Lectric's founders are buying into e-bikes while VC-backed rivals retreat
Levi Conlow says Lectric sold nearly 30,000 bikes in its biggest month and has put about $10 million into three new brands.
By Ryan Merket · Published
Why it matters
Lectric is testing whether founder-led capital discipline can beat the venture-backed e-bike model that overexpanded during the pandemic boom.
Levi Conlow and Robby Deziel's Lectric eBikes has spun out Monarc as a premium adventure e-bike brand, the third brand move in six months from a bootstrapped Phoenix e-bike seller expanding while better-funded rivals have collapsed.
The move, reported by TechCrunch, is not a conventional category-extension story. Lectric is using a downturn in the e-bike market to build a portfolio: a Juiced Bikes relaunch after acquiring the brand in 2025, Juiced Powersports with an e-moto scheduled to ship in August, and now Monarc, a Minnesota-based standalone brand that TechCrunch says began as a skunkworks project inside Lectric.
Conlow and Deziel were childhood friends before starting Lectric seven years ago, according to TechCrunch. That origin matters because Lectric's current play is the inverse of the venture-backed e-bike script that dominated the pandemic boom: keep the core brand narrow, sell mostly direct, avoid VC expectations, then spend into the gap when competitors are restructuring.
"Others might be pulling back, or raising money, we're actually deploying and investing into initiatives like this," Conlow told TechCrunch. He said Lectric has put about $10 million toward the three initiatives. The amount, like the company's recent sales figures, comes from Lectric's CEO and should be read as a company-supplied figure rather than a disclosed financing event.
The bet: the market was overfunded, not saturated
Conlow's argument is that e-bike demand did not disappear with the pandemic-era boom. The businesses built around that demand were often too expensive to operate.
"I actually don't think the market is saturated right now; Lectric last month had its biggest sales month in our company's existence and we sold almost 30,000 bikes," Conlow told TechCrunch. He also said the market "lacks a lot of worthy competition right now."
That framing serves Lectric's expansion strategy. Rad Power Bikes, once one of the sector's venture-backed leaders, raised nearly $330 million, was valued at $1.65 billion, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in December 2025, and had its assets sold to Life Electric Vehicles Holdings for $13.2 million, according to TechCrunch. The point is not that venture capital alone killed Rad. It is that e-bikes became a test of inventory discipline, service capacity, customer acquisition costs, and balance-sheet patience.
Lectric's model has been more constrained. TechCrunch says Lectric sells 90% of its products direct to consumers through its own website, which Conlow said receives 2 million to 4 million monthly visitors depending on the month. TechCrunch also reported Lectric shipped 150,000 units in 2025. Those figures give Lectric a customer funnel that lets it launch products without the same retail dependence that can weigh on hardware sellers, but they do not answer the harder questions of gross margin, warranty cost, returns, or service burden.
Why separate brands instead of one bigger Lectric
Lectric is best known for lower-priced XP Series e-bikes. Conlow told TechCrunch that is exactly why he does not want every new product sitting under the Lectric name.
"What we've learned is that Lectric cannot be everything to everyone," he said.
The structure Lectric is choosing is unusually deliberate for a consumer-hardware seller at this stage. TechCrunch reported that each brand has its own product engineering and development, branding, marketing, and customer service teams. Conlow said he wants the brands to compete with one another rather than converge into products that look and feel the same.
That is also a way to protect the Lectric brand from category confusion. A Juiced model promoted heavily on the Lectric homepage could blur the signal around the XP Series. An e-moto under Juiced Powersports reaches a different buyer, with different regulatory and support expectations. Monarc, led by industry veterans Julia Moran and Ryan Callahan, gives Lectric a premium adventure vehicle without asking core Lectric customers to accept a different price point or identity from the same logo.
The upside is segmentation. The risk is complexity. Three brands mean three marketing machines, three product roadmaps, and three customer-service promises in a category where servicing and safety issues can damage trust quickly. Lectric's decision to separate teams is meant to preserve focus, but it also increases the management load on a business that has historically won by being simpler than its funded rivals.
Bootstrapped, then private-equity backed
Lectric's anti-VC story is accurate but not the whole financing picture. TechCrunch says Lectric did not raise venture capital and was bootstrapped before taking an investment from Bertram Capital Management in 2020. The size, valuation, ownership stake, and structure of that deal were not disclosed in the source material.
That distinction matters. Lectric is not a founder-only balance sheet. It has a private-equity investor behind it, which can support operational expansion but usually brings its own expectations around growth, cash generation, and eventual liquidity. What separates Lectric from the e-bike companies that raised large venture rounds is less the absence of outside capital than the type of capital and the timing of its deployment.
For Conlow and Deziel, the next test is whether Lectric's discipline transfers. Buying distressed or underused brand equity is easier than proving those brands can stand up as operating businesses. Monarc, Juiced Bikes, and Juiced Powersports will show whether Lectric has built a repeatable e-bike platform or whether its advantage was narrower: one well-positioned direct-to-consumer brand selling practical bikes at the right price.