What Onomotion Built With an EIC Accelerator Grant for Cargo Bikes

The ONO looks like a small delivery van that someone has fitted with pedals. It is a covered, three-wheeled electric cargo bike that a courier can ride without a driving licence, with a container at the back that can be swapped in minutes. Its maker, Onomotion, was registered in Berlin in 2016 as Tretbox GmbH and won a grant in the European Innovation Council's March 2020 round. The European Commission's list of selected companies names "TRETBOX GMBH" of Berlin, grant only, among the projects selected as COVID-19-related, with no partner company. The EU paid €1,851,306 of the €2,644,723.75 project, which ran from August 2020 to July 2022, according to CORDIS.

The vehicle was built, put into production and bought by some of Germany's biggest parcel carriers. The company was not sustained. In September 2024 Onomotion filed for insolvency, and on 1 December 2024 the court opened proceedings and the business was sold to Emoving GmbH, part of the Singapore-based DuTech and Tri Star group, according to the company's own announcement and electrive.

Where Onomotion Stands Now

The company that won the grant is insolvent. North Data's summary of the Berlin commercial register lists ONOMOTION GmbH as "i. L." (in liquidation), with a court decision of 26 September 2024 and a liquidation entry on 3 December 2024. The dates of the proceedings differ between reports: electrive gave 27 September 2024 as the opening of preliminary proceedings, and the company's December announcement says preliminary proceedings began on 26 September and the main proceedings opened on 1 December 2024. Two subsidiaries, ONOMOTION eCargobike GmbH in Berlin and ONOMOTION Niedersachsen GmbH in Salzgitter, were also covered by the proceedings, electrive reported.

The reason given was plain: sales stayed below expectations because of weak demand in Germany, and further money from shareholders or outside investors could not be raised, co-managing director Beres Seelbach said, according to electrive and Vision Mobility. The company itself said that the group was not profitable.

The product survived the company. Emoving GmbH, registered in Rheda-Wiedenbrück in August 2024, took over the brand, the ONO and, according to the announcement, all employees. It renamed itself ONO GmbH in February 2025, according to North Data, which also lists two cargo bike patents published in October 2025 and March 2026 and a 2024 balance sheet filed in September 2026. ONO GmbH's press page says it has continued "the vision of ONOMOTION GmbH" since December 2024 and that the bike is used in Germany and the UK; its news page lists no announcement after December 2024 but shows stands at Parkex and Eurobike in 2025. Co-founder Philipp Kahle is named in its imprint; its managing director is Rui Xu.

The Technology: A Bicycle Sized Like a Van

The ONO is legally a pedelec: the electric motor assists the rider up to 25 km/h, so no licence or registration is needed and the vehicle may use cycle lanes. What sets it apart from conventional cargo bikes is its size and its modular rear. The CORDIS periodic report describes a weather-protected cabin, swappable batteries for up to 60 km with two packs, a payload of up to 200 kg and more than 2 m³ of container volume, with an RFID system to unlock vehicle and container. A container can be loaded at a depot, rolled onto the bike and swapped for an empty one, which is the core of the company's pitch to parcel carriers.

The idea dates back to the founding. A 2017 report on the seed round says Tretbox began at the Volkswagen incubator in Dresden and that its investor was IBG, a subsidiary of Wolfsburg AG, the joint venture of the city of Wolfsburg and Volkswagen; North Data still lists Wolfsburg AG as a shareholder. The company also sold the bike as a service: the CORDIS report describes a subscription with maintenance, insurance and a replacement guarantee, a model electrive called "Vehicle-as-a-Service".

What the EIC Project Promised, and What CORDIS Shows

The award was Onomotion's second EIC grant. A Phase 1 grant of €50,000 had paid for a feasibility study from January to April 2019, according to CORDIS. The Phase 2 objective framed the bike as an answer to the pandemic's parcel boom and set out six tasks: optimise the vehicle and its containers for pre-series production, develop the technology and software, prepare manufacturing, build and test a service model, test pre-series vehicles in customer fleets, and do research on additional modules and a solar roof.

CORDIS publishes one periodic report, for August 2021 to July 2022. It says production had been set up with a Tier 1 automotive partner in Germany, a spare parts warehouse opened in Berlin, service partnerships signed with Get Bike Service and the parking operator Apcoa, and that 70 ONO vehicles and 81 containers were on the road with 33 clients, mainly in Berlin, Leipzig, Munich and Hamburg. The CORDIS results summary adds an 18-month test phase, a technical service department of 18 staff in five facilities in Germany, a new production facility in Berlin and a service launch in Paris. The solar roof and a fleet management app are named as ideas under exploration; neither has been announced as a product since.

1. Vehicle and containers ready for pre-series productionDeliveredProduction with a Tier 1 partner, per the CORDIS report.
2. Manufacturing set upDeliveredOwn assembly in Berlin from September 2022, per Transport Online.
3. Service model built and testedDelivered18 service staff in five facilities, per the CORDIS summary.
4. Pre-series fleet testsDelivered70 vehicles with 33 clients; orders from DPD and UPS.
5. Solar roofNot achievedStill an idea in the final report; no launch announced.
6. Commercial launch on a sustainable footingPartlySold to carriers, but insolvent in 2024.

Measured against the grant agreement, the project did most of what it promised and finished on schedule in July 2022. The gap is commercial. The final report expected the team to have "the necessary team, infrastructure, and funding to commercially launch the product"; the company raised that funding, launched the product and failed two years later.

What Onomotion Achieved Since the Award

The customer list was impressive for a start-up. DPD ordered 50 more ONOs after a one-year pilot with two vehicles, for a fleet of 52 in eight German cities in 2022, financed through Mercator-Leasing, according to electrive and Transport Online. UPS deployed ten in Hamburg and Cologne from micro-depots run by Apcoa, electrive reported in April 2022. Hermes was using ONOs in 2021, VerkehrsRundschau reported, and Sixt began renting them in Berlin in 2023, according to electrive. ONO GmbH's customer page shows 24 logos, from GLS and Veolia to Boehringer Ingelheim.

The numbers behind those names were modest. VerkehrsRundschau counted 65 vehicles on the road in August 2021; the CORDIS report counted 70 a year later. The production site opened in Berlin in September 2022 had capacity for "several hundred" bikes a year, with a goal of several thousand, Transport Online reported. How many ONOs were built in total has not been published. In June 2023 the company handed its own delivery service to the Dortmund start-up pickshare to concentrate on building bikes, according to its announcement. In April 2024 Mercedes-Benz Vans presented a concept in which an electric Sprinter acts as a mobile depot handing ONO containers to the bikes, according to VerkehrsRundschau; no customer deployment of it was reported.

The Money

Onomotion financed itself from several sources. A crowd campaign through GLS Crowd sought €3 million at 6% interest over seven years to fund 190 more bikes, VerkehrsRundschau reported, and reached its target in May 2022, according to electrive; electrive later reported that the money was raised by the subsidiary ONOMOTION eCargobike GmbH as subordinated loans. In December 2022 the company closed a €6 million Series A with Proeza Ventures, Zu na mi, the European Innovation Council and existing investors, and started selling a bond of up to €15 million through GLS Bank, according to VerkehrsRundschau. How much of the bond was placed has not been published.

Onomotion's annual accounts for 2016 to 2022 are filed with the register, but their figures are not freely viewable, and no accounts after 2022 are listed by North Data; revenue, losses and staff numbers could therefore not be verified. North Data also lists a regional state aid of €2,961,000 under the federal and state programme for regional economic structure in September 2022 and a federal research grant of €273,410 from February 2022 for an autonomous delivery system project; neither could be confirmed in a second source. What bondholders and crowd lenders recover depends on the insolvency proceedings, which are not concluded according to the register.

Why Europe Should Care

Cargo bikes have a place in EU policy. The European Declaration on Cycling, approved by the Council and signed by the three EU institutions in April 2024, states that cycling is "playing an increasingly important role in the urban transport of goods, in particular parcel deliveries", and commits the signatories to increase European production of bicycles and to support "cycle logistics", according to the Council text and the European Cyclists' Federation. Onomotion was a near-perfect fit: a German manufacturer that said 97% of its suppliers came from Germany and neighbouring countries, according to Transport Online.

Its fate shows the limit of that fit. Policy backing did not turn into enough orders, and the European manufacturer the EU had funded with grants and equity ended up owned by a group headquartered in Singapore. The bike is still made and sold, which keeps the technology in use, but the value created by the EU's support now sits outside the company it backed.

The Verdict

Onomotion's insolvency administrator, ONO GmbH and the EIC have not been asked for comment for this article. It is based entirely on public records, company statements and EU project data, linked throughout.