Ukraine war: The Electric Bikes Facing Off Against Vladimir Putin’s War Machine

tech.hindustantimes.com:

When Daniel Tonkopi founded Delfast in Kyiv, Ukraine, in 2014, he had no intention of building and selling electric bikes. He also never anticipated that his company would be caught up in a war with Russia or that his bikes would become military vehicles. But at 43, Tonkopi, a native of Almaty, Kazakhstan, now finds himself living in Los Angeles, running an e-bike company and remotely managing dozens of employees living in a war zone. In May, Tonkopi made headlines when he shared images on Facebook of Ukrainian fighters using Delfast bikes to carry anti-tank weapons to the front, demonstrating yet another use case for electrified two-wheelers.

“Our bikes are still working despite damages,” he told me on a video call earlier this month.

Tonkopi moved to Ukraine from Kazakhstan in 2009. He’d been working for KazMunayGas, the state-owned oil and gas company, as a project manager building gas stations when he decided to head to Kyiv to try his hand as an entrepreneur. The vogue at the time was to build clones of successful U.S. tech companies, so Tonkopi made a version of Yelp for Eastern Europe. It was, by his own admission, a flop, as were several attempts that came after. “I became an expert in all the possible mistakes and how to not make a startup,” he says.

Delfast began as a one-hour delivery company. (The name is short for “we deliver fast.”) Tonkopi wanted to use e-bikes for the service because they were cheap, quick, zero-emissions and didn’t require couriers to pedal for hours on end. When he couldn’t find bikes with long enough battery life to work all day, he decided to try building his own. His Frankenstein creations turned heads. “We heard a lot of asks from random people. ‘Hey, are you selling these