36Kr Exclusive | Ebike Company Secures Over Hundreds of Millions in Financing Led by Brizan Ventures and Tony Gao, Set to Enter the Exoskeleton Market

Author | Zhang Ziyi

Editor | Yuan Silai

Yingke learned that the global intelligent electric-assisted bicycle brand "URTOPIA" recently completed its Series B financing, with a total financing amount exceeding 200 million RMB. This round of financing was led by Brizan Ventures and the industrial fund of Tongxiang Municipal Government, with continuous investment from institutions such as Gao Bingqiang, Kungho Fund, and Guangyuan Hesheng.

After the completion of this round of financing, URTOPIA will continue to increase its investment in core technology R & D, global market expansion, supply chain construction, and organizational capacity upgrading, and promote the company's development from an intelligent electric-assisted bicycle brand to a company centered on outdoor embodied intelligence and human-machine coupling intelligent sports technology.

In URTOPIA's long-term plan, the intelligent E-bike is not the end of its business, but an entry point for its expansion into the field of "outdoor embodied intelligence".

In the view of Zhang Bo, the founder and CEO of URTOPIA, compared with traditional two-wheeled travel tools, the intelligent E-bike naturally has the basic conditions for real-time interaction with the rider's body and the external environment because it integrates motors, batteries, sensors, and micro-control units. The company's core technology is not limited to a single motor or electronic control system, but a complete human-machine coupling system, which is also the key technological foundation for outdoor embodied intelligence in sports scenarios.

The so-called "embodied intelligence" means that the intelligent system not only exists in the virtual cloud or on the screen, but also has a physical entity, which can perceive the physical laws of the physical world through sensors and make real-time feedback to the external environment through actuators.

In the outdoor sports scenario, as a device carrying human movement, the E-bike can directly obtain the rider's physical indicators such as cadence, pedaling force, and heart rate, and at the same time collect environmental data such as terrain, slope, and wind resistance through the vehicle-mounted sensors. Through real-time processing of these multi-source data, the system can output refined power assistance, thus achieving a "human-machine coupling" riding state.

This transforms the electric-assisted bicycle from a passive means of transportation into an intelligent device that can understand human movement intentions and provide physical feedback. URTOPIA's strategic upgrade to an "outdoor embodied intelligent sports platform" is precisely an attempt to break through the data closed-loop among people, vehicles, and the environment, and expand its business boundaries from simple bicycle hardware sales to the fields of outdoor active health management and intelligent sports services.

In addition to E-bike products, URTOPIA plans to extend its products to hard-tech products such as mechanical exoskeletons in the future. These new products will share the underlying perception and control logic, further deepening the technological barrier of human-machine coupling.

In terms of offline channels, in 2025, URTOPIA completed the acquisition of relevant assets of Pedego, an established North American electric-assisted bicycle chain channel brand.

By introducing Pedego's channel resources and local teams, URTOPIA can not only reach North American consumers more efficiently, but also further improve the complete consumer goods closed-loop from product sales, test rides, after-sales service to user operation.

For products like E-bikes with high unit prices, heavy emphasis on experience and service, offline channels and local service capabilities are important foundations for promoting large-scale growth.

In the future, URTOPIA will form a composite growth model of "technology platform + product matrix + local channels + service network", and continuously combine intelligent product capabilities with local channel capabilities to establish a more solid and sustainable foundation for consumer goods growth in the global market.

CEO Interview

Yingke: You mentioned that new products similar to "exoskeletons" will be launched in the second half of the year. This is a step for URTOPIA to expand from a single E-bike. How do you plan your product ecosystem in the future?

Zhang Bo: The underlying motor and electronic control technologies of exoskeletons and E-bikes are completely the same, which provides dimensionality-reducing support at the supply chain end. More importantly, it can break the outside world's perception of us as just a "micro-mobility" brand, firmly establish the strategy of "outdoor embodied intelligence", and jointly enter the huge "silver economy" with E-bikes.

Based on core technologies and Pedego's offline channels, our ultimate goal is to build an outdoor embodied intelligent ecosystem based on human-machine coupling. We will focus on hard technology, and through the full reuse of channels, supply chains, and user groups, we are committed to becoming the world's number one outdoor embodied technology company.

Based on the underlying technology platform, we will deeply integrate intelligent devices with human movement, and ultimately achieve in-depth auxiliary movement and health management. If we only focus on the single category of E-bikes, it is absolutely impossible to build the hard-tech barrier for outdoor embodiment.

Yingke: You emphasized the expansion into hard-tech categories such as mechanical exoskeletons. From the perspective of technology reuse, how does URTOPIA apply its underlying capabilities across different products?

Zhang Bo: The core of underlying technology reuse is the motor and electronic control system.

The underlying physical principle of the motor is very simple, which is the four-quadrant principle learned in university. Unless there is a Nobel Prize-level theoretical breakthrough, the physical principle will not change, and the rest are all engineering problems.

The most difficult point in technology crossover lies in: how to customize the most balanced and suitable motor and control algorithm for a brand-new scenario. For example, although the power requirements of mechanical exoskeletons are different from those of two-wheeled vehicles, the requirements for lightweight and real-time human-machine coupling response are extremely strict.

Our logic is: as long as the underlying "motor + electronic control" technology platform exists, when facing new scenarios, we only need to make product definition conversions and make some targeted R & D investments.

This kind of technology transfer is the hard-tech approach I most advocate. It means that every time you develop a new product, you are reusing resources and deepening the barrier, rather than blindly groping from scratch. Based on the reuse of this core technology platform, we want to take it a step further: not only reuse the underlying technology, but also truly break through the ecological closed-loop of auxiliary movement and human-machine coupling through the evolution of hardware forms.