This electric motorcycle company just hit 10 million battery swaps – and it’s profitable

0 Comments Brazilian electric motorcycle and battery-swapping company Vammo is hitting several major milestones as it prepares to take its model beyond its home of São Paulo, including reaching EBITDA profitability, surpassing 10 million battery swaps, and growing to more than 10,000 active riders.

Vammo has operated in São Paulo since 2022, building out a network that now includes roughly 1,000 battery-swapping points. Riders use the company’s electric motorcycles and can pull into a swapping location to exchange depleted batteries for charged packs rather than waiting around to plug in.

Early last year, we covered the company’s major milestone of reaching 1 million battery swaps. Now Vammo is adding another zero to that number.

Vammo co-founder and Chief Operating Officer explained to Electrek how the company is beginning its first significant geographic expansion, with Campinas set to become its second official city. Vammo plans to remain focused on the broader state of São Paulo for now before eventually expanding throughout Brazil and into other Latin American markets, cruising towards becoming the Gogoro of Latin America.

That pace might sound like a relatively conservative expansion plan, but remember that São Paulo alone represents a massive two-wheeler market. In just that one state, more than 500,000 motorcycles are sold annually – or more than the entire US motorcycle market.

And the company’s existing operating territory is already huge. Vammo says its current service area around São Paulo is geographically comparable to the San Francisco Bay Area and contains around 26 million people.

The company has now performed more than 10 million battery swaps and expects that figure to exceed 100 million sometime in 2027. Active customers have increased 250% this year alone to more than 10,000, while Vammo says it is on track to reach around $45 million in annual recurring revenue by the end of 2026.

Perhaps more importantly for a capital-intensive business involving both vehicles and physical infrastructure, Vammo says it reached breakeven in June – six months earlier than planned – and is now comfortably EBITDA profitable. That’s a rarity among young electric motorcycle companies.

The company is also rolling out its third-generation swapping station, which it says reduces costs by another 15%. The new stations use AI-based software to dynamically adjust battery charging rates based on factors including real-time and predicted rider demand, weather, delivery-app demand, customer usage patterns, and battery temperature.

There’s still a huge amount of room for electric motorcycles to grow in Brazil.

Vammo says data from Brazilian vehicle industry association FENABRAVE shows 11,587 electric motorcycles were registered from January through August this year, an 85% increase year-over-year. Yet electric models still account for just 0.7% of motorcycle sales, a veritable drop in the bucket.

But among that small yet growing slice of the pie, Vammo reigns supreme. The company claims more than 65% of Brazil’s electric motorcycle market so far this year, and if its growth continues at the current rate, we could see that share balloon even further.

That’s particularly interesting in a country where motorcycles play a much larger transportation role than they do in North America, especially for delivery and other commercial riders. Brazil also generates the large majority of its electricity from renewable sources, particularly hydropower, with rapidly growing wind and solar generation. That means electrifying motorcycles there can offer an unusually compelling combination: replacing gasoline-powered transportation with electric vehicles that are themselves charged largely from low-carbon electricity.

And there’s a strong economic argument for riders, too. Vammo says its average customer saves around 35% compared to operating the typical alternative, a used 160cc gasoline motorcycle. Much of those savings comes from lower energy and maintenance costs – two key wins for electric motorbikes.

The company has also launched a new 36-month rent-to-own program aimed at tackling another distinctly Brazilian problem: expensive vehicle financing, where Vammo says rates can approach 45%. At the end of the rental period, riders can purchase the motorcycle for the same amount they originally put down as a deposit. They can then either purchase a battery or continue using Vammo’s swapping network.

Battery swapping has been tried in plenty of markets, often with mixed results. But two-wheelers remain perhaps the strongest use case for the technology. Their batteries are small enough to physically swap by hand, commercial riders can’t afford hours of charging downtime, and dense urban usage makes a swapping network easier to support.

With 10 million swaps already under its belt, profitability achieved, and its first expansion beyond São Paulo underway, Vammo is starting to demonstrate what that model looks like at serious scale.

And considering electric motorcycles still make up less than 1% of Brazil’s motorcycle market, the company may still be writing just the first chapter of that story.

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The e-bikes that make up Micah’s current daily drivers are the $999 Lectric XP 2.0, the $1,095 Ride1Up Roadster V2, the $1,199 Rad Power Bikes RadMission, and the $3,299 Priority Current. But it’s a pretty evolving list these days.

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