Dat Bike is a familiar name to investors. The startup once appeared on Shark Tank, a reality TV show and impressed audiences with its sporty design.

Dat Bike has announced the successful call of $5.3 million worth of capital from the Series A round led by Jungle Ventures with the participation of Wavemaker Partners.

With the capital call, the total capital Dat Bike has mobilized since its establishment has reached $10 million.

It plans to use the money to develop technology, expand production scale, and increase penetration in large cities throughout the country. It also plans to recruit more workers.

Dat Bike is a startup founded by Nguyen Ba Canh Son, a 9x CEO. In 2019, Son turned up at Shark Tank with the idea of developing environmentally-friendly electric motorbikes and called for investment in the project. But he failed to do this.

At that moment, Shark Binh, one of the investors of the TV show, commented that electric motorbikes were a growing trend. However, he ‘cast a damper on Son’s project’ when affirming that no one would buy the products.

“What you are doing is wrong in terms of business and market. Wrong moment, wrong products. I strongly recommend that you do some other things,” Shark Binh said.

However, contrary to Shark Binh’s prediction, Dat Bike has developed rapidly. Established with just a small-scale workshop in Da Nang, Dat Bike now has a hi-tech factory with a capacity of 1,000 products a month in HCM City.

Meanwhile, Dat Bike’s workforce  increased by threefold. The number of orders is three times higher than expected.

The startup has also successfully recruited Andrzej Bialasiewicz, an experienced marketing expert, who once worked for Carlsberg, and Ha Truong, a veteran electric vehicle designer, who is now design director, as well as Minh Pham, former product strategic director of Yamaha Vietnam, who is now head of the product development division.

Son said his startup has the ambition of shifting all petrol-run motorbikes in Vietnam and Southeast Asia into electric motorbikes.

Dat Bike is focusing on the Vietnamese market. Indonesia will be its next market in Southeast Asia in the next 2-3 years.

In related news, total investment capital poured into Vietnamese startups in 2021 reached $1.4 billion, which was 1.5 times higher than 2019, according to a report from NIC (Vietnam National Innovation Center) under the Ministry of Planning and Investment and Do Ventures.

Trong Dat