Lectric eBikes, a Phoenix, Arizona-based company known for its practical and affordable XP series electric bikes, has launched three new brands so far this year — a Juiced Bikes relaunch, a new Juiced Powersports brand, and now a premium adventure brand called Monarc — an expansion strategy that runs counter to the wave of bankruptcies that have plagued the sector.

Together, Lectric has put about $10 million toward these initiatives, CEO Levi Conlow told TechCrunch.

“Others might be pulling back, or raising money, we’re actually deploying and investing into initiatives like this,” he said. “I actually don’t think the market is saturated right now; Lectric last month had its biggest sales month in our company’s existence and we sold almost 30,000 bikes. I’m not sure anybody has done that before, even at like peak COVID.”

It may seem like an odd time to launch an e-bike brand, let alone three.

In the past two years a slew of e-bike companies have filed for bankruptcy, shut down, or withered until they were snapped up by larger companies. Rad Power Bikes, the buzzy electric bike company that raised nearly $330 million in venture capital, was perhaps the highest-profile collapse. The company, once valued at $1.65 billion, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in December. Its assets were acquired by Life Electric Vehicles Holdings for $13.2 million.

“To me, it’s just opened it up,” Conlow said of the market after listing a dozen companies that had folded or left the U.S. market. “I think the market actually lacks a lot of worthy competition right now.”

The contrarian bet has a contrarian backstory. Conlow and co-founder Robby Deziel never raised venture capital, instead bootstrapping the business, which they founded seven years ago as childhood friends, before taking an investment from private equity firm Bertram Capital Management in 2020. What started as a scrappy startup is now one of the top-selling direct-to-consumer e-bike companies in the U.S., shipping 150,000 units in 2025.

The playbook — bootstrap, stay profitable, let better-funded competitors implode, then expand — is one that founders across hardware categories might find instructive. But Conlow is careful about how Lectric grows. Trying to sell e-bikes for every kind of customer risks diluting the brand, he said.

“What we’ve learned is that Lectric cannot be everything to everyone,” he said, before pointing to its broad product lineup, which includes folding bikes and an electric tricycle. The company sells 90% of its products direct to consumers through its website, which, depending on the month, attracts 2 million to 4 million visitors.

The solution is to keep the brands separate or risk dilution. Featuring a Juiced Bikes model prominently on the Lectric homepage, for instance, might pull attention away from Lectric’s best-selling XP Series, sending the wrong signal to the wrong customer.

“You need to be a lot more intentional, and when you’re more focused, you can go really deep into that vertical; you can make customer service, branding, and marketing specific to that product and that company,” he said.

That’s what Lectric has done with Juiced Bikes, Juiced Powersports — which will ship its first e-moto in August — and Monarc. Juiced Bikes was acquired by Lectric in 2025 and relaunched last month, while Monarc, which started as a skunkworks project within Lectric, spun out this week as a standalone brand based in Minnesota, led by industry vets Julia Moran and Ryan Callahan.

Each brand has its own product engineering and development, branding, marketing, and customer service teams. Conlow takes this separation a step further, noting he even wants the brands to compete with each other.

“We don’t want three brands that end up looking and performing the same or feeling the same. There should be healthy competition between [them],” he said.

Monarc is leaning on its premium adventure lifestyle features and customer service strategy that includes a five-year warranty and phone support with real humans. (Conlow was quick to note that none of its brands will ever use AI for customer service.)

Monarc’s first e-bike, an all-terrain trail electric bike called the Marker, will come standard with two LG 48-volt 15Ah batteries — an offering that is unusual in the e-bike sector — that provide 720 watt-hours each and are UL 2271 certified. The batteries also come with a 5-amp fast charger. The Marker, which will begin shipping to customers in July, is kitted out with other premium features like a Bafang motor, Shimano drivetrain, and a 3.5-inch color touchscreen that can sync with other accessories like rearview radar and smart helmets.

Monarc and the two Juiced brands are small, with 10 and eight employees, respectively, though they are expected to expand. Lectric itself has 170 employees. The brands operate independently but leverage Lectric’s supply chain, purchasing power, and back-end support.

Whether Lectric will continue to launch new independent brands is an open question. Conlow kept the prospect open: “We continue to explore and keep our eyes open.” But he isn’t in any rush. “We have made our plate very full, and we’re going to stay focused on this.”

In early-stage companies, time often becomes the most constrained resource. Founders and engineering teams must move quickly to build products, reach customers, and refine their offerings. Yet a significant portion of that time can be spent on infrastructure tasks that sit behind the scenes. According to a report, application development accounted for just 16% of developers’ time, meaning the majority of their work was spent on operational and supporting tasks rather than writing code. Against that backdrop, database management has become one of the areas where engineering hours quietly accumulate.

Jacob Blankenship, founder of RogueDB, believes this is where many startups lose momentum. “When teams look back at how their engineers spend time, database management can take a surprising share of it,” he explains. “Our focus has been simple. If we can give those hours back, engineers can spend them building their products instead of maintaining infrastructure.”

RogueDB is a fully managed database platform designed to handle the core responsibilities traditionally associated with data infrastructure. The system manages performance, scaling, and security within the platform itself, while allowing developers to interact with the database through a simplified API. According to Blankenship, the goal is to reduce the operational overhead that many development teams encounter as their applications grow.

The challenge, he explains, often begins with the way databases are typically deployed. Many teams either configure and maintain their own database infrastructure or adopt a managed platform that still requires ongoing tuning and configuration. Both paths can place a significant workload on engineering teams.

Blankenship notes that even experienced engineers may spend weeks or months configuring infrastructure and troubleshooting performance. “Setting up a database environment can take a considerable amount of time,” he says. “And even after the initial set-up, there are still ongoing responsibilities for maintaining the performance, security, and preparing the system for scale.”

RogueDB attempts to simplify that process by removing several traditional steps. According to Blankenship, the platform operates through a purely API-driven architecture rather than relying on conventional SQL-based interaction. From his perspective, this approach reflects a shift in how modern applications integrate data systems.

“There has been an assumption for decades that a serious database requires SQL and extensive configuration,” he says. “We designed RogueDB to show that a database can be integrated directly through an API with zero configuration and still deliver strong performance and security.”

According to Blankenship, that design in practice means developers interact with the database through programmatic calls rather than managing configuration layers themselves. He explains that the platform is structured so that security and performance are embedded into the core design. “Our philosophy is there should only be one way to use the system: the secure way,” he says.

The platform’s development has also been shaped heavily by user feedback. During the first quarter of 2026, the company focused primarily on stabilizing the product and addressing issues reported by early adopters. Blankenship says those improvements were implemented quickly, within days rather than weeks or months.

“When customers identified problems or asked for adjustments, we prioritized rapid fixes,” he says. That feedback-driven approach has influenced the product roadmap as well. The company is expanding the platform’s capabilities throughout 2026, including additional support for transactional workloads and analytical data processing. According to Blankenship, these features reflect common requests from organizations evaluating the platform.

“Our roadmap is shaped by the conversations we have with users,” he says. “When teams tell us what capabilities they need to move forward, those insights help determine what we build next.”

The company’s current audience consists primarily of startups, IT firms, and small to medium-sized businesses that prioritize speed and flexibility. These organizations often operate with small engineering teams where each hour of development time carries significant value.

Blankenship notes that database management can represent several hours of weekly work for each engineer. “Even conservative estimates suggest engineers can spend multiple hours a week managing database infrastructure,” he says. “If a platform can reduce that significantly, the benefit compounds quickly across a team.”

By reclaiming that time, he argues, teams can focus on the activities that define their growth. “The real goal is not just a faster database,” Blankenship says. “It is giving engineers the ability to concentrate on building products and launching features instead of maintaining the plumbing behind them.”

As RogueDB continues to expand its capabilities and pursue additional compliance certifications, the company’s long-term vision remains centered on that same principle. In Blankenship’s view, reducing infrastructure complexity ultimately enables smaller teams to compete more effectively.

“When you give people back their time, they can move faster and build better products,” he says. “For startups and growing businesses, that difference can shape everything from product development to how quickly they reach the market.“