Jungle Ventures leads $5.3m funding in Vietnamese startup Dat Bike

Vietnamese electric motorbike startup Dat Bike has announced a $5.3 million Series A fundraise led by Jungle Ventures, with participation from existing investor Wavemaker Partners. This brings the total fundraise by the company since inception to $10 million.

Dat Bike intends to use the new round of funding to invest in technology, scale production, expand to metro and Tier 1 cities across North, Central and South Vietnam, and hire top talent.

Founded in 2019, Son Nguyen, founder of Dat Bike revealed his environmentally-friendly concept to the world on Shark Tank Vietnam in what became the country’s top viewed episode.

Since then, Dat Bike has been built with a vision to drive the mass adoption of green transportation in Southeast Asia and convert the 250M gasoline motorbikes to electric.

Despite Southeast Asia being one of the largest motorbike markets in the world, the adoption of electric vehicles has been slow since traditionally they are seen as an inferior option to gasoline bikes being weak and low-ranged, delivering only half the performance of a typical gas bike. This is the gap that Dat Bike is addressing.

Dat Bike’s competitive advantage has been its performance against gasoline bikes which results from their deep vertical integration since designs and builds key components in house including the speed controller and battery.

Dat Bike’s first line product – Weaver (2019) offered three times the performance (5kW versus 1.5kW) and two times the range (100 km versus 50 km) of most
electric motorbikes at the same price point.

In November 2021, Dat Bike launched it’s second model, Weaver 200 (2021) which is double the range (200 km) and more powerful (6kW) compared to the Weaver. Further, charging time has been reduced to 1 hour for a 100 km charge and 2.5 hours for a full 200 km charge, compared to 6-8 hours of other electric bikes.

Since the launch of Weaver 200 (November 2021), the company has been overwhelmed with the customer response, with revenue increasing 10x, despite a waiting time of up to 4 months. The company has also opened a new store in Hanoi in April 2022 and will open one more in Danang soon, to meet the growing demand.

“Dat Bike is proud to be at the forefront of reimaging transportation in Southeast Asia. We are incredibly proud of the progress we have made so far, and we continue to strive to make electric vehicle performance at par and better than gasoline. Today Dat Bike represents high-performance, electric motorbikes that are designed and crafted at affordable prices for the changing Vietnam. We are proud to continue to partner with Jungle Ventures as we scale into other geographies in Vietnam,” said Dat Bike founder and CEO Son Nguyen.