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Photo credit: BackPedal
New e-bike models with GPS tracking enabled keep rolling off the assembly line, with the idea that this technology will deter theft and help you recover your bike if it’s stolen. But how exactly can it help you get your bike back if you know roughly where to put it?
“Customers don’t care if they can track their bike after it’s stolen,” James Dunn, co-founder of e-bike recovery startup BackPedal, told TechCrunch. “Owning a GPS tracker doesn’t actually allow them to recover their e-bike. They think, “Well, the police won’t do anything.” I don’t want to take my bike back. So what’s the point?'”
In the hands of a lone civilian angry over their stolen property, GPS may not be very useful. But in the hands of BackPedal, e-bike recovery actually seems possible.
The UK-based startup offers e-bike owners a monthly subscription service that includes e-bike recovery and, more recently, insurance through Sundays Insurance, one of the UK’s largest bicycle insurers. BackPedal states that the recovery rate is 90%, but the insurance provides a safety net for the bikes that cannot be returned.
The subscription starts at £8.99 a month but increases quickly depending on the value of a customer’s e-bike.
Such a product is becoming more and more relevant as the proliferation of e-bikes and with it the theft of e-bikes continues to increase. According to a report by Cycling Industry News, bike insurance specialist Cycleplan saw a 292% increase in e-bike insurance policies between 2019 and 2022. But that doesn’t include the recovery operations, which the founders say are what most people want.
BackPedal found in its pre-launch research that 76% of potential customers would rather have their own stolen bike returned quickly than go through the process of filing an insurance claim and getting a replacement bike.
“GPS has been implemented at scale,” Dunn said. “Mastering the recovery operations is the hard part that hasn’t been done at scale.”
While BackPedal says its service is nationwide, most of the startup’s offices are in London and Cambridge, and the south-east and south coasts of the UK. One of BackPedal’s commercial fleet customers from the UK also wants BackPedal deployed in Amsterdam, providing an opportunity to test scaling the recovery model in another country.
This model involves working with both the police and a network of recovery agents. The rescuers are usually ex-police officers or security experts, i.e. contractors with their own security company who know the situation on site and have connections with the local police.
Or sometimes it’s just Dunn and his co-founder Richard White running down the sidewalk in search of bikes.
BackPedal has a remote operations center where someone will take the customer’s request, track down the bike on the back end, manage the recovery agents, and liaise with the local police.
The agents will do anything from knocking on the door and confronting the would-be thief to jumping fences and stealing the bike back.
“They assess the situation, and if it’s not dangerous, we tell them to go ahead and get it,” White told TechCrunch. “If it’s dangerous, we tell them to wait for the police.”
Dunn said that BackPedal was successful in enlisting the help of the police, despite the widespread notion that police officers could probably do better with their time.
“That’s because we’re not private individuals; We’re actually BackPedal, a professional e-bike recovery company, and we recover valuable stolen bikes,” he said. “We’re learning how to deal with the police and part of that is not expecting something to happen right away.”
BackPedal is following a process to involve the police. Once a report of theft is received, the startup immediately reports it to the police and provides all available evidence such as the type of bike, how it is being tracked and where it is located.
“We let them know that we are professional. We are not emotionally connected. We have the resources and we have our people on the ground, and we’re not going away,” Dunn said. “Police have a legal obligation to help with things like this.”
Ultimately, Dunn (whose parents were police officers) said bike theft is a thorn in the side of communities and he wants BackPedal to reach the point where it is a trusted partner to the police force.
Where engineering feeds into e-bike recovery
According to Dunn, the biggest challenge for BackPedal, besides building an on-demand network of recovery agents and integrating them into each police district, is finding the right hardware.
“What hardware enables reliable recovery? How does that change depending on the vehicle type, use case and geography?”
As e-bikes get smarter, they are increasingly being equipped with IoT, GPS and Bluetooth trackers. Bikes with GPS from BikeTrax, IoT Ventures and BikeFinder are on the company’s list of approved trackers because they are built into the bike (and thus can be charged from the bike’s battery), have a backup battery, have proven coverage have and can be accessed by third parties -allowed.
For bikes that don’t have GPS installed, BackPedal offers an installation service – £225 for a professional fit or £150 for a team led fit via WhatsApp at home.
GPS can only get you so close to a bike. You may be told which apartment building it is in, but it doesn’t take you to the actual unit. For this reason, BackPedal also uses beacon technology, which acts as a lighthouse and sends a signal every second via Bluetooth.
“It basically means we can see behind walls, and that’s something nobody does,” White said, noting that the signal is picked up via a smartphone within 50 meters of the bike’s location.
One of the challenges BackPedal has faced as it grows is that the thieves keep getting better at what they do, requiring the startup to continually deploy better hardware.
One focus is on the scaling of the model
Since January, BackPedal has grown an average of almost 20% per month, the founders said. Today, the startup has 500 customers, but aims to reach 1,000 subscribers in the next five months.
The addition of insurance was an important step for BackPedal to offer a more comprehensive product that puts the startup in a better position to raise seed capital. BackPedal will consider starting this process six months after the company continues to grow.
The company is now working on healthy and sustainable growth. Getting to know each new market, sourcing recovery agents, and building relationships with the local police are essential to the process and will take time. Scaling requires a streamlined way to enter new markets, more GPS trackers on e-bikes, and continued work on the back-end software to manage the entire business, Dunn said.
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