Niche Mobility, a Girona startup founded in 2021 that offers mobility solutions for electric bicycles, has just launched the ADTC (Automatic Digital Transmission System), its product to transform electric bike journeys. This solution offers an automatic transmission to the vehicle, in addition to greater autonomy, more power, a weight saving of one kilo, regenerative braking and an anti-theft system to offer more safety, comfort and pleasure in driving e-bikes, as well as a much lower maintenance cost.
The company was co-founded in Girona by Marc Barceló, its current CEO and founder of the electric motorcycle company Volta Motorbikes; and Francesc Queralt, CBO of Niche and co-founder of the Social Energy and Social Car digital platforms. Likewise, the team counts with Enric Delgado, CTO of Volta Motorbikes for seven years, as COO, and with Lluís Olivet, founder of OTC Engineering, as an advisor. All in all, Niche Mobility has formed an “experienced team of serial entrepreneurs with a clear vocation for sustainability”, the startup points out.
Regenerative braking
The solution designed, developed, patented and produced in-house by the Niche Mobility team it becomes the first electric bicycle traction system with regenerative braking and virtual gearbox. The product, totally compact and adaptable to e-bikes of all kinds, has its own motor, battery, display and charger. This system will be sold to bicycle manufacturers who will integrate it into their products, responding to Niche’s conviction that the cities of the future will need improved mobility solutions that reduce congestion and pollution. Barceló explains that the idea of the company is to produce the product and sell it to customers “who will be bicycle manufacturers” and points out that they have been “a year and a half with the development” of the product.
Specifically, the startup does not make the entire bike. Make the engine. The cyclist pedals and changes gears automatically. “On an electric bicycle, when there is an uphill or downhill slope, you have to change gears, our system does this automatically on its own,” stresses Barceló.
300.000 euros
After developing, patent, test and test your prototype, now, through the crowdfunding platform Crowdcube, the Niche Mobility team plans to raise 300,000 euros, with which to boost their commercial and marketing strategy, expand the team with the hiring of 15 people, and complete the development and approval of its first units. “It’s innovative, we were able to patent it, there are companies that do something similar but not the same,” explains the CEO.
In the framework of the NextGeneration European funds, the project already obtained 228,300 euros granted by the Instituto para la Diversificación and the Energy Saving of the Spanish Government, being identified as one of the most relevant initiatives in the contribution of technological solutions to the green mobility market.
The startup’s CEO explains that initially, to reduce manufacturing costs, “suppliers will be sought who can assemble the batteries and motors for us and then the idea is to do it internally”.
Exponential growth
Niche Mobility’s projections predict that next year, in 2024, 500 units of its product will have already been sold in Europe to its first bicycle manufacturing customer, starting a process of exponential growth of new customers that would reach 46,000 units sold in 2027, with sales worth almost 45 million euros. Likewise, Niche Mobility’s forecasts place a positive EBITDA for 2025.
The Niche Mobility solution can cover all thes segments of the electric bicycle market, from private users to bike sharing, including used bikes for last-mile delivery. In this sense, the startup’s team anticipates that its market in the European Union, aimed at e-bike producers, will grow by 13.5% annually, reaching 13.5 million electric bicycles in the year 2030.
Specifically, Niche will focus its product on urban and cargo electric bikes (mostly used in last-mile delivery), providing a low-maintenance, more robust solution and offering routes much more comfortable for urban cyclists and professionals of the last mile.