E-bikes tend to be hooked up to power overnight or throughout the day while at work, but for the founders of startup e-bike brand Morelle, this trickle charging is too slow. The Californian company has developed a $3,000 urban e-bike that can go from flat to almost full in minutes, rather than hours. The battery technology they’re using isn’t bought in; it’s proprietary and, later this year, is set to power humanoid robots.
Morelle’s lithium-ion battery tech uses silicon instead of graphite. Compared to graphite, silicon stores up to ten times more energy, so using silicon powder instead of graphite for anodes—the part that releases electrons during discharge—can significantly improve a battery’s energy density.
Morelle isn’t the only company using such silicon anodes. The black powder already powers the five-day battery life of the latest Whoop activity-tracking wearable, and it’s the same kind of nanoscale powder that American companies, such as Sila, say could enable ten-minute recharges for electric cars.
And it’s not just a case of swapping one anode powder for another; there’s a significant amount of chemical complexity built into the process. Morelle’s technology was developed by battery scientist Kevin Hays, whose PhD was in silicon anodes, and who cofounded the company with tech development specialist Michael Sinkula.
They previously worked together at Ionblox, a battery company specializing in large-format pouch cells using pre-lithiated silicon-dominant anodes for electric vertical take-off and landing (eVTOL) air taxis, a fiercely competitive sector yet to scale.
The pair left to found Morelle, teaming up with legendary bicycle designer and entrepreneur Gary Fisher.
Fisher, a notable San Francisco bicycle racer in the late 1960s, was one of the Marin County pioneers who, racing down a steep fire road near the forest town of Fairfax on modified 1930s Schwinn paperboy bikes known as “clunkers,” codeveloped the product and sport of mountain biking in the mid- to late-1970s with other legends such as Joe Breeze. Spotting a commercial opportunity to promote and sell clunkers more widely, Fisher coined the term “mountain bike” in 1979 and, in the same year, cofounded MountainBikes, the first company to specialize in the manufacture of this type of “balloon tire” off-road bicycle. Just 160 were sold in the first year.
Fisher went on to found Gary Fisher Mountain Bikes, a brand later acquired by Trek Corporation. Fisher worked as a brand ambassador for Trek until 2022.
Hays and Sinkula started working with Fisher in 2023, appointing him as Morelle’s chief bike designer.
“We didn’t know if [Fisher] would be interested in e-bikes at all,” said Hays, “but he was super excited about what we’re doing, and was very forward thinking, and wanted to get involved with what we were proposing.”
Shrink it
And what they were proposing was an e-bike that was lighter than other e-bikes and didn’t look like one, either.
“We wanted to shrink the battery to get to a point where you’re not carrying around all this excess battery,” said Hays. “We wanted the bike to feel more like a bike, and less like an e-bike. When you’re worried about range and charging times, you end up putting large batteries on the bike, but that makes the bike heavy and cumbersome.”
Morelle bikes will be lighter and slimmer than traditional e-bikes, said Hays. And they’ll charge much faster. E-bike batteries typically charge at a rate of 100-300W, while Morelle can charge through standard wall outlets at a rate of 1000-1200W. Using a proprietary wall charger will boost this recharge to 1500W, a rate that could prove attractive for fleet operators.
“We wanted to move away from the idea that you have to leave your e-bike battery charging for four to eight hours, perhaps even unattended,” said Hays. “With our bike, you’ll charge for 10 or 15 minutes, so you’re not sitting there worrying about leaving a battery charging for a long time.”
Hays and Sinkula formed their own brand after being rejected by e-bike battery companies such as Bosch.
“We were hoping that the bike industry would be more forward thinking on [new technologies],” said Sinkula, who has a biomedical engineering backgound. “But they were not forward-thinking at all. That pushed us to pursue this.”
Self-funded so far, Sinkula said Morelle will be seeking venture capital. In addition to its own e-bikes, Morelle is also supplying batteries to Under Control Robotics (UCR), a US supplier of humanoid robots for deployment in challenging work environments such as construction, energy and mining.
“Performance-wise, the kind of battery pack we’re putting in the e-bike is almost identical to what’s required for untethered robotics,” said Sinkula. “[Makers of humanoid robots] are also somewhat restricted to volume and weight constraints, so energy density is also an important factor.”
Morelle—derived from Morty and Ellie, the names of the dogs owned by the Hays and Sinkula families—is a direct-to-consumer brand with an initial focus on the US. The company’s aluminum bikes will be manufactured in Taiwan. Pre-orders are now being taken, and the first batch of Morelle’s $3,000 e-bikes will be available early next year, with a limited production run of 1,000 units.
Morelle’s batteries will be used in UCR’s robots set for commercial release in the fall.
