New investment in much needed help for bicycle industry

Accelerace has invested in Bikekey – a potential game changer for the bicycle industry.

About 45.000 bicycle thefts are reported per year, and approximately 100.000 lost bikes are discarded each year in Denmark, due to having no way to track down their owners. That all too common theft of your bicycle is what had happened to the founders of Bikekey too many times. In fact, the CINO, Søren Koch, had bikes stolen six times in the the months leading up to the creation of Bikekey. Something had to be done.

The team took up the big challenge

Søren was fed up with bike theft and got in touch with now CEO, René Nørgaard. Together they started researching the scale of the problem in Denmark and quickly found that it was a very big issue for many people. Getting CMO, Anders Holm, on board the team tested the public’s interest in a system that could build upon the original “stelnummer”-system. They found that it was resounding and positive feedback, and therefore just needed a functional online solution – bring on the last person on the team, CTO Elias Christensen, who quickly dissembled the original solution and build a new and better one, that could push the team on to improve on the original “stelnummer”-system.

An improvement on a world-exclusive system.

In Denmark all bicycles are sold with a “stelnummer” which is a form of VIN (vehicle identification number). In fact, you cannot insure your bike if you can’t provide a stelnummer. But, the system – the only of its kind in the world – is flawed and don’t ensure that you get your bicycle back. Bikekey want to improve the chances that you do: they connect your bike’s stelnummer to your mitID. That way you are the registered owner of the bike, which means that if a bike has been stolen and abandoned somewhere, which is often the case, people can make you aware of its location.

A simple QR code can have several effects.

When you purchase a Bikekey subscription, you receive a sticker with a QR code. Your bike is then registered to the QR code, and if a person scans it, they can alert you to the location of your lost bike, so it can find its way back home.
Secondly it also gives you the chance to transfer ownership of the bike to someone else in a second hand bike sale. This gives you the assurance that the person you are buying it from is the actual owner of it.

The future brings Bikekey to all bicycles in Denmark

The immediate future for Bikekey, after their received investment, is to increase the number of bike stores that they collaborate with, as well as doing extensive product development of an upcoming IoT device, that will allow all bikes to have their own “pulse”. The aim is to have 120 bike stores offering a registration with repairs and purchases by the end of August. The hope is that when everyone knows Bikekey, if you see an abandoned bicycle, you scan the QR code to check if it is reported as missing, helping your fellow people get their bikes back.

Of course the ambitions are sky high for the founders, and there is a hope and a goal of getting Bikekey on every single bike sold in Denmark, as every Bikekey registration makes the system stronger.