Skarper: The Revolutionary E-Bike System That Fits in Your Hand

What if you could transform any standard bicycle into an e-bike in seconds, then switch back just as easily? That's the concept behind Skarper, a company based in Camden, North London, who have developed a groundbreaking clip-on disc drive system that is changing everything we know about e-bikes.

Skarper co-founder Dr. Alastair Darwood wanted the power of an e-bike without the bulk and expense. But when Skarper was founded in 2020, there were literally no components on the market small enough to fit their vision. The team spent years designing and developing their own ultra-compact speed controller to create some of the smallest, most powerful components in the e-bike industry. The device is small enough to fit in a shoebox, rather than the massive boxes traditional e-bikes require, making the Skarper system much more sustainable than other solutions. Every Skarper sold means one less heavy e-bike manufactured. Plus, Skarper extends the lifespan of bicycles for years, embracing the circular economy by reusing what's already built, and adding only what's needed.

We travel to Skarper’s headquarters in Camden to meet Alastair and COO Uri Meirovich, who show us their sophisticated bike testing rigs, and tell us about how their development partnership with Red Bull Advanced Technologies brought Formula One-grade engineering rigor to consumer cycling. Alastair also takes us on a short bike ride around North London to demonstrate how riders can switch seamlessly between eco, cruise, and turbo modes using the Skarper app.

Find out more about Skarper here.

Find out more about Arena here.

Your host is Paul Haimes from industrial software company PTC.

Episodes are released bi-weekly. Follow us on LinkedIn and X for updates.

This is an 18Sixty production for PTC. Executive Producer is Jacqui Cook. Location recording by Geoff Marsh. Sound design and editing by Clarissa Maycock. Music by Rowan Bishop.

Transcript

Welcome to Third Angle, where we are cycling smoothly towards the future of e-bikes.

I am your host, Paul Hames from Industrial Software Company PTC. In this podcast, we share the moments where digital transforms physical and meet the brilliant minds behind some of the most innovative products around the world, each powered by PTC Technology. In this episode, we're heading to Skarper in the vibrant streets of Camden in North London.

It's here, among the canal-side workshops, that a small team is reimagining what an e-bike can be. It's not built into a frame. It doesn't require a complete bicycle rebuild, and remarkably, it fits in the palm of your hand. The Skarper concept is elegantly simple: take any standard bicycle, attach a specially designed disc brake rotor system, and you easily transform it into an e-bike in seconds. Remove it and you are back to a traditional bike. No compromise, no permanent modification. Just choice. 

Co-founder Dr. Alastair Darwood takes us for a tour of the Skarper offices to find out more about this revolutionary clip-on e-bike drive system.

Hi there, welcome to the Skarper Camden office. Should we go on a little tour, first of all? Sure, let's do it. Alright. Let's just walk upstairs. So as we walk down the office, you can see bikes from various brands. They all have the disc rotor sitting on the back. The whole point of development is to make sure that you can pick up a Skarper, go onto pretty much any bike onto which the disc driver's been fitted, and you can just align the Skarper up like that, like so, and then you can just click it straight on to turn that bike into a new bike.

So this is the main floor of the office. We have all the different departments within Skarper. So we have mechanical engineering, software engineering, electrical engineering, industrial design. There's a lot of activity which goes on here. A lot of complex engineering challenges being solved, and trying to get as many Skarpers out to customers as we can, trying to keep up production with the demand that we're seeing. 

So on a day-to-day basis it can vary, but at the moment I think there's about 22, 23 people who can be in this office on a daily basis. So it can get quite busy in here, but it's a great place to work. 

Dr. Alastair Darwood isn't your typical e-bike entrepreneur. Having trained as a doctor with a background in medical device engineering, he's brought a unique perspective to the cycling world, one that prioritizes precision and user experience in equal measure. As a keen cyclist, he wanted the extra power of an e-bike without the bulk and expense, but after exploring various conversion kits. He found them too heavy and cumbersome, so he set out to create something better. 

I've always been a fan of inventing new things. There's a huge amount of satisfaction that you can get from going from nothing to something, creating something new. Now, in the medical device field you are creating devices that are hopefully really helpful to people and can benefit them in some way. But very often you are creating a device that no one wants to use for fun. It's more a device that alleviates something or helps in the treatment process. And whilst that's really satisfying, it sometimes loses a bit of the light touch that, let's call it fun, invention can do.

Now, as a passionate cyclist I really wanted to try and create something that was completely different to my medical device work in the consumer space to create something that people wanted, not what they had to have, if that makes sense. 

However, the Skarper concept is not just about creating another e-bike, it's about changing the way e-bikes are made altogether.

In the cycling industry, the e-bike industry specifically, you've got two main methods of powering an e-bike. That is hub motors where you put the motor into the wheel of either the front wheel or the rear wheel, and you've got mid drive where the motor is built into the frame at the pedal cranks. We believe at Skarper we have developed the third method of powering e-bikes. It's the disc drive system. It's a way of taking any bicycle at a factory level and giving the customer the option to have an e-bike or normal bike at will whenever they fancy on their ride without changing anything about the underlying bicycle itself. It gives consumers freedom but it also gives OEM manufacturers freedom to turn any bike in their inventory into an e-bike. 

What sets Skarper apart isn't just the concept, it's the extraordinary level of engineering that makes it possible to pack a motor gearbox, battery, and all the electronics of a full E-bike into something you can hold in one hand, required solutions that simply didn't exist. Co-founder and COO Uri Meirovich explains the challenge they faced in the beginning.

When we started with the vision of making Skarper so small there was physically no components in the market that would fit the contours of the product. So if you wanna buy a speed controller, you go to the best company, the Canadian company, it makes speed controllers. It was just too big. So we spent the first years at the start of Skarper designing and developing our own speed controller, our own electronic boards, our own battery management system. And where you are in our workshop, this is the electronics parts today it's kind of done. Today we are just doing testing, but you can see here battery packs and you see that speed controller here. It's one of the smallest, most powerful speed controllers on the market, which in theory, by the way, we could sell it to other e-bike manufacturers today because it really is small and powerful, but it was designed for us.

These ultra-compact components allow the Skarper system to be lightweight and portable, but Skarper's vision extends beyond convenience. It's also about sustainability and addresses some of the e-bike industry's most pressing environmental challenges. 

So Skarper from a sustainability angle hits a lot of different interesting points. There's the obvious one where you've got bicycles which maybe aren't being used, or they're sitting there collecting dust in a shed that they're perfectly good and they can be reused and given a new lease of life as e-bikes. But the really fascinating one comes, if you look at the logistical chain behind the sale and consumption of e-bikes globally. When you buy an e-bike, it comes in a massive packaged box, usually needs about two people to lift it with a huge logistics chain to get it to the customer that goes behind that box. Skarper exists in a shoebox, and that logistical advantage exists in terms of warranty and maintenance. If something goes wrong with the Skarper, you're not transmitting a bike back to a shop or a warranty center, you're posting a shoebox- which obviously from an environmental standpoint is really significant. 

The other key one is massively increasing the lifespan of bikes that people are buying. So if you buy a typical e-bike, the underlying mechanical components to the bike can last for many years, but the e parts of the bike are limited by their fragile independent components. How long is the battery going to be produced by the customer once it's outta warranty? If anything goes wrong with a component, there's hugely expensive repair fees over this point. Skarper disconnects all of the higher risk electrical components from the underlying bicycle, and turns into something that can be easily sent back, returned, fixed, repaired, maintained by customers.

And it really comes down to the circular economy, reuse what's already built. Add only what's needed. So in terms of the real impact, I guess every Skarper sold means one less heavy e-bike manufactured. It means people cycling more, replacing car journeys and reducing emissions.

As part of Skarper's development they've partnered with the world famous Red Bull Advanced Technologies. It's a collaboration that brings Formula One grade engineering and rigor to consumer cycling and allowed Skarper to test if their bikes would satisfy F1 standards. 

We started working with Red Bull initially on a mountain biking concept, that developed into work on our gearbox and the current disc drive system that's on the market at the moment. And it was really their engineering prowess and expertise, which helped us crack the really tricky engineering problem of the amount of power and torque density we need to put in such a small space. So we are really proud to work with them. They've given us, you know, testing rigor. If it can survive F1 standards, if it can survive British winters and Alpine climbs. I think where it matters is, when you say developed with Red Bull Advanced Technologies, people understand this is serious engineering. This is a novel e-bike drive system. 

And when a six time Olympic champion puts their name and investment behind a product, people pay attention. Sir Chris Hoy believed in the concept so much that he became a founding investor in Skarper.

Sir Chris Hoy became a founding investor of Skarper really early on. And I think what's interesting, he's a six time Olympic champion. He doesn't put his name on gimmicks. He tested it, loved it, invested in it, and became really from the early, early days of the company, one of our most credible advocates,  because of his huge ability and his reputation in the cycling industry.

Walk into Skarper's test lab and you'll find a fascinating array of custom built rigs, including modified turbo trainers running units at maximum power for thousands of kilometers and longevity rigs that mimic years of real world riding. There's even a waterproof testing chamber with a shower head to simulate torrential rain. This is where theory meets reality. Initial prototypes evolved into production units that run for weeks under conditions far more extreme than any normal rider would encounter. 

This is the Skarper Test Lab, and it's really where we stress test Skarper units, put them through their design paces and check Skarpers as they come off the production line to really check that everything going out to customers is gonna give them thousands of kilometers of easy use. So you can see we've got heavily modified bicycle turbo trainers onto which we put Skarpers and we just leave them at their absolute maximum power output for thousands of kilometers to try and effectively break them and see where the problems will occur. And it might be a bit hard to hear, but usually we have these large fans running to cool the Skarper as it runs on the turbo trainer. These are putting out about 430 mechanical watts for upwards of 2000 kilometers to try and see where the limit of the engineering actually lie. 

So three years ago we had a testing regime and we had a test to destruction of the rotor. We said it need to last X hours. We put those rotors on a testing and they lasted 20 minutes. They just turned into dust and then you realize, oh, like,  we're gonna need something better. And we took a lot of work and also the support of Red Bull Advanced Technologies and a lot of engineering to come up with a design that it was supposed to last an amount of hours, and I can say it now, last days and weeks, and it just keeps on going. So we're very happy with the outcome. I don't wanna say we can't break it anymore, but we have to try very hard and we're happy with how robust the product turned out. 

But the real test is the experience of riding the bike, which Alistair demonstrates for us on the surrounding streets of Camden. He introduces us to some of the features of the dedicated Skarper companion app, which connects to the drive via Bluetooth and allows users to switch between eco, cruise or turbo mode.

And we are cycling out onto the streets of Camden. We're gonna do a few laps over the little park over here, and yeah, just so you can see what it's like to ride Skarper. So I've currently got the system in turbo mode, so I'm probably gonna have to change the mode because I'm having to do absolutely no work as you can see, and it propels me off quite quickly. It's very much like a motorbike in this mode. The majority of our customers tend to actually ride in eco because it dynamically adjusts the amount of power it gives based on road incline and cycling cadence. And the other thing that's quite cool is if I backpedal three times now, so that's 1, 2, 3. It's put the Skarper into a pause mode. So I'm just cycling along normally. Now this is all under my own power, and the Skarper has gone to sleep. So if I was on a long, flat section of a cycle, I could just put the Skarper into pause mode, do my cycle, and then I could just backpedal again three times, 1, 2, 3 and now the Skarper is pushing me along again. 

Now of course, all of this can be done from the app. And if we increase our speed a little bit, you'll see that Skarper will cap out at 25 kilometers an hour, and if we try and go faster than 25, we can, but just under our own power. There's an automatic clutch inside which effectively completely disengages the system. So above 25, it just feels like a normal bike again. As we slow back down below 25, the system gradually kicks back in and starts giving us assistance. So I think when you ride Skarper, I'm riding a fairly nice bike - it's got a good grip set, good frame, and it just feels like riding a normal bike just with massively powerful legs. The combination of measuring road incline as well as cadence gives it a really smooth, very, very dynamic ride feel. Our dynamic climb algorithm smooths things out. And actually it's a common theme we get from a lot of our customers. Incredible feedback about the dynamism,  how smooth the onset and offset of power is, and how responsive the system is.

You know, we've just done a fairly decent cycle in pretty horrible London winter conditions. And, yeah, I was lazy. I had this in turbo mode today and really the Skarper has done all of the work for me. But of course, if I started going in different modes then that would really drastically change things.

But Skarper don't just want to make individual rides more pleasant. They want to change our behaviors and get us all out riding more leading to healthier, greener futures. 

So even for people who like bikes, there are many times, whether they're tired after work, it's raining at six o'clock in the morning, where they might just choose a car or non eco-friendly travel, not because they don't like bikes, but because there's no good solution for them short of buying a separate e-bike, which they have to store, they have to have the space, they have to have the financial ability to do so. So I hope Skarper will have the ability to give some of the flexibility to do new things on their bike, whether that's commute, whether that's cycle further, whether that's just get more active hours in the day. That's really something that I'm excited by. 

You know, I'll give you an example that's quite relevant to me. So last summer I went cycling with my dad. He likes to gravel ride and we did a 90k ride just south of London. And I actually had to carry the Skarper for him. So for the first 30k I carried a Skarper in the rucksack. For the remainder of the ride, we stuck the Skarper on eco mode, clipped it onto his bike, and it just took the edge off. So he was able to happily keep up with me and climb all those different hills and without the Skarper wouldn't have been able to do that ride. And it just opened up that to let him go further, faster, and longer that he'd otherwise wouldn’t be able to do.

Our thanks to Alastair and Uri at Skarper. Now it's time to get our experts take. Welcome Jon Hirschtick from PTC. John, Skarper is still a relatively young company, and for them this first product launch is a huge milestone. They absolutely had to hit their target date, and that's why they adopted PTC’s Arena, which brings together all of their product data, bills of materials, and changes into one connected system. For companies in that same position feeling the pressure to hit a launch date, can you talk us through the real benefit Arena gives them and how it helps take the stress out of that final run-up to release? 

When teams are gearing up for a product launch, the number one thing I hear is that feeling of pressure. And it's rarely because the engineering work isn't good. It's usually because everyone's trying to keep track of information that was in 10 different places. You've got spreadsheets floating around different versions of a bill of materials, emails with changes someone may or may not have captured in the bill of material. And then you've got a contract manufacturer trying to make sense of whatever file they were sent last Tuesday. That's where things start to get stressful because as you get closer to launch, the margin for error just disappears. One mystery vision or one outdated file can create a domino effect that eats up days you don't have. 

What Arena does is take all that noise away. It pulls the BOM, the CAD files, the documentation, the changes, everything into one place. Once you've got one source of truth, suddenly the team feels like they can breathe again, and it doesn't stop there. Your suppliers and your contract manufacturers are part of that same flow. Instead of you emailing them a PDF and hoping they're building from the right revision, they just log in and access the latest release data themselves. That alignment alone saves days, and it removes so much of the anxiety that typically shows up right before launch. 

Now, a lot of PLM systems do some of this, but Arena in particular goes beyond doing these PLM functions because it makes it even easier to set up and operate the system because Arena’s Cloud Native, it's a PLM system that can be set up almost instantly and can be accessed by anyone almost instantly. And no need to maintain servers or databases or backups that traditional PLM burdens impose on companies. So when people ask how Arena helps teams under heavy time pressure, I always say the same thing: we give you clarity. Clear data, clear ownership, clear approvals.

When you've got clarity, you make better decisions faster. You free up engineers to actually engineer instead of firefighting, and you walk into launch week confident that everyone inside your company and outside it is working from the same playbook.

Thanks to John and to Alastair, Uri and our producer Goeff for taking us behind the scenes of Skarper. Please rate, review and subscribe to our biweekly Third Angle episodes wherever you listen to your podcasts and follow PTC on LinkedIn and X for future episodes. 

Companies that make products the world relies on rely on PTC.

This is an 18Sixty production for PTC. Executive Producer is Jacqui Cook. Location. Recording by Geoff Marsh. Sound design and editing by Clarissa Maycock and music by Rowan Bishop.