Upway Co-founder and COO Stéphane Ficaja is calling in by video from the company's warehouse in Gennevilliers, northwest of Paris. He pauses for a moment to swing around his laptop camera slightly to show the rows of e-bikes waiting for refurbishment.
"We have all the bikes here," Ficaja said, with a hint of pride.
In these days of virtual call backdrops, this one is far more fitting for a company that has quietly built the largest online bike shop in Europe, albeit one that doesn't sell a single new product. Instead, it has pioneered the market for refurbished e-bikes, selling more than 100,000 over the past five years and expanding to nine countries.
With sales doubling since last year and projected to double again next year, the company announced on Thursday that it had raised a $60 million Series C funding round led by A.P. Moller Holding with participation from Galvanize, Ora Global, and continued support from existing investors, including Sequoia Capital. That brings Upway's total funding to more than $125 million since its founding in 2021.
I interviewed Ficaja earlier year this on stage at VivaTech 2025 about his background, including his time working at Uber, for a session called "Beyond Two Wheels: How Upway is Rethinking Light Mobility." We caught up on Thursday after the funding announcement to discuss the latest news, and it's clear that the company's ambition and momentum have only grown since we last spoke.
Ficaja said Upway had not intended to raise more money this year. But given the acceleration in the business, they decided to seize their chance.
"The market for people buying an e-bike every year is pretty huge. So the opportunity is very big," he said. "And if anything, what I learned working at Uber is that when the opportunity is big, you don't want to be constrained."
From Uber Exec to E-Bike Entrepreneur
Ficaja's journey to founding Upway began with an academic background in engineering, quantum physics, and fundamental mathematics. "Nothing that helps you fix any bike, unfortunately," he said.
Following a stint in finance, Ficaja spent seven years at Uber, where he met his co-founder Toussaint Wattinne.
"I was super grateful to be able to build a consumer business from scratch," Ficaja recalled of his time at Uber. "I worked across multiple geographies, in Europe, across EMEA, in the US and Canada, on different businesses. And so that was a bit of a genesis of being excited by building things and building consumer products."
As Uber matured into a post-IPO company entering the S&P 500, Ficaja and Wattinne felt the pull to return to early-stage building.
The question was: what to build?
"We love shaping consumer habits. We love to actually see that electric mobility is a long-term trend," Ficaja said. "It's something that really boomed during COVID, has been slightly more stable in the past year, but we strongly believe it's something that will keep growing in people's minds and consumer habits every day."
The duo identified a gap in the market that seemed obvious in retrospect. While refurbished markets had emerged for cars (think Carvana in the US or Auto1 in Germany) and electronics (notably France's own Back Market), no one had cracked the code for e-bikes at scale.
The Anti-Hardware Hardware Company
Upway's emergence comes at an interesting moment for French startups. Five to seven years ago, France made a big bet on hardware companies as a distinctive competitive advantage. That bet largely didn't pan out because hardware proved difficult, expensive, and risky for venture capital.
Upway sidesteps many of these challenges with a crucial insight: they're not a manufacturer.
"A lot of companies went out there to start and create e-bikes, and then what they discovered is that your first e-bike, unless you ride 1 million kilometers with 10,000 clients who go through a lot of different situations, a lot of usage, decent climbs like sand, rain, snow, whatever, you are going to take a lot of time to build a product that is reliable," Ficaja said.
Instead, Upway takes bikes that already exist and restores them to like-new condition. It accepts about 90-95% of e-bikes on the market. This approach dramatically reduces the spare parts inventory needed compared to manufacturing and eliminates the painful iteration cycles of hardware development.
The company now operates six refurbishment centers (or "UpCenters" in company parlance) across New York, Los Angeles, Berlin, Düsseldorf, Paris, and Antwerp. Each bike undergoes a rigorous 50-point inspection before being listed for sale with a one-year warranty.
Cracking the Trust Equation
Perhaps Upway's biggest challenge wasn't operational. It was psychological. How do you convince consumers to spend thousands of euros on a refurbished e-bike when the category barely existed?
"When you look at the car industry, which is far more developed, a lot of people buy secondhand or refurbished, because it's a far better deal than buying new," Ficaja said. "So our mindset was to start with: Our market is not the second-hand market or the refurbished market. It's a full market of everyone who is having a credit card who wants to buy an e-bike."
The value proposition looks like this: customers save an average of 45% with a refurbished bike compared to retail prices, often over €1,000 per bike, but the quality is often close to new. With more than 200 brands and 2,500 models available, Upway offers a selection that would be impossible for a traditional retailer.
Still, trust remained the sticking point. Ficaja discovered that perception of refurbished goods varies dramatically by geography: "Refurbished in French has a positive note, while refurbished in the U.S. has a negative note, and it's a good signal of how perception can change between countries...The only way you can solve it is to have standards that are so high that people will trust you, will be impressed, they will have a magical experience, and then tell their friends about it."
The Surprising German Success Story
If there's one market that exemplifies Upway's trajectory, it's Germany, which is now its largest market despite initial apprehension about a French company expanding there.
"Every time I talk to some American investor, they tell me that in the U.S., e-bikes will never work. We are a car country," Ficaja said. "I'm like, well, in Germany, they are a car country, but they are also an e-bike country."
Germany's e-bike boom didn't happen by accident. Government support for manufacturing, subsidies through employer leasing programs, and serious infrastructure investment created the perfect conditions. Germany now hosts Europe's biggest e-bike manufacturers and brands, many of which export globally.
For Upway, Germany became almost a necessity. Understanding that German consumers wanted "high-quality products with the lowest price and the best quality and the best trust" unlocked rapid growth, Ficaja said.
Raising in an AI-Obsessed Market
The timing of Upway's Series C is particularly interesting given the current venture capital climate. As Ficaja noted, "A lot of them were actually saying, 'Hey, I just do AI, so I'm not going to engage.'"
Yet for those investors who did engage, Upway's fundamentals stood out. With projected revenues of $150 million this year and operations already profitable in Belgium and the Netherlands (and projected to be profitable next year in France), the company offers something increasingly rare: a physical goods business with proven unit economics and a path to profitability.
"The metrics have a proven track record. They've been operating for four years," Ficaja explained. "So basically, the top of the funnel is probably not as exciting as we would have liked it to be, meaning that not everyone decided they would like to invest in a consumer business. But as soon as they started to get into their story, they were very excited."
The involvement of A.P. Moller Holding, the investment arm of the shipping and logistics giant, signaled confidence in Upway's operational excellence and global ambitions, he added.
The Road to One Million Bikes
With new capital in hand, Upway's goal is to give new life to one million e-bikes by 2030. The funding will primarily support three areas:
- Continued expansion in Germany, where, despite being the largest market, Ficaja sees massive untapped potential.
- Cracking the US market, where regulation is finally starting to shift in favor of e-bikes, particularly in states like California and New York.
- Technology and product development to enhance the customer experience and operational efficiency.
Geographic expansion remains selective. Having learned from Uber's experience with "waking up in the morning with an issue in a very small country that is a legal, urgent issue that takes one day of your brain to even understand," Upway focuses on major Western markets, Ficaja said.
"We are probably going to stay in Western Europe, the U.S, and Canada," Ficaja said. "So, of course, you can go to Italy, of course, Portugal, to Denmark. We need to go to the U.K. at one point."
Beyond Business Model Innovation
Upway has succeeded by addressing multiple challenges simultaneously.
Each refurbished e-bike can reduce CO₂ emissions by up to 90% per kilometer compared to cars. The company prevents thousands of bikes from ending up in landfills annually.
"We founded Upway with a simple idea: light mobility can only be sustainable if it's circular," Ficaja said.
By creating industrial jobs across Europe and North America, they're contributing to the re-industrialization that many politicians champion. This has earned a lot of public and political goodwill.
"There is really a difference between the Uber times, where the outside world was having a negative perception of the company and our business [Upway], where we only got great feedback," Ficaja said. "We are into electric mobility. We are into refurbishments. And ultimately, we are into building factories in Europe, in countries where they are afraid of factories leaving countries."
As Upway scales toward its million-bike goal, Ficaja sees two high-level challenges.
"What is the pace at which I can scale this operation without breaking it?" Ficaja said. "Because it's very easy to break things. I think that's probably our constraint. How can we continue to be very aggressive, to 2x growth year-on-year as long as possible without breaking our operations? Every year it becomes more challenging."
The second relates to the demand side. While a great product will attract customers, the risk is growing faster than the market can absorb the products produced.
"When you are number one and there is not even a distant number two, it's kind of like running an endurance race and setting the pace against yourself," he said. "What is the growth rate we are aiming for, and what is the efficiency we are aiming for? Maybe we could grow faster, but it might be inefficient."
As dilemmas go, however, these are good ones to have, especially with a new check in the bank.
"We're chasing this very ambitious mission to refurbish 1 million bikes by 2030," he said. "And now we're in a great position to make that happen."
