It’s Tuesday, and today we’re covering OKXE, a Vietnamese platform for buying and selling motorbikes. Founded by Wooseok Kim, the company recently completed a $14.5 million Series A round from Kwangju Bank, JB Financial Group, and The Invention Lab.

Southeast Asia is a motorbike-heavy region, but Vietnam still manages to stand out with its claim of having the highest motorbike ownership rate in the world.

Of all households that own any type of vehicle, 89.4% own a motorbike. There are about 77 million motorbikes roamingVietnamese streets—spread across 28.1 million households, that works out to an average of 2.7 motorbikes per household. Since 1996, the number of motorbikes has grown at a 10.7% CAGR, and studies show that in Hanoi alone, anywhere from 60% to 80% of trips are made on two wheels.

In 2024, 2.65 million new motorbikes were sold in Vietnam. But what we’re focusing on today is the used side of the market.

The numbers here are murkier. Some sources claim over 8 million used motorbikes change hands every year. My own rough estimate puts it in the 5-9 million range1 (yes, a big range, but gives us a general sense of the market), but regardless — it’s a huge market.

But that market has some problems.

The core issue is that the market is very informal:

And all that is happening in a low‑trust society. So you have a large, informal, fragmented market where participants are wary of dealing with each other.

That’s a classic opening for an aggregator to step in and solve the trust problem. However, the business we’re looking at today went beyond that.

In a very brief period of time, OKXE as a company went through several transformations, and lived through three distinct chapters.

OKXE was founded by Wooseok Kim, a motorcycle enthusiast who emigrated from South Korea and started a business in Vietnam. From his point of view, the Vietnamese market resembled what the Korean market went through 5–10 years earlier. He himself experienced the same problems as local buyers when trying to purchase a motorbike: no standardized pricing, lack of warranties, and other issues.

When he launched OKXE in 2019 it functioned as a typical aggregator, selling used motorbikes through the platform.

From the start the company worked with both individuals who wanted to sell their motorcycles, as well as businesses: in the first year the company acquired 500 local partners selling motorbikes. There wasn’t a specific mechanism to validate sellers, but it did provide more transparency to the market. First and foremost, consumers had choice, which made pricing more transparent and comparing different models easier. Second, since OKXE was a specialized platform, unlike the aforementioned Facebook groups, it was incentivized to police itself and rid the platform of unethical sellers.

The problem that OKXE solved fairly early was financing. By 2020 it partnered with Shinhan Finance, a major Korean financial institution, offering prospective customers unsecured loans for 12–48 months with an 18–38% interest rate.

Another feature rolled out at the time were electronic contracts, which standardized agreements between buyers and sellers and gave each transaction legal weight. This offered both parties more security and recourse in case of disputes.

However, an online-only model had its issues, with the main one being…well, that it was online-only.

Both offline shops and online aggregators have flaws. Shops buy motorbikes fast, but pay low prices because of their high operating costs. Online platforms offer choice and hence lower prices, but on the buyer side it’s harder to perform quality checks since sellers are scattered.

For that reason OKXE evolved from being a purely online player into an online-to-offline (O2O) model. The company opened its first OKXE Motorbike Service Station in Ho Chi Minh City in May 2022. These stations offer various services, including a 60-point vehicle quality inspection, appraisal, price consultation, consignment, sales negotiation, and an optional 1-year warranty.

The value is apparent for both sellers and buyers:

By this point OKXE had largely solved the initial problem it set out to tackle. The company provided selection from thousands of sellers, formalized transactions, and enabled financing. It also allowed sellers to improve bikes and their presentation through servicing, while assuring buyers that they were purchasing a quality product.

The second chapter lasted for about a year, but the next shift was significant enough that it merits a delineation. That shift is two-sided.

First, after launching the O2O model and seeing increased customer demand, in 2023 OKXE decided to start selling new motorbikes. While it made the addressable market larger, and while it is operationally challenging to shift from used to new, many aggregators offer both.

From a product evolution standpoint, the second shift is more interesting.

You’ve heard and I’ve also written about the shift to electric motorbikes (e.g., Oben Electric) which Vietnam, with its massive market, is a part of. One aspect of shifting to electric is offering E2W on the platform — that part is obvious. But OKXE went beyond that.

The company opened a motorbike store selling VinFast, the country’s leading EV seller. The store operates a 3S model — selling, service, and spare parts. It also started a trade-in program where buyers can exchange their old gasoline vehicle for an electric one. They even have a dedicated insurance product for electric motorbikes.

OKXE believes that the future is electric and actively shaping it.

To solve for trust and add structure to the chaotic market, OKXE had to create supporting mechanisms from different sides. If we generalize, each consumer goes through four steps in their motorbike journey: selecting the product, testing it, purchasing it, and using it. OKXE has embedded itself into each of those steps, building walls of trust at each one:

OKXE created new rules of engagement in the marketplace. It’s a rare case where making the purchase process more cumbersome is actually a good thing, because it builds trust between all parties involved.

The company makes money in several ways. The main one is a transaction fee, which is 2.5% on every motorbike sold. If a seller wants to service the bike before the sale, that adds a small extra fee.

If the buyer purchases an E2W, they can buy one with or without the battery. If they go without, OKXE sells battery packages priced according to the monthly distance covered.

Finally, there’s the loan component. Buyers can choose to purchase on credit, though the details of how OKXE splits revenue with its financing partners are not public.

For me the biggest concern is expansion speed coupled with margins. The company went from being a pure-play aggregator with high fixed costs but low variable costs, into a business that now has both. To make this work, OKXE has to unlock real value in online-offline integration and in building out service centers. That means moving people seamlessly from online to offline and back again has to actually happen.

But do price-sensitive buyers really want all the services, the presentation, the vertical integration? Or do they just want a motorbike at the lowest possible price, with no insurance, and the expectation that if something breaks, they’ll either fix it themselves or ask a friend?

I guess we’ll see.

The company is already deeply embedded in Vietnam’s motorbike ecosystem and has multiple revenue streams. Motorbikes aren’t going anywhere, and Vietnam will remain a massive market. There are also clear opportunities for further service expansion, which OKXE itself mentions with things like gas stations and car washes. As integration deepens, the company collects more and more data on consumer behaviour — data that helps improve existing services and expand into new ones.

At some point, as it builds a true brand in the motorbike space, OKXE can unlock higher margins: both because of scale and because as a trusted brand it can charge more. Integration, a seller network built from the ground up, servicing, parts distribution — all these pieces become extremely defensible when scaled together.

There are also plans to expand beyond Vietnam, but even focusing on just one country looks like it could deliver a lot of growth.

OKXE, like many others, is already talking about expansion. Yet the company operates in a massive market and hasn’t captured 100%, 50%, or even 30% of it. Which makes me wonder: when’s the right time to expand?

Most of the companies I write about are early-stage, and many of them have ambitious expansion plans, even though they haven’t really exhausted the opportunities at home.

Answering that question — when the timing is truly right — is something I’ll need to come back to in the future.

1: To calculate the number of used motorbikes sold every year, I looked at data from other countries. In Italy, Brazil, India, and Thailand there are 7.5, 28.3, 263.4, and 22.9 million motorbikes. In the last year available 626,022, 3,489,625, ~28 million, and 1.3 million used motorbikes were sold respectively. That’s an implied rate of 8.3%, 12.3%, 10.6%, and 5.7% respectively.