Electric bike company Rad Power Bikes has reached a deal to sell itself to a company called Life Electric Vehicles Holdings (or Life EV) for about $13.2 million, just over a month ago. after entering bankruptcy proceedings.
Florida-based Life EV bills itself as a “developer, manufacturer, and distributor in the light electric vehicle industry.” It offers a number of electric bikes for sale on its website, although most are marked as “for sale” at the time of this article’s publication.
A filed to the bankruptcy docket at the weekend showed that five entities participated in the auction on the assets of Rad Power January 22. The first bid at $ 8 million, and the parties traded bids until Life Electric Vehicles came away as the winner. When accounting for Rad Power’s obligations, the total bid value was $14.9 million.
Another e-bike company called Retrospec had the second highest bid at $13 million, and was labeled as a “backup bidder” if the deal with Life EV fell through. The offer is a big discount to Rad Power’s peak valuation of $1.65 billion, which was reached in October 2021. per PitchBook. The company has raised a total of $329.2 million, according to Pitchbook data.
The acquisition still needs to be approved by a bankruptcy judge.
Rad Power is not the only company in the micromobility world to seek bankruptcy protection in the new year. Peers like VanMoof and Cake went through restructuring and found new owners. Scooter company Bird is also going through bankruptcy proceedings.
It is not clear what life EV plans to do with Rad Power; Life EV CEO Robert Provost directed questions to Rad Power. “It’s still a work in progress and there’s an exciting future planned for Rad Power,” he wrote in a message.
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TechCrunch could not reach Rad Power for comment; This article will be updated if the company responds.
Like many of its peers, Rad Power saw an uptick in sales during the pandemic, but struggled as that momentum dried up.
The company has gone through several rounds of layoffs in recent years, juggled CEOs, and more recently had problems with some of its older batteries catching fire. The Consumer Product Safety Commission found 31 reported fires related to batteries.
Rad Power told TechCrunch at the time that it “stands behind our batteries and our reputation as a leader in the e-bike industry, and strongly disagrees with the CPSC’s characterization of certain Rad batteries as defective or unsafe.”