Wolt’s first investor, Helsinki-based VC Inventure is now partnering up with Yeply, a mobile bike service that operates in Finland, Germany, and the Netherlands. Yeply secured 2.5 million euros in a seed round led by Inventure. Tony Honkanen, Wolt’s Director of international expansion, will join the Executive Board along with Gorilla’s COO & Co-Founder Felix Chrobog following the capital injection.
Backing Yeply to fix Europe’s bikes.
The news
Inventure announced they are thrilled to partner with Yeply in a €2.5m Seed round to build Europeans largest bicycle maintenance service provider. The company is bringing breath of fresh air into an industry that has really not changed since Karl von Drais invented the first bicycles in 1817.
The big picture
Two major trends have impacted the bicycle industry – and therefore bicycle maintenance – like never before.
First, thanks to the rapid expansion of food delivery (i.e. our friends at Wolt) or quick commerce in recent years (i.e. Gorillas, Flink etc) more couriers than ever are relying on their bikes, requiring unprecedented levels of maintenance that needs support.
And on the consumer side, the bike boom took off as people looked for alternatives to public transportation during the pandemic. What’s especially notable is that the bike boom was an e-bike boom, which translates to higher cost bikes where consumers value preventative maintenance. In Europe, e-bikes enjoyed a massive increase by 52%. In 2020, this represented 11B€ or 60% of all bike sales in value, up from 3.3M units in 2019.
Another interesting trend is that the pandemic’s long wait times for new bikes has pushed purchases onto the internet and away from brick-and-mortar dealerships with an attached repair shop. In response to this large shift in the customer relationship, bike brands including Geero, Angell, Sushi, and Bzen use Yeply to build a digital connection to the consumer beyond the bike purchase, including a digital service book and warranty services.
The product
- Compared to small repair shops, Yeply’s mobile vans meet everyday cyclists in convenient neighborhood locations, and with professional fleets or in front of their operations centers.
- Through Yeply you can book a Formula 1 pitstop online, fixing your bike and running through preventative maintenance.
- Today Yeply is active in 77 cities across Germany, Finland and The Netherlands, repairing over 60,000 bikes.
- Their wide coverage is key for providing warranty coverage for bike brands, and for collecting data on repairs and end-consumer use. This larger data-driven focus is key for Yeply’s lean operations.
The impact
- Increased efficiency, transparency, and predictability for consumers and fleets using Yeply’s services.
- Tackling global challenges such as climate change, urbanization, and personal well being by bringing back and maintaining more bicycles on the streets
- A path for continued improvement across all parts of the operating fleets
- Lower barriers to entry for delivery companies, as new or existing delivery would no longer have to invest in house maintenance services
The team
“We first met the Cofounders Antti Känsälä and Tommi Särkkinen during a pitching session of Business Finland in 2018. We followed their path ever since and got our last piece of conviction by a proper beer with both of them last December! Both, Antti and Tommi possess the rare combination of skills, experience, and executional gene, to build this product and crack the go-to-market, like they have shown in the last 24 months. We could not imagine a better team set up for Yeply.” states Kevin Lösch, Investment Assosciate of Inventure.
Antti began working on Yeply when he was still full-time working at eazybreak (eazy-to-use mobile service for employee benefits). While at eazybreaks, he led many of the core product elements. Tommi, with an extensive background in Marketing and Design, was the logical Cofounder scale the brand across Europe.
Together, the team possesses the technical domain expertise, a deep process understanding, and the relationships across the industry necessary to make
Kevin’s thesis:
“Yeply tackling exactly the interface between the ongoing quick-commerce and the e-bike boom, which is creating unprecedented digital opportunities for the bicycle industry. Through the unmatched access to data centered around the bikes, Yeply will be in a lead position to shape the future of how bike owners (B2C) and (B2B) will be served.”
