Rivian spinout Also was working on an e-moto project in Kenya — until it walked away

Focus is the most expensive commodity in a startup. You can have the best engineers, a massive war chest, and a pedigree that includes Rivian, but if you try to solve two of the hardest problems in mobility at once, you will probably fail at both. This is the lesson currently being learned out loud by Chris Yu and the team at Also.

The Kenyan Detour

Also started with a high-profile lineage and a lot of momentum. When you spin out of a company like Rivian, people expect you to build the future of moving things. For a while, that future looked like electric motorcycles in Kenya. It made sense on paper: emerging markets need cheap, reliable, electrified transit. It was a hardware play with a social mission.

But hardware is hard. International hardware in regions with fragmented infrastructure is exponentially harder. According to Chris Yu, the company eventually decided to walk away from the Kenyan e-moto project entirely. They didn't just delay it; they abandoned it. This is a rare move for a startup that had already committed resources to the region, but it reveals a cold, founder-first reality: you can't build a global hardware supply chain and a world-class autonomous driving stack at the same time.

The Pivot to Autonomy

The decision to kill the bike project wasn't about the market opportunity in Africa. It was about where Also wants to sit in the value chain. Yu has made it clear that the priority now is autonomous vehicles. In the world of venture-backed startups, software and AI layers have higher margins and better scalability than physical bike frames and battery swaps.

For builders, this is a signal. The "everything app" or "everything hardware company" is a trap. Also realized that their competitive advantage wasn't in manufacturing low-cost two-wheelers; it was in the intelligence that controls the vehicle. By stripping away the distraction of the e-moto, they are betting the house on self-driving tech.

The Cost of Admitting Mistakes

One of the hardest things for a founder to do is stand in front of stakeholders and admit that a high-profile initiative was a mistake. Most companies would have "sunsetted" the project quietly or kept it on life support to avoid bad PR. Also took the hit publicly. They owned the delays and the pivot.

As a builder, you should respect this. It’s better to cut a limb to save the body than to let a failing project bleed your runway dry. The e-bike launch was delayed, the optics were messy, and the pivot is jarring. But it’s honest. In a space filled with vaporware and founders who refuse to admit when a product market fit isn't there, this level of transparency is actually a bullish signal for their remaining projects.

What This Means for the Mobility Sector

The mobility space is currently split between two camps: those trying to solve the last-mile hardware problem and those trying to solve the autonomy problem. Also tried to bridge both and found the gap too wide. We are seeing a consolidation of intent. Companies are realizing that the "Tesla model" of doing everything vertically is nearly impossible to replicate in the current economic climate.

• Hardware remains the graveyard of startups: Even with Rivian DNA, the logistics of a physical launch are brutal.
• AI is the gravity: Every mobility company is being pulled toward the autonomy/AI stack because that is where the defensible IP lives.
• Market selection matters: Kenya was an ambitious choice, but the friction of operating there likely outweighed the data gains for their autonomous systems.

The Builder’s Perspective

If you are building in the crypto or AI space right now, you are likely feeling the urge to expand your scope. You want to build the protocol, the app, and the hardware device all at once. Don't. Also had more resources than 99% of startups, and they still had to choose.

The takeaway here isn't that e-motos are a bad idea. It's that your primary mission has to be the only mission. If Also wants to be an autonomous vehicle company, every hour spent on motorcycle suspension in Kenya was an hour stolen from their core AI training. They stopped the theft.

The hardest part of building is not deciding what to do, but deciding what to stop doing.

We see this in crypto all the time. Teams try to build a L1, a DEX, and a wallet simultaneously. They end up with three mediocre products. Also is choosing to have one potentially great product. It’s a gamble, especially given how crowded the autonomous space is, but at least they are now playing with a full hand of focus.

Final Thoughts for Founders

Watch how Also handles the next twelve months. If they can translate the saved resources from the Kenya exit into meaningful milestones in their autonomous stack, they will have provided a blueprint for the "strategic retreat." If they continue to struggle with delays, it suggests the issues are deeper than just project management.

For now, give them credit for the pivot. It’s better to be a focused autonomous company than a bankrupt motorcycle company. In the startup world, the only mistake you can't recover from is running out of time because you were busy doing too many things at once.

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