The three entrepreneurs, 22-year-old Cristóbal Cabello, 23-year-old Andrés Roi Eggers and 24-year-old Juan José Monsalve walked away from their programs in their university to focus full-time on the Yerka Project.
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It works by having a fully removable seat post and a lower part of the frame that comes apart, allowing users to feed the detached shaft through the modified frame.
The Yerka has an integrated design, making it both a bicycle and a lock.
The friends raised money for their invention via a crowdfunding venture, and following the success of this they are set to release 300 bikes after production. The entire bike can then be clipped around something. After the lock thieves are unable to steal the bike since the bike locking system literally breaks the bike into pieces. Immovable objects such as lampposts, small tress etc.is ideal to lock the bike.
According to Yerka designers, the whole locking operation takes not more than 10 seconds.
“We chose crowdfunding because it’s the easiest way to make the product go worldwide”, Cabello said, who is the CEO of the startup. “Iot’s an worldwide web page that is well known, and customers can pay securely with a credit card”. The Yerka website states the bike was designed by addressing the root of the problem.
“Now a thief would have to cut through the main structure to take the bicycle, defeating the objective”, it said. “Ours wasn’t a huge order and the factory produces 3,000 bikes per day”, says Cabello. Their IndieGoGo campaign was so successful, the bicycle, named the Yerka, is now in production. “In Chile we haven’t got the culture of riding a bike as a commuter and the infrastructure and bike lanes aren’t good”. The team ordered an extra 100 bikes which they plan to sell in Chile, before targeting the U.S. market in 2016.
The bike will cost about $600, depending on where it’s sold.
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Around 110,000 bikes are reported stolen in UK each year.
