Rad Power Bikes Was an E-Bike Unicorn. Then Everything Blew Up.

The startup had everything: ambition, market share, a $1.65 billion valuation, diehard fans, and the wind at its back. Is that what killed it?

EXPERT OPINION BY MATT ALSTON

Illustration: Inc.; Photo: Getty Images

Rad Power Bikes was supposed to be the brand that made e-bikes go mainstream in America. The Seattle-based company had all the hallmarks of the contemporary American entrepreneurial mythology: the founder’s lightbulb moment, bootstrapped hands-on product development, and an all-in crowdfunding campaign that raised $320,000 and took it from idea to production in 2015, when Rad began selling its first mass-produced model. 

Within five years of his company’s initial production run, Mike Radenbaugh, Rad Power Bikes’ CEO and founder, told NPR’s How I Built This that the company had grown more than 100 percent annually for 5 consecutive years, including a pandemic boom of nearly 300 percent growth from 2019 to 2020. It controlled more than 25 percent of the North American market. By 2021, a $154 million fundraising round put the company in unicorn status with a staggering $1.65 billion valuation. 

Four years later, Rad was in free fall. Radenbaugh and his co-founders were gone, and the company was cycling through C-level executives and rounds of layoffs. In November 2025, the Consumer Product Safety Commission issued a recall order, labeling Rad’s lithium-ion batteries as a fire hazard posing serious injury or death. The following month, Rad filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

In January of this year, Rad’s Huntington Beach retail warehouse caught fire on the heels of the CPSC’s warning that its lithium-ion batteries could unexpectedly ignite and explode. By March 2026, Life Electric Vehicles acquired Rad Power—brand, intellectual property, inventory and operating assets—for less than $14 million.

So how does a company go from unicorn to ash heap in less than five years? Let us count the ways.

Rad’s beginnings as a bespoke e-bike

Much of the company’s swift rise can be found in the self-told mythology of the interviews with and profiles Radenbaugh participated in during the company’s rise and most successful years. Rad Power began in the mid-aughts in a small rural Northern California town, where a teenage Radenbaugh attended a regional high school 17 miles from home. As he told Inc. in 2015, the prospect of a 34-mile daily round trip to school with unreliable buses led him to online forums and his local Radio Shack, where he began tinkering with motor controllers and scooter motors, daisy-chaining batteries and Frankensteining parts into a series of prototypes, until he had his own handmade electric-powered mountain bike, and, per NPR, he could “cycle to school without breaking a sweat.” (Radenbaugh didn’t respond to Inc.’s request for comment—a notable shift from the many interviews he gave at the company’s peak.) 

Between 2005 and 2015, Radenbaugh found some customers for his bespoke e-bikes, mostly through word of mouth. While completing an industrial design degree at Humboldt State University (now Cal Poly Humboldt) and grad school at UC Davis, he continued to sell his bikes, buying ads in a local paper to promote his one-man, boutique operation. All this tinkering gave him the insight, intuition, and hands-on experience to decide that electric-powered mountain bikes as daily transportation might work as a real company. Radenbaugh knew that fat-tired bikes were comfortable to ride but hard to pedal. Adding an electric motor to the fat tire design made the bikes both powerful and durable. Fusing the two, he realized, might be something people wanted.

As Rad became a full-fledged bike company, it grew largely by reputation over innovation. While they did pioneer rack and cargo systems that would later become the standard for many e-bikes and held more than 100 patents at the time of the bankruptcy sale, Rad had no proprietary software or smartphone integration. The company’s genius and its value lay in packaging, marketing, positioning, and price point. Down the road, this distinction would matter.

Operating like a bootstrapped startup

Ty Collins, one of Rad’s co-founders and Radenbaugh’s childhood friend, describes the early days as driven by a simple belief: “We just wanted to make e-bikes accessible for the masses and accessible for as many people as possible.” One of the company’s earliest slogans was “built for anything and priced for everyone.” A 2015 Indiegogo campaign put that belief to the test. With a $40,000 goal, Rad raised $320,000, enough to order components for roughly 300 bike orders. Reviewers at the time picked up on and appreciated the authenticity of Rad’s offering, loving a bike made by a team of “dedicated electric vehicle enthusiasts [GC13] ” and the D2C model of the initial product run allowed for a reasonably priced alternative, at around $2000 to the $4000 models[GC14]  that dominated the market at the time.

“We really had something,” says Collins, who left the company in 2021. And as the market evolved, and as more people learned about us, they would want to be a part of it.”

During the post-Indiegogo days, Rad operated in the nimble, on-the-fly style of a bootstrapped........

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