Malmö's Wheelys accepted into Y Combinator

    Dagens Industri reports that Malmö-based Wheelys has been accepted into YCombinator’s upcoming program. It’s an interesting move for YCombinator – Wheelys isn’t quite a tech company, nor is it really a brick-and-mortar business. Instead, Wheely sells rolling cafes decked out with LCD displays, running water, chilled storage, and whatever you need for selling coffee and snacks under the Wheelys brand.

    Digging for more tech, they also seem to offer their own app for pre-ordering, but it doesn’t seem to be the selling point. Instead, they’re selling the dream of running your own business to folks who can scrape together a few thousand for the hopes of selling between $250 to $600 a day. Like any franchise, they charge $150 a month to use the Wheelys brand, which gives access to PR and social media help, discounted branded cups, and other franchise benefits.

    All in all it’s a all a super-polished Swedish solution, which makes sense once you find they were founded in part by folks from Studio Total, the Swedish advertising agency that’s won a few awards.

    They write on their website, “The idea came to us after years of working with the mega brands. What if there was a way of using their techniques but in a better way- leaving more freedom (and money) to the people running the businesses. And of course- being nicer to our planet. The answer was Wheelys.”

    So far they’ve launched two models of bike carts, the first running $2100 and the second running $7k. This summer the company will launch their third model, Wheelys 3.0.