Revel’s Frank Reig shares how he built his business and what he’s planning

It’s only been three years since they hit the streets and Revel’s blue electric mopeds have already become a common sight in New York, San Francisco and a growing number of U.S. cities. However, Revel founder and CEO Frank Reig has set his sights far beyond building a shared moped service.

In fact, since the beginning of 2021, Revel has launched an e-bike subscription service, an EV charging station venture and an all-electric rideshare service driven by a fleet of 50 Teslas.

So we caught up with Reig to talk about what he learned from building the company, how Revel’s business strategy has evolved, and what lies ahead.

Before we get to the good stuff, here’s some background:

The idea for Revel seems like it came from the classic entrepreneur’s guidebook: Reig had a need that no existing company addressed. He’d seen mopeds used as major, if not dominant, forms of transportation as he traveled around Europe, Asia and Latin America, and he wondered why this logical (and fun) mode of transport was largely absent from American cities in general, and in his hometown, New York City, in particular.

So in 2018, Reig quit his job, raised $1.1 million from 57 people, and launched a small pilot program involving 68 mopeds in Brooklyn. In May 2019, he raised $4 million in VC funding, which helped him expand to 1,000 electric mopeds across Brooklyn and Queens. Revel secured another $33.8 million in September 2019, in a round that included funding from Ibex Investments, Toyota Ventures, Maniv Capital, Shell and Hyundai, according to Reig. This has allowed the founder to execute a grander plan to build an electric mobility company.

The company now operates more than 3,000 e-mopeds in New York City, and has another 3,000 across Washington, D.C., Miami, Oakland, Berkeley and San Francisco.

The following interview, which has been edited for brevity and clarity, is part of an ongoing series that focuses on founders in the transportation sector. The twist? We will check back in with these founders a year after their interview is published.  

TechCrunch: You’ve added three new business lines and told us previously that you have more on the way. That’s a lot.

Frank Reig: Yes, we have had a busy start to 2021! We began the year announcing our fast-charging stations across the city that will help fill the large gap in infrastructure to support the wide-scale adoption of EVs. We launched our e-bike subscription program to offer New Yorkers another way to navigate their city, and with our newly announced electric ride-sharing program, we are solving the “chicken and egg” problem of EV charging and demand. We are focused on building out these business lines and our moped business as well and very much looking forward to what is to come.

When shared micromobility companies expand, they often just offer different vehicles. You seem to be going, “Ok, we’ll offer a different vehicle — an e-bike, but it’s a subscription. And we’re also doing electric vehicle chargers, and let’s add an EV rideshare to the mix.” It’s pretty broad.

If we’re talking about electrifying mobility in major cities, it starts with infrastructure. And we’re the company rolling up our sleeves and doing it now by building that infrastructure and operating fleets. Because in a city like New York, the infrastructure does not exist for electric mobility.

There are a few Tesla superchargers around the city, usually behind parking paywalls, so you have to pay the garage to even use it. And, of course, you need a Tesla for that infrastructure to even be relevant. And when you think about other public fast-charging access points in the city, they are few and far between. We’re building 30 in one site and many more beyond that in 2021.

New York is a complicated city to operate in, so it’s easier for us to add e-bikes as a service because I already have the infrastructure and on-the-ground operations that we built with the mopeds. I have multiple warehouses throughout this city. I have full-time staff that I’ve employed, from field technicians to mechanics, and a fleet of over 3,000 vehicles on the streets in New York. So it’s a natural extension of the platform to be able to add another product to it, to reach a new type of user, or to supplement the use case of our current moped users. All we needed to do was finance some e-bikes, and then you have another line of business.

Are you worried you might risk losing focus on the moped business?

I wouldn’t say anyone is losing focus. There’s a ton of focus on the moped business. We’re looking to expand that business in 2021 as we come out of COVID and all of our markets recover and it starts to make sense to expand into new markets. We’re spending a lot of time getting ready for summer demand, which we know is going to be very high. I like to say that people have mobility debt. People need to go see friends and family, to go out to restaurants. There’s gonna be a lot of movement as we come out of COVID as vaccinations increase and as cities truly come out of lockdown. So I couldn’t be more excited about where the moped business is going this summer.

We’ve been operating mopeds for three years now across all different city types and architectures, and we’ve gotten quite good at it. And now 2021 is about expanding that vision we’ve had from day one, but now we actually have the capacity to do it.

This is a really exciting time in electric mobility. The last hundred years have been human-driven and gas-powered. That’s been the world. And I would make the argument literally starting in 2021, this is the actual inflection point where we are now transitioning to electric and autonomous. And whoever wins the electric race will win the autonomous race. Whoever wins the electric infrastructure race, who understands how to operate fleets at scale and is doing it now instead of just transitioning to electric, is setting themselves up for that autonomous future, whether that’s seven years or 17 years from now. And Revel is putting ourselves right in the middle of all that convergence of the energy transition and major metro areas.

So when you said there’s more to come, is that “more” automation-related?

For the launch of rideshare, we are using Model Ys that are human-driven cars with employee drivers. In the long term, however, I know that the company that wins the transition to electric is going to be in a strong position to win the transition to autonomous. In that regard, we’re already leading the way.

As you’ve gone through different funding rounds and brought new investors on board, which parts of your business strategy have investors been excited about?

I think it runs the gamut. Our current investors are very much in favor of expanding our vision. In some of our markets, we have hundreds of thousands of people that use Revel and understand our product and love the moped side of things. How do we go from several hundred thousand in a city like New York to several million users? And how do we drive more revenue and more usage from each of those users? We like to think of it as going deeper in some of our markets and really extending the platform, building the infrastructure for that platform and having users continue to use additional products and services from that platform. The strategy is: Instead of trying to be everywhere, pick some of these major markets and go really deep.

What has surprised you along the way? What have you learned in the course of this journey?

One of the things that I’ve learned is that you have to continue to learn, because there’s so much I don’t know. As the CEO, it’s a constant funnel of new information, issues that we need to deal with and solve, and you don’t have all the perfect data in order to make that decision, but you have to make the best decision possible. It’s a constant learning process.

How have your past business decisions informed your current strategy or outlook?

We’re constantly learning from our mistakes. Any good company has to do that. And like every startup, we’ve made plenty of mistakes along the way. I think we have gotten really smart in terms of doing the analysis we need to do to feel really comfortable that, as we expand our platform or as we think about additional markets to enter, profitability is very much on the horizon. Make sure you’re profitable and that you’re doing a ton of work on the back end before you start spending capital to expand the business and go to new cities.

I think my past decisions also reinforce some of the things that we’ve done right. For instance, this past summer we had a change in rider behavior, specifically in New York, coming out of the first COVID lockdown. Folks were just not wearing helmets — something we had never seen in two years of operating beforehand. We realized as a company that the best thing we could do right now is to recognize the issue, take accountability and go solve it. We worked with the New York City Department of Transportation, the Mayor’s Office, the entire political hierarchy in New York, and we temporarily suspended our own service this past summer for four weeks. We worked together to solve the issue and make safety enhancements ourselves. It was the best decision this company made in 2020, because now we have a better relationship at the regulatory and political level not just in New York City, but in every market that we’re in.

Where do you expect to be a year from now?

I think that Revel is strategically thinking about the future, which is this transition of all mobility to electric — and it’s happening now. We have a strategy of concentrating on big urban markets, of rolling up our sleeves and building the infrastructure now, not in 2025 or 2030. We have a strategy of operating fleets and extending our platform so you can use Revel for every trip in the future, going A to B within a major city.

No one else is going after the future the way we are. We have a really differentiated way that we are attacking this space. So when I think about a year from now, I’d like this company to be in a place where we have changed the paradigm and actually have the most successful way to do it. I would like that to be the conversation among everyone, from investors to transportation reporters.