How ezBike turned a pandemic pivot into Pakistan's battery swap scooter business

In the second week of March 2020, Mohammad Hadi and his cofounder Ali Moin gave themselves a rule. If the disruption from Covid lasted three months, they would ride it out. If it lasted three years, they would change the business. Their company, Roamer, a peer to peer car rental service, had grown to about 1,500 cars and 75,000 users. Covid had cut its volumes to about 20 percent of their peak.

They chose to change it. Roamer was wound down, and in October 2020 the founders launched ezBike, an electric scooter sharing service in Islamabad. Roamer Technologies still runs it. Hadi had spent 15 years at Credit Suisse in London and New York before leaving banking in 2017.

A sharing service built on hard maintenance

The model was simple for riders. ezBike rented electric mopeds from public parking areas, and registered users found and reserved one in the app, unlocked it, rode to their destination, left it in a designated parking zone and paid digitally. By May 2022 the company said it had more than 100,000 customers and was well known in Islamabad.

Behind the app was a harder business. Hadi has said that shared scooters take heavy punishment, that the operational complexity of keeping a fleet running is underestimated, and that operators either get operations and maintenance right and turn a profit, or fail. ezBike spent a long period testing at small volumes and building its own software and hardware, and learned battery swapping along the way. It also built analytics to move scooters to where riders were. Hadi calls that accumulated learning the moat.

Owning the fleet was capital heavy, but Hadi argued that it let ezBike beat ride hailing companies on price and still make a profit. The sharing service doubled as a testing ground for the next step. Moin pointed to the team's experience of assembling, operating and maintaining electric scooters and battery swapping stations at scale. The bigger bet was to sell the scooters.

A million dollar bet on selling scooters

In May 2022 ezBike announced a $1 million pre seed round from i2i Ventures, Walled City, GroundUp and US angel investors. The money was meant for an electric scooter assembly facility, low cost lithium ion battery production and a network of battery swapping stations. The company said it would start selling its own scooters that summer and test them with one of Pakistan's leading delivery companies.

“With 22m legacy motorcycles, Pakistan represents a $20 billion market opportunity for two wheel electric vehicles.”

About two million motorcycles are sold in Pakistan each year, Hadi said, and electric vehicles had not grown at a significant pace because they were too expensive. His pitch was that a buyer could get a scooter for about 80 percent of the price of a comparable petrol motorcycle and run it at about half the cost. In a podcast interview published the same month he put the planned price at 70 to 80 percent of a leading motorcycle brand, and said swapping a battery would cost about half the price of petrol.

The company also leaned on the environmental case. It cited an estimate that about 65 percent of emissions come from transport, with motorcycles among the largest contributors, and said each motorcycle replaced would remove about 300 kilograms of carbon a year. Misbah Naqvi, a cofounder and general partner at i2i Ventures, said her firm was proud to back the founders as they took on climate change.

Money was a constraint beyond that round. ezBike joined the SME Accelerator of the PFAN clean energy programme in November 2021, and its project profile listed an ask of $10 million. Hadi said venture equity was then the only source of capital for cleantech startups in Pakistan.

Swapping instead of waiting to charge

The product that came out of the plan was the Electron, launched in Islamabad in November 2023 with a network of battery swap stations. The scooter has a 2,000 watt motor, a lithium iron phosphate battery, a top speed of up to 65 kilometres an hour and a range of up to 75 kilometres, and a home charger takes two hours. At the stations, which are run through an app called ezSwap, a depleted battery is exchanged for a charged one in under 30 seconds. Forty stations were planned, in Islamabad and Rawalpindi.

The company says its stations, batteries and scooters are made in Islamabad. Hadi has said the battery packs are assembled locally while the lithium ion cells are imported.

Hadi has said the hardest part of building the business was neither regulation nor capital but talent and professional culture. On policy, he has argued for cutting import duty on motors and batteries to 1 percent and for concentrating electric vehicle incentives on two and three wheelers, an argument he made in the May 2022 podcast interview.

Who pays for the batteries

ezBike now describes itself as a battery as a service business with three kinds of customers. Corporate clients, such as logistics firms and field teams, want lower running costs. Fleet riders, such as delivery workers, want a scooter they can use all day without waiting for a charge. Retail buyers want cheap personal transport.

“Our customers, on average, save 40% just on pure petrol versus electric, and on top of that, zero maintenance cost.”

The range has widened since the Electron. The company's website now lists three models, Electron, Spark and Volt. The Volt has a 2.6 kilowatt hour lithium iron phosphate battery, a 1,500 watt motor, a top speed of 65 kilometres an hour and a range of up to 80 kilometres. A battery swap takes under a minute, against about five hours for a full charge.

The site carries a savings calculator. For a rider covering 30 kilometres a day on a Volt, it shows a monthly saving of Rs7,312 and an annual saving of Rs88,968.