Infinite Machine launches Alto e-bike at $3,495 — a class 2 design built legal by intent

can't wait to launch our out of home campaign. John, I'm so excited. The We were in the We're deep in the creative process. We got to pitch Joe on doing an out of home campaign. Let's bring him in. We'll hear his pitch and then we'll pitch him some billboard ads because I think this thing needs to be advertised.

Break it down for us. What are you building launch day? Congratulations. Show us. Give us a little tour. What What are you building? Hey guys. Uh so you are here at our New York City facility. Fantastic. Uh, I'm calling from Infinite Machine and we make the best non-car vehicles on Earth. Okay.

And today we're launching our second product. It's called Alto. It is a class 2 ebike, but it looks nothing like an ebike. We rethought this thing from the ground up. So, it goes 25 miles per hour in the bike lane. It's got pedals that turn into foot rests. It fits two people. It's made out of aluminum and steel.

It's beautiful. It's useful. It's high-tech. It's connected to the internet. And we we just announced it today. What's the damage for one of those? How much it cost? $34. 95. You're giving them You're giving them away. Away. Double the price. We're giving them away. Uh yeah. Yeah. I mean, it looks amazing.

Congratulations on the launch. How much? So So So you basically reverse engineered this so that it didn't need a light. So you basically that's riding. get like hypothetically John and I and the team, we get a bunch of we get a fleet of these for the office and we want to rip over to our favorite lunch spot. Yep.

Uh we're we're riding, it looks like we're on little motorcycles. Cops, you know, put the sirens on, they pull us over, we pull the pedals out, and we're good to go. We're like, "Look, I'm sorry, officer. It's a bicycle. I don't know what you're talking about. " Yeah.

So basically, um, most ebikes take traditional bicycles and strap motors and batteries to them, but bicycles were never designed to be powered. And so you're taxing these parts that were never intended for for motor power. And instead, we said, okay, how can we think about this from the ground up?

We have to work within the legal envelope of what a bicycle is. So, if you look in all 50 states in America, the definition of a bicycle is something that has pedals that are operable, meaning it has a chain. It goes 20 miles hour as a class 2 ebike or 20 or or 25 miles per hour as a class 3 ebike.

Um, and it's narrower than 36 in. That's the basic constraint. And so, uh, you know, we took that brief and then we designed what we thought was the best version of that design. What is the barrier to going more aggressive? Building it wider, taking the pedals out, uh making it go 40 miles an hour.

Then are you regulated as a motorcycle and I need a motorcycle license? Is that is that how it works? Yeah. So if you're considered a an ebike, you don't need a license plate. Sure. And therefore, it's not a motor vehicle. It's not regulated by the state. It's not regulated by the federal government. Got it.

And so yeah, like it's just a much lower friction experience. You don't need to register the product. There's no insurance requirements. You don't need a license plate. Um, and so we wanted to make a super low friction product that you can get on. It's super easy to use. You don't have to deal with complex dealers.

You don't need to register the thing. Um, and yeah, you can get on and go and it's and it's accessibly priced. Yeah. What's the go to market? Is it important to demo these things in real stores? Get them into traditional bike shops?

I've been in some bike shops where they have ebikes as well, or is this all DTOC and e-commerce? So, can show you quickly. We have a space here in New York. We're getting set up for an event. So, this is a 13,000 square foot space in New York. Um, and it's going to be open to the public as a store.

Uh, people can come in and buy vehicles. Um, and so we are going direct to consumer to start, but and through retail includes your own retail. Yeah. Yes. To start our own facility here in New York. We're also interested and open to selling them in channel retail. Sure.

Um, I guess Best Buy, for example, like it would be make a lot of sense for it to be there. Exactly.

talk about the broader explosion of ebikes because I feel like adults nowadays the the number one way I feel like a boomer is when uh you know some like 12year-olds with ebikes are like you know ripping through traffics and and it feels like every time I I drive in the city now at some point or another and and and in some ways like you know that the boomer in me is like oh that those kids are being you know dangerous and then and then part of me at the same time is like it's actually makes cities much smaller now where can just go out and explore.

But I feel like it it feels like with with and and what you guys are doing broadly, we're kind of in the second era of the sort of um micromobility, right? Maybe the first era was was the kind of sharing economy, bird lime model. And it's clear that that form of transportation is awesome. Yeah.

But the communityowned approach or or this sort of sharing economy model um ha had some like really you know big big issues and it does feel like you know actually having people own the end product care for the end product and not be just you know trashing devices that are part of a network.

So the way we look at it is you know the world as we know is urbanizing. More and more people are living in cities and when you live in cities things get denser. So instead of living in giant homes you live in apartments. Instead of driving giant cars, you drive smaller vehicles.

And we believe that over time more and more vehicles in cities will not be cars. They will be smaller, smarter, and we hope more beautiful vehicles. Um, and our intention is to make the best of these things. Now, you're right. The first gen one micromobility companies were all sharing oriented.

We think ultimately it's not a great business model. There's a reason why those companies have not done super well, gone out of business, etc. Uh but also we think that there's an opportunity to learn from what made cars so successful. People love their cars. They love their vehicles.

They have an emotional connection to them. And ultimately the car was built as a symbol of freedom. And we think that there is an opportunity in urban environments to have a new symbol for freedom and a new tool for freedom. So this thing you get on it, you can go anywhere in your city in 15 minutes. No hassle.

The wind's at your back and it's just great. And compare that to the experience of sitting in the back of an Uber stuck in traffic. It's just night and day. Yeah.

Uh talk to me about what's going on in China because I feel like a lot of the phone companies have started going into cars and mobility and BYD makes all sorts of stuff and uh they have a very different model.

uh you know with with so many tech companies it's like are you going to wind up being a bullet point at WWDC or or Google's IO uh it feels like it's unimaginable that we would see Apple launch a competitor to this but what's the actual dynamic why are America's big tech companies not going into different areas if they have experience in hardware like why isn't Samsung getting in on the action why isn't Apple doing anything here uh can you comment on like the reaction to just like the a American companies are building technology today versus the China model.

I actually think it's a bit of the opposite. So yeah, you're right. If you go to China, you have these new hardware companies that are multicategory. Uh so yeah, you go to a Xiai and they started at making phones and laptops and now they're making cars. Yeah.

When you look at the US, the model, take a company like Apple, we love Apple, but they're very very conservative. they stick to their lane and the other American tech companies are actually not great at building hardware.

And so the way we see it is that there's an opportunity to build the the next great American hardware company.

We're starting with P1 and then alto and with vehicles at large, but we call the company infinite machine because we have big ambitions and we want to make incredible physical things in the world that move and are high-tech in new ways. And so we will be multicategory at some point.

Um, and we're really building the competency to build high-end, moving, beautiful hardware with an integrated software layer. Um, and do it in a way where we can move really quickly. I mean, this company, uh, I've been full-time for less than a year and a half. Uh, we have raised less than $10 million.

We've productionized two motor vehicles. Uh, so we're kind of in a new age of what I call the ultra lean hardware company.

Um, and we're going to keep pushing and we're going to take that competency and double down, especially as we enter an age of embodied intelligence where the AI, you know, kind of escapes the screen and we're going to be all over that.

We're positioned to take advantage of that stuff and we're building the competency to make things uh that take advantage of it.

Is there any I'm just gonna I'm just going to speculate, but I can imagine you guys making a horse buggy without the horse that's fully autonomous and you just get to ride around the city, you know, windows down. Yeah. You see the carriages in Central Park. Replace that as well. For sure. Or a horse or a robotic horse.

I'd love that. Yes. Yes. Yes. Henry Ford said if you ask if you asked customers what they'd want, they'd say faster horse. I want a faster horse. I'd love a faster horse. They're already self-driving. They come out of the box self-driving. Go home, horse, and it'll just take you there. Um, exactly.

Well, are areas has has your world been rocked by the tariff war? Are we in the clear now? Is there any fear around scaling up the battery supply chain? Uh, some companies have been fine on the battery side. The more defense application companies like Skyo run into a lot more issues there. What's that been like?

I know that everyone's focused on re-industrialization in America, but it's a long journey. Things have stabilized on the tariff front. Um, you know, I it's not great. Um, the world economy is highly entwined.

The supply chain for electric vehicles, even domestic manufactured electric vehicles is highly connected connected to China and beyond. And so we are all, you know, we are fully supportive of re-industrializing America. We want to be on the cutting edge of that. We support, you know, smart policy to do that.

Both, you know, carrot and stick. So tariffs are a stick. Um, you know, there's an opportunity for a new industrial policy that incentivizes domestic production. We haven't seen that yet. We've only see the seen a stick.

So, um, short story is, you know, it's stabilized, but honestly, I think we should be playing offense as America, and we're not yet. We're we're we're using kind of protectionist measures. Yeah. uh talk to me about making these uh vehicles safer using technology.

Um I I I remember like the hoverboard was a beneficiary of of uh you know better compute power and the ability to stabilize a device while you're riding on it uh very very cheaply. And so those kind of went viral for one year in like 2014 and then kind of disappeared.

But I imagine that there's things that you can do now that you maybe couldn't have done if you were trying to build this company 20 30 years ago. Um what what what what technology trends are you benefiting from? You know on the safety front these are lower speed vehicles so you're not moving at you know highway speeds.

And so the name of the game is awareness uh people not just for the rider but also for people around you. So that's emitting a sound, that's being highly visible, um, and that is alerting the rider when there are issues, and we do that stuff.

Um, you know, I think over time we'll start to use some of the ADAS software from automotive in these vehicles to do uh alerting and also to take over the vehicle when when that presents itself. Um, but to start, you know, there are millions and millions of people riding ebikes right now.

If we can make them 10% 15% safer, um that's a big win and that's where we're starting. Um talk to me about actually getting these in the hands of New Yorkers. Um well, let's talk about getting them in let's getting in the hands of us.

I want to I'm going to sign I'm going to I'm going to configure uh one for each person on the team and then and then we're just going to be emailing you every day. Hey, what what's what's the wait time? What's the weight time? Yeah, we got this.

We are offering what we call in internally the Burning Man shipping option, which is straight from the factory in August before Burning Man. If you opt for non Burning Man shipping, that costs 4,500 bucks. But if you opt for non- Burning Man shipping, uh that will arrive in late September, early October.

So, you know, they're shipping quickly. We are about to start mass production. Um and maybe for you guys, we'll expedite a few. That'd be amazing. That'd be amazing.

No, I mean I think that you will get the equivalent of millions of dollars in in marketing spend from just being at Burning Man because you can imagine, you know, if you can get a dense of the density of these on the Playa, the number of of Instagram stories, posts, etc. , it's going to be absolutely wild. Yeah. Yeah.

What about storage? Like what are you recommending to people that buy these and are living in an apartment? Is it something that you're designed to bring into your apartment or or do most buildings these days have like in like safe places to store ebikes or parking garages for these things? Yeah.

So, one of the cool things about Alto is it's designed to be left outside. You park the vehicle outside. It's fully weatherproof. It has an onboard security system. It's virtually impossible to steal. Hardware and software. When you park it, you don't have to take the whole bike to your apartment to charge.

You can take the battery out of the seat. Weighs 20 pounds. It's a hot swappable battery. Take it up to your apartment and then we have a dock that you drop it in and the dock plugs into a normal 110 volt outlet. So, super simple. So, you charge it overnight and then just take it out with you every morning.

Six hours to charge. We also have a supercharger. It takes three hours for a couple hundred bucks and yeah, very cool. Amazing. Anything else? Uh, please uh make a video of yourself taking one of these things on a jump. I just think it would be fun.

I I was going to ask when can we get these first thing the first thing the marketing strategy here you know I want to see I want to see the big jump you know monster truck rally let's push these to the limits really show people I think we should get one and put the full TBPN racing livery on it all the you know ramp on there all the different partners are we doing like Pikes Peak or are we doing like halfpipe like what's going to go most viral here all of it all of it okay I'm super I'm super you know this this is one of the I I love businesses and products where you take something that um seems like, you know, seems like it's competitive and then you you spend a hundred times, you know, you you you you be hundred times more intentional about creating it, designing it, distributing it, and um you create, you know, an entirely new also shipping before Christmas.

I love a physical gift, a big box under the Christmas tree. It's rarer Christmas trees. It's rarer and rarer these days because everything's gone digital. You used to give people books or CDs or DVDs and all of this is digital now. So, it's very hard to find something to give to someone.

Uh although this is obviously like an a very nice gift, it is something that can really make a statement and be an absolutely joyful Christmas morning if you unwrap this thing.

We've been recommending that people give each other uh you know sales tax software or potentially corporate cards, but I think I think this is going to be added to our Christmas list this year. I think this is a little bit more fun. Yeah.

And people can place if they want if folks want to make sure they get one for the holiday season, they can put a deposit down now. It's 100 bucks. Oh, cool. And it's fully refundable. So, okay. Well, save your configuration. Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for stopping by. Uh we'd love to give it a try.

We'll talk to you soon. Very excited for you guys. Bye. Uh if you're if you're operating a wander, you got to get one of these for your guests to be able to tool around on. That would be fantastic. Imagine this probably goes really hard in Malibu, ohigh, any any fun places, Sun Valley, any place where you're traveling.

Uh, and if you're looking to take a vacation, get on Wander. Find your happy place. Find your