's shift from D2C micromobility platform to corporate e-bike supplier
Summary
The founders, alumni at shared micromobility companies Lime, Bird and Scoot, sensed the shift away from shared and toward small electric vehicle ownership and wanted to capitalize on it.Within a couple of years of managing supply chains, providing maintenance to customers across a range of brands and dealing with customer service nationwide, the founders realized D2C was actually a hard business to be in.Today, Ridepanda has completely rebranded, shifting its focus toward helping enterprise customers like Amazon offer e-bikes and e-scooters to their employees.Were venture-backed, so we are aiming for high growth, predictable, recurring revenue, Chinmay Malaviya, co-founder and co-CEO of Ridepanda, told TechCrunch. Thats why for us subscription and leasing were very interesting concepts to go and dabble in.Ridepanda initially approached Amazon after the retail giant announced its intention in 2021 to offer its employees e-bike benefits, including rentals, maintenance and more. Today Ridepanda has so-called Panda Hubs, where employees can test out vehicles or take them to get serviced, in Seattle, San Francisco and New York. Just a full spectrum solution much like you have with a company like Gympass.Malaviya said the team learned from the mistakes of now-bankrupt e-bike darling VanMoof, which failed in large part because it didnt have a robust enough supply chain and service network to handle fixing and replacing all of its proprietary parts.Ridepanda dealt with a range of supply issues during COVID, when there was no supply, which meant the margins were very tight, said Malaviya.As a middleman, we were just not able to get the margins we wanted to make it a sustainable business, he continued.It was also hard to provide customers with the sort of white glove customer service they expected when Ridepanda was relying on third parties or the brands themselves to handle any maintenance issues.The issues we were facing working with multiple different brands are, if you ship a product, and theres a warranty issue, they have nobody to help. And the bike is maybe in the middle of nowhere in the U.S., said Malaviya.Thats why all of the vehicles on Ridepandas platform today are brands that use off-the-shelf parts that are easily repairable.Its less about what didnt work, and more about the objectives of these companies that started to emerge, said Depman.Return to office is big.