When Daniel Tonkopi founded Delfast in Kyiv, Ukraine, in 2014, he had no intention of building and selling electric bikes. Know more:
“Our bikes are still working despite damages,” he told me on a video call earlier this month.
When he couldn’t find bikes with long enough battery life to work all day, he decided to try building his own. His Frankenstein creations turned heads. “We heard a lot of asks from random people. ‘Hey, are you selling these bikes?’” he says. So, in 2017, Delfast launched a crowdfunding campaign, raised $165,000 and sold 44 e-bikes.
Last fall, after realizing that 80 percent of the company’s customers were in the US, Delfast opened an office in Whittier, California, outside Los Angeles, where Tonkopi and a few others work. The remaining 30 employees are still in Ukraine. Tonkopi spoke with Bloomberg about e-bikes as weapons, managing a start-up through war, and the Delfast product pipeline.Q: You’ve got 30 or so people in Ukraine.