Remember Cake? No, not the one you have sitting in your kitchen. I'm talking about the beleaguered Swedish maker of electric motorcycles that entered bankruptcy proceedings in February 2024.
As you may recall, the story took a bit of a turn (at least, in the US) when a Florida-based shop called eMoto and its owner, Michael Joyce, announced that it had bought nearly all the remaining bikes and parts in Cake's US inventory.
The story was always going to be complicated, because while Cake was based in Sweden, it also did business internationally, with offices in the US and Taiwan. Still, at the time, Cake's bankruptcy administrator in Sweden made it seem like it was very strange that these assets should have changed hands prior to the full bankruptcy proceedings concluding.
It wasn't long afterward before we began to hear rumblings of a new owner possibly buying all of Cake's assets through the Swedish bankruptcy administration firm. RideApart's requests for comment from that buyer on their future plans for Cake went unanswered at the time.
But now that it's June, that buyer has just made an official announcement. Cake's back.
Who Owns Cake Now?
A Norwegian firm called Brages Holding AS purchased Cake's assets and intellectual property. It's owned by Espen Digernes, a car dealer of Toyota and Lexus vehicles in Norway. And if you consider the automobile market in Norway, the interest in getting into something like the Cake ecosystem begins to make at least a little sense.
In early January 2024, headlines proclaiming things like "EVs Take 82% Market Share [In Norway]" from Reuters only further cemented just how strong the uptake of EVs in the country has been. It's also not terribly surprising when you understand that the country intends to halt the sale of new ICE cars in 2025. That's, um, next year, if you can believe it. Norway isn't just living in the future; the future is already here.
That context is crucial to understanding the revived Cake organization's official announcement.
"As a car retailer in Norway, we have witnessed how fast the electrification shift can go when people set their minds to it. Now, we believe the transformation in the micro-mobility sector will accelerate as well. Not only for motorbikes, but also for scooters, mopeds, and electric bikes. When we first connected with CAKE as a retailer, we fell in love with their products, the design, the craftsmanship, and the story behind CAKE," Digernes wrote.
"Our goal in acquiring CAKE was to evolve the brand. We aim to scale CAKE by building a robust retailer distribution network and transforming a remarkable Swedish initiative into a Scandinavian success," he concluded.
Lofty goals, to be sure, and the newly-revived Cake certainly has its work cut out for it. A look through the back catalog of two major Swedish business publications, Dagens Industri and Breakit.se, which covered the rise and fall of Cake in detail, gives insight into some of the twists and turns the company went through directly post-bankruptcy.
While original Cake founder and CEO Stefan Ytterborn was one of the original company's biggest shareholders, two others were Creandum and AMF, a Swedish pension fund. None of these three received money out of the bankruptcy, as other creditors had priority above them.
If you guessed that the pension fund probably received nothing, go ahead and get yourself a nice, big slice of cake.
One former investor in Cake who was left out in the cold, by the name of Adam Lewis, even reportedly threatened legal action against Ytterborn if he or anyone affiliated with him was involved in the purchase of Cake out of bankruptcy. (For his part, Ytterborn has since formed a product and brand consulting firm with several former Cake designers, which he's calling To Be.)
So How Much Of The Cake Remains?
According to the revived Cake's official announcement, key former Cake team members including CTO Petra Färm will be part of the revived Cake team going forward. Although its new ownership is based in Norway, Cake has now reopened both its original HQ and its brand store in Stockholm, Sweden. Furthermore, it says that bikes previously produced are now available for sale once more.
As to how things will move forward from here, stay tuned.
