Bike start-up Cowboy: 4.7 million euros through crowdfunding
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.