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STILRIDE reaches 100,000 bike requests
A year ago, the first concept images of STILRIDE's product Sport Utility Scooter, SUS1, were published, and since then the interest has been great. Now the company has reached its first milestone with 100,000 expressions of interest for the electric scooter.
100,000 is of course a bit of a dream figure and it feels extremely funny that there is such pressure and high interest around SUS1. We are now in a final phase regarding material selection and all the small details that need to be in place before we can start mass producing our first scooter towards the end of this year, says Jonas Nyvang, founder and CEO of STILRIDE.
For STILRIDE, a lot has happened in the last month. In January, the company closed an oversubscribed round where it raised SEK 31 million with investors such as Gustaf Hagman , Saeid Esmaeilizadeh , Sam Bonnier, Andreas Adler and Tobias Emanuelsson. It has also taken a place in ABB's growth hub SynerLeap, where it has the opportunity to develop its unique manufacturing process STILFOLD. STILFOLD can most easily be described as industrial origami as we fold sheet steel into advanced and extremely strong constructions. It saves material, weight and provides a unique design DNA. STILFOLD is a green manufacturing technology that makes it possible to drastically reduce the environmental footprint, continues Jonas.
Less than a year ago, STILRIDE opened up the opportunity to make an expression of interest to be one of the first to buy a SUS1. At the end of January, around 70,000 had signed their interest, but after being covered last week in major international entrepreneur, design and lifestyle magazines such as HypeBeast , DesignBoom , FastCompany and Gizmodo , the last 30,000 registrations were received in less than 3 weeks.
It was great fun that we managed to produce a product that interests and fascinates many different people in several countries. After the media impact last week, which literally started in the USA but then took a turn around the world via Japan, China and India, among others, the pressure was record high and we passed 100,000 by a good margin, says Jonas. STILRIDE as a company leans partly on the product part, where SUS1 is in focus, partly on the in-house developed and unique manufacturing technology STILFOLD. The advantages of the technology are many and the potential is enormous, even outside of the SUS1 project. Because STILFOLD is based on sheet steel that is then bent, bent and folded by a pre-programmed robot, we enable advanced constructions that are made locally and, in addition, the shipping becomes considerably more efficient because it involves flat packages all the way, concludes Jonas.
STILFOLD is further developed in parallel with SUS1 and has already received great interest from a number of large, traditional industrial companies that are currently investigating the possibility of using the technology in parts of their operations.
