We're joining TVS Motor to continue revolutionising the ASEAN 2W industry!
This will be my final post as CEO of ION Mobility.
I’d like to begin this final post by acknowledging the elephant in the room, with the title of this post saying it all. With this deal, our team and I will join TVS Motor effective 1 April 2025. TVS will also take over our assets and intellectual property and integrate them into its business. As our ION chapter comes to an end, and as my TVS chapter begins, I will serve as Senior Vice President with two hats on; one as Head of ASEAN, and the other as the Head of the ION M1-S platform within the group. My team and I are excited to bring our unique blend of design, engineering and entrepreneurship to the world’s 4th largest 2W behemoth, and have a chance to play a major role in TVS Motor’s growth and electrification of motorcycles and scooters in the months and years ahead.
We couldn’t have found someone better to work with in the long run than TVS, so as to fully realise our vision and roadmap for the M1-S and our other planned models. With TVS as the world’s 4th largest two-wheeler industry titan, the ION M1-S will be relaunched in Indonesia (and beyond) with way-better quality and manufacturing considerations, while our team integrates with the rest of the company to bring our unique blend of superpowers and shake up the ASEAN 2W industry (and beyond) in the months and years ahead.
When I founded this company back in Oct 2019, selling out wasn’t something I had envisioned as our eventual outcome. I had longer-term (and broader) plans for ION to start in 2W mobility, but to then cross-over into energy storage and charging infrastructure. In my mind, the multi-industry approach was necessary in order to thoroughly solve the challenges I saw in enabling delightful and performant electric scooter or motorcycle automotive-grade mobility across Indonesia, and eventually throughout the other key markets of Southeast Asia. We tried our best to secure additional financing to continue operating as an independent team and brand, but ultimately failed to find other investor-partners who truly understood our team and our play. This has been my longest entrepreneurial path in my life; my first real startup in spite of my seeming experiences in the venture and startup ecosystem of Southeast Asia. I thank my team and my investors for supporting me on our moonshot, and take full accountability for not having done better. I thank our TVS Motor board members, Sharad Mishra and Anuraag Agarwal, for their belief and support in bringing us aboard the TVS train.
As one investor of ours shared during our recent catch-up, “I backed you for the moonshot, and you turned a 1-in-100 outcome into a 1-in-10. That’s still something to cheer about! Your outcome (with ION) is way better than the ongoing eFishery fraud.” I do not regret ever having embarked on this journey. The extent of self-learning, personal growth and cross-discipline problem solving I engaged in, is something that I will remember for the rest of my life.
I started out without a Singaporean motorcycle driver’s license, and will be ending my stint as Founder and CEO of ION Mobility still without one 😅. I faced more naysayers and disbelievers than I cared to remember, but will always remember every team member that contributed to our part in E2w history in this region. I could never have embarked upon or finished this chapter of my life without having my wonderful wife and kids always being by my side.
Humour me on my final report card as CEO, as I restate our journey’s highlights and achievements over the past 65 months of existence (5 years, 4+ months):
I started the company and invited Joel to join as co-founder and COO. We incorporated the company on 1 Oct 2019 with a paid-up capital of S$150k. I invested S$67.5k personally and S$15k via my personal holding company Silicon Straits, alongside Joel’s S$67.5k. We worked for free until the following year, after raising some initial funding.
We tried getting off to a quick start by relying on a large Chinese moped OEM as our ODM partner; a strategy proposed by Joel, with the ODM partner coming from his past contacts. It didn’t work out with late or non-results during the 6-month partnership. We lost all our initial starting capital on this failed approach by Mar 2020. I tried axing the deal in Dec 2019 and it took Joel until Mar 2020 to terminate the agreement. I started building our core team amidst a full-blown pandemic with zero travel. Our differences grew as I saw how different we were as individuals, professionals and managers. In spite of well-intentioned investor-hosted arbitration and subsequently legal arbitration, we parted ways. I invested more (S$550k) into the company at that point, using a part of it to buy Joel out entirely. Ironically, Joel made money from his initial investment into ION while our investors certainly won’t be 🥲.
In spite of our founder break-up, I don’t regret asking Joel to join me one bit. I wouldn’t have had the courage to go at it alone from the get go, and on hindsight needed that founder break-up process to reinforce my personal conviction. I would never have met Ho Sen and others if it wasn’t for Joel. Shit happens in Life, you just gotta keep dealing with it along the way and remain laser-focused.
Later on in Oct 2020, we closed US$3.2m in the part-one Seed financing that took me 9 months to raise amidst the pandemic via a convertible notes structure. I crafted punitive terms on my dilution for a qualifying part-two priced preference share raise as a show of my conviction and confidence, which I subsequently fulfilled in 2021 with a further US$3.3m in our part-two Seed raise. Alongside interest from part-one notes, a total of US$6.8 million was converted into preference shares. It wasn’t fun to raise money twice in 2 years while dealing with a founder break-up in-between, but hey, it was the pandemic; all sorts of norms went out of the window during that extraordinary period.
Over the years, we have grown to over 130-strong in 7 locations (Singapore, Jakarta, Karawang, Bandung, Ho Chi Minh City, Shenzhen and Xi’an) across 4 countries, having raised only US$25.5m since 2020 over 2 rounds. We are fully inhoused in terms of our own activities in design, engineering, firmware and software, spanning the fields of industrial and product design, engineering (mechanical, electrical, embedded electronics, embedded firmware, power electronics, software), system-level or vehicle-level verification and testing, supply chain and manufacturing. We do outsource some of the work in terms of testing and homologation, which is par on course.
We have improved the ION M1-S with user feedback from Nov 2022 through Aug 2023, with specific emphasis on the tail-end of the bike, and ensuring the product meets our requirements on banking angle, ground clearance, seat height and overall riding comfort and performance.
As an example of the blood, sweat and tears that collectively went into the ION M1-S:
We are directly responsible for all 763 drawings that go towards the ION M1-S at the bike-level and factory-level. This doesn’t take into account our in-house PCB designs, embedded firmware and full-stack software work to support the ION M1-S as a product.
Of 763 drawings, 66 (8.65%) are process drawings at the factory-level, with the remaining 697 drawings at the bike-level.
Of the 697 drawings at the bike-level, 276 (39.6%) are for Modified-Off-The-Shelf (MOTS) or Completely-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) parts that can be common or standard on the sourcing vis a vis the bike platform. The remaining 421 drawings (60.4%) are R&D parts we created from scratch for the M1-S. We first make them in 3D CAD, before drawing them up in 2D with material, quality and process requirements where appropriate.
We have completed 2 homologations for 2 variants of the ION M1-S, achieving 65-66% local content as a PMA entity in Indonesia for both homologations.
We have launched a 4-floor flagship showroom lifestyle concept in South Jakarta (Radio Dalam) that demonstrates our approach towards brand- and community-building; radically transforming the typical distributor-dealership approach in automotive industries and going direct-to-customer (D2c) in the marketing and selling of the ION M1-S.
We have completed a 42.5m x 100m bike and battery pack manufacturing plant in Karawang, with readiness to support initial volume estimates.
Entrepreneurs are natural truth seekers, wayfinders and problem definer-solvers solely focused on driving execution to beat the odds. Having started ION in Singapore amidst the pandemic, and choosing to focus on full-stack electric automotive-grade scooters in a region not known to have mature talent and suppliers for E2w, I have always known the complexity and difficulty of this endeavour. My leadership team and I have had to build and run teams across geographical, cultural and lingual diversities, against all odds. I’m wistful of the outcome, but also equally gratified by TVS Motor’s recognition of what we have built as a product and as a team. Going forward, I’m excited to be leading a bigger team with even more know-how and resources on-tap, so that our plans can be properly funded, finally empowering us to properly take on this two-wheeler industry at-scale, and for the long-term, in ASEAN and beyond.
Signing off, one last time, as your humble CEO at ION Mobility. See you on the other side from 1 April 2025!
So will it be called ION M1S or TVS M1S in the future
Also the silver lining whichever name it takes it could theoretically launch anywhere with a TVS dealer (like Bali) instead of having to go all the way to Jakarta just for a test drive