It’s Thursday and today we’re diving into Neold, a French electric bike refurbishing company founded by Thibault Penicaut. The company recently completed a €1 million seed round with participation from SKALEPARK and Bpifrance.

Electric bikes can be significantly more expensive than traditional ones. According to one German study, the average selling price of a new e-bike is €2,650—enough to buy a car. Maybe a clunker, but a car nonetheless.

So what’s the alternative? If you don’t fancy a rundown used car or a standard bicycle, you can go second-hand. Because bikes are often tossed well before they become unusable, a steady supply of used models exists. Of course, you can’t just grab an old e-bike off the shelf. It needs a thorough cleaning, basic repairs, etc.

This is where Neold comes in: the company refurbishes old e-bikes, then sells them. Its website features more than 150 models—city bikes, fat bikes, high-frame, low-frame, short-distance, and long-distance. Prices reflect this variety, ranging from as little as €700 up to €4,000.

Refurbished e-bikes are the core of Neold’s business, but the company also offers two complementary services.

First, like any traditional bike shop, Neold sells accessories—pedals, seats, locks, and more. Nothing unusual there.

The second offering is more interesting: maintenance. At first glance, it seems obvious—of course a bike seller would offer repairs. But Neold’s model is more akin to a certified car dealership. Think of it like Toyota: they sell new cars and offer official servicing. Neold does the same, except instead of new Toyotas, it’s second-hand e-bikes.

Yes, you could take your bike to any repair shop. But you’re usually better off going to someone who knows the product inside and out. And in Neold’s case, they don’t just know the bikes—they rebuilt them.

Neold’s main value flow is simple: buy an old e-bike, restore it to the best condition possible, and sell it to a customer. So the company’s margin depends largely on two things:

Partnerships are another important piece of the model:

These partnerships enable Neold to reach customers it couldn’t serve on its own—geographically, financially, and even behaviorally.

France has lagged behind its European neighbors in bike adoption. As recently as 2019, bikes were the main mode of transport for just 3% of the population—far behind Germany (15%), Sweden (21%), and the Netherlands (41%). Only 18% of the population cycled even once a week, one of the lowest figures in Europe. In 2010, just 3% of trips were made by bike.

But that’s been changing—at least a bit.

The government has made cycling a priority, committing €2 billion between 2023 and 2027 to double the national bike lane network and offer €500 million in purchase subsidies. The goal? Grow cycling’s share of transport to 12% by 2030.

The public has also warmed up to two wheels. Bike trips jumped 13% in 2022 and grew another 5% in 2023. In Paris, cycling’s share has nearly quadrupled, reaching 11%. But nationally, 2024 hasn’t seen much additional growth.

E-bikes have seen steady gains, with their market share rising from just 5% in 2016 to 30% in 2023. In 2023 alone, 671,585 electric bikes were sold, making up 61% of the market’s total turnover.

But despite the hype, sales are declining. E-bike sales dropped 9% in 2023—alongside a broader dip in traditional bike sales.

That’s worrying, especially as ridership stagnates. According to Le Monde, there are four big reasons:

Neold can’t fix oversaturation or infrastructure gaps, but it can do something about pricing. And that matters—between 2019 and 2023, demand for bike maintenance services doubled.

A 2019 study found that 30,000 tons of bikes and scooters are thrown away each year in France, while only 7,700 tons are recovered. That’s a 75% gap between what could be reused and what actually is.

Most of that weight comes from scooters, and some bikes are damaged beyond repair. Still, the gap is large—and the problem is structural. There just aren’t enough collection points. For example, Decathlon—with its 325 stores—collected only 40 tons of bikes. Assuming an average bike weighs 7 kg, that’s only around 5,700 bikes. Not a huge number.

If all else is equal, most people would rather buy new. But as battery prices continue to fall, and if better battery tech emerges, new e-bikes will get cheaper. There’ll probably always be a low-cost segment, but staying in that segment long-term is tricky. You rarely want to keep racing to the bottom.

Neold is focused on price-conscious buyers. But in tough economic times, some of those buyers won’t just trade down—they’ll drop out of the market entirely. Refurbished or not, an e-bike still costs money.

Bordeaux is a big city, but it’s not Paris. For a large, heavy physical product, being outside the country’s major economic hubs creates friction. Delivery takes time (up to 9 days), and delivery fees are high (€59). That’s not ideal when your customers are comparing multiple options, many of them local.

A few sentences ago, I argued that economic troubles could hurt if price-conscious consumers stop buying altogether. But we also have to consider that some of them won’t disappear—they’ll just trade down, shifting from buying a new e-bike to a refurbished one. And that’s where Neold stands to benefit. Especially since French government incentives apply even when buying a refurbished e-bike, which plays directly in Neold’s favor.

It’s hard to imagine supply becoming a bottleneck. With e-bike ownership rising, the volume of bikes entering the secondhand market is bound to grow. That helps Neold in two big ways:

Some buyers can afford a new e-bike—but still choose refurbished for sustainability reasons. It’s hard to know how big that group is, but it’s definitely growing. And marketing to these customers is easier than marketing purely on price, since they care about the mission.

We’ve gotten used to thinking that anything with an “e-” in front of it is growing. And that anything sustainability-related is booming—especially in Europe. But the reality is that even “good” markets hit walls when macroeconomic forces get in the way.