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Bike start-up Cowboy: 4.7 million euros through crowdfunding

Cate­gory: Venture Capital
16. Janu­ary 2020

Brussels — Belgian micro-mobi­­lity start-up Cowboy (www.cowboy.com), maker of the epony­mous elec­tric design bike, has raised over €4.7 million in its first crowd­fun­ding campaign. The company thus excee­ded its funding target of €1.4 million by 340 percent, which was reached within just 12 minu­tes. Cowboy plans to use the funds to drive the micro-mobi­­lity revo­lu­tion across Europe and improve trans­por­ta­tion in cities.

A total of 3155 inves­tors from 70 count­ries supported Cowboy via the crowd­fun­ding plat­form Crowd­cube (www.crowdcube.com) with an average of 1,510 euros. This makes the Belgi­ans’ campaign the most successful in the clean­tech sector that Crowd­cube has listed to date.

“The campaign has clearly excee­ded our expec­ta­ti­ons. Our origi­nal goal was to give our custo­mers and fans the chance to become part of our company and grow with us in the years to come. Howe­ver, it quickly became appa­rent that Cowboy was attrac­ting the atten­tion of many other inves­tors who wanted to be part of our micro-mobi­­lity move­ment to posi­tively impact the future of cities,” said Adrien Roose, foun­der and CEO of Cowboy.

Cowboy raised funds of €13.2 million from inter­na­tio­nal inves­tors (inclu­ding Index Ventures, Tiger Global, and Hard­ware Club) in its Series A round in the fall of 2018. The first model of the elec­tric bike sold out in Belgium in a very short time last year. This spring, Cowboy laun­ched its second version and expan­ded to Germany, France, the Nether­lands, Austria, UK, Spain and Italy during the year. Compared to the previous year, Cowboy has grown fivefold.

In 2019 alone, Cowboy sold more than 5,000 bikes — 40 percent of which were sold in Germany, Cowboy’s largest market. The Cowboy commu­nity is made up of loyal fans of the brand and has alre­ady covered more than 3.4 million kilo­me­ters on the elec­tric bikes; 1.5 million kilo­me­ters of them by German Cowboy riders. The so-called “iPho­nes among e‑bikes” have won nume­rous awards and recei­ved posi­tive reviews in tests.

About cowboy
Cowboy is a Belgian company that deve­lops inno­va­tive elec­tric design bikes for urban riders. Cowboy’s main goal is to improve inner-city mobi­lity and get urba­ni­tes to their desti­na­ti­ons in a plea­sant, sustainable and effi­ci­ent way. Cowboy was foun­ded in 2017 by start-up entre­pre­neurs Adrien Roose, Karim Slaoui and Tanguy Goretti and is head­quar­te­red in the Belgian capi­tal Brussels. Cowboy is the winner of the Euro­bike 2017, the Red Dot Bicy­cle Design Award 2018 and the Red Dot “Best of the Best” award for the proto­type of the new 2019 model.

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