Four young Canadians have developed a high-tech bike with several smart and safety features. The so-called Valour looks like an ordinary two-wheeler but it contains sensors that can detect cars in your blind spot, help you choose flatter, quieter routes, and avoid potholes. It can be connected with a smart phone and other Valours to provide turn-by-turn directions as well as measure speed, acceleration, and balance and even let you know if you are passing a stolen Valour.
The bike is designed to encourage more people to commute by bike. It’s a mode of transportation becoming more popular among Canadians looking to stay fit, to reduce pollution and sometimes just to beat the traffic.
‘The bike needs to get better’
“We all come from a commuting background, said Ali Zahid, co-founder of Vanhawks, the company he set up with his brother and their two best friends. “So we used to bike every day to school and to work. And we thought, the bike needs to get better and we created something that we loved ourselves.”
Made of carbon fibre from a single mold, the bike weighs less than 7 kilos and has an internal skeleton. It comes in both single-speed and multi-speed version and sells for about $1,200 Canadian.
‘If we give you money, will you stay in school?’
The project started with a $100,000 investment from friends and family. Zahir says his parents “…were like, ‘If we give you this money, will you stay in school?’ and we’re like ‘yes, yes, yes we will.’ So they funded us, but we ran out of that money quite fast because when you’re manufacturing, money runs out quite fast.”
$820,000 in 30 hours
The four then got help from FounderFuel, a three-month startup accelerator program in Montreal. It helps entrepreneurs start businesses in return for a nine-per-cent interest in it. And finally they turned to Kickstarter for crowd-sourced funding. Their target was to raise $100,000 but they surpassed $820,000 in only 30 hours. That makes their’s the most-funded Kickstarter project in Canada, says Zahir.
Vanhawk has pre-sold 800 bikes in 30 days which will take until March to produce, and it continues to take orders from around the world.
To ‘change the world for the better’
“Our dream is to change the urban commute from taking people from point A to point B,” says Zahir. “We see ourselves as big as Google in the future and being the next big company in the world that’s going to change the world for the better.”
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