With the 10 million euros collected at the end of 2018, and the 4.5 million a few months ago via crowdfunding, the Belgian company has raised a total of more than 35 million. Now it remains to make them profitable.
The covid-19 crisis has been rather profitable to sellers of electric bikes in general, and Cowboy in particular. During the months of May and June, the young Belgian company tripled its turnover compared to the first months of 2020. The opportunity for internationally renowned investors to invest in connected bicycles, including the Italian family Agnelli , at the head of Juventus in Turin, or even the luxury car brands Maserati and Ferrari.
“I think we came at the right time for them”, Welcomes Tanguy Goretti, co-founder of Cowboy. “Cowboy was the perfect box for these investors to ride this wave of electric bikes, which are now becoming an obvious solution for cities in Europe ”. With his four other new partners (Index Ventures, Isomer Capital and Future Positive Capital), Cowboy brings together 23 million euros, which will be used in particular to hire around thirty new employees, including engineers and marketing specialists.
Rentable, Cowboy ?
Asked about the company’s turnover after 3 years, Tanguy Goretti prefers not to speak, except for the post-containment boom. What we know in any case is that Cowboy lost 3 million euros in 2018. A hole largely filled by the recent additions of the Agnelli family and others.
Remember also that, at the head of Cowboy, we find two of the former leaders and a former employee of another start-up on two wheels: Take Eat Easy. The meal delivery company went bankrupt in 2016, still leaving more than 400,000 euros in unpaid wages to its couriers and up to 20,000 euros for some restaurateurs according to SMart, who provided the contracts of a good number said couriers.
“For this kind of box, either it works very well, or we lose almost everything”
“In this start-up or scale-up world, success is measured by capital raised, but this is short-term success.” Explain Georges Hübner, professor of finance at the University of Liège. “In the long term, it is necessary that this capital be productive and that the company is profitable. It happens from time to time, sometimes it doesn’t. It is therefore a big responsibility that weighs on the shoulders of the bosses. But he is very happy that we have this kind of entrepreneurs, because the successes of today are the risks of yesterday. Basically it’s a binary game: either it works and then generally it works fine, or it doesn’t and usually we lose pretty much everything”.
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