The Vanhawks Valour smartbike has officially blown by its initial crowdfunding goal, doubling up on its $100,000 target on Kickstarter. Currently standing at just over $200,000, the campaign for the world’s “first connected bike featuring performance tracking, security sensors & interactive feedback,” has attracted 258 backers.
And it still has 25 days left of crowdfunding potential left. So did Vanhawks cofounders Ali Zahid, Niv Yahel, Adil Aftab and Sohaib Zahid predict the enourmas response after just a few days?
“No, to be honest, but within the first three hours we knew we had something,” said Ali Zahid, 20. “The rate we were going at we knew something was up. I’m ecstatic: this is insane”
It’s going so well that Zahid said they’re gunning for their “stretch goal” of $750,000. He said given estimates from one crowdfunding analytics website, $1.2 million isn’t unreachable either. In fact, Kicktraq reveals that Vanhawks has raised 200 percent of its initial goal, and is projected to hit $1,242,728 based on a continued growth up to 1242 percent (numbers subject to constant change). Of course these are simply predictive statistics, and the likelihood of this happening is slim.
It’s certainly not the biggest crowdfunding case in the world, or even in Canada. Palo Alto-based Pebble raised over $10 million on Kickstarter in May 2012 from nearly 69,000 individual backers. In Canada, the Neptune Pine smartwatch is among the most successful Canadian-based projects in crowdfunding history. It raised $801,000 from over 2,000 backers in December.
Vanhawks has now raised a nice chunk of cash for its smart bike. Not only did they receive more than they were expecting, but more bikes have now been ordered and (arguably) expectations for a great product have been heightened along with the dollar value on Kickstarter.
Zahid said the team feels no added pressure, as the company adequately planned for higher demand. “We were prepared to ramp up our production up very easily, knowing that if something like this were to happen we’d be able to deal with it. We come from a manufacturing background, so it was actually better for us to ramp up production, beause it gets cheaper and easier for us to produce on a larger scale.”
Vanhawks is currently one of the teams in FounderFuel’s Spring 2014 cohort of startups. FounderFuel’s DemoDay comes on May 13, in which Vanhawks will deliver an investor-focused pitch.