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After the HyperSport, with Jay Giraud: Part 2

Paul Roberts
6 days ago
8 min read

200, 200, 200 - Building the HyperSport Dream

Last week in Part 1: "Finding the Line - How Jay Giraud Rewired the Motorcycle World," we rode shotgun with Jay from his teenage breakouts to a life-changing accident in 2016 — the moment that flipped his world and sparked a mission to make motorcycles safer. His lesson? If you want to change the game, you have to start from scratch. This week, we dive into the machine born from that obsession — the HyperSport — and the grit, grind, and business strategy that turned a dream into the bike everyone wanted.

HyperSport: The Ride Everyone Wanted

The HyperSport started as a personal quest that turned into a reality. Born from a drive to make motorcycles safer, it was forged through relentless innovation and a no-compromise approach to design. Riders from every corner showed up: From LA tech founders to high-mileage truckers, boardroom suits to backroad rebels — they all lined up to throw down deposits and back the machine. The vision was clear, the concept undeniable, and the HyperSport became the bike everyone wanted.

If you want to make a safer motorbike, you have to do it yourself. Obviously, the bike that we dreamt up had so much technology in it. We had to change the motor, the battery system, and integrate everything into the bike. Nothing was strap-on; it was one piece of hardware that worked in unison.

Through their pursuit of safety, a hard truth hit home: to make an impact, they couldn’t follow the pack. The decision wasn’t just about engineering — it was a business call. To create a product that would sell, generate returns, and position the company as a serious player, they needed something extraordinary. What followed was a full-throttle mission to develop a world-class superbike — a machine that fused cutting-edge safety with performance, designed to turn heads and define a new standard.

The genesis of the company was safety. But if you say, "let's make a $5,000 motorbike," it wouldn't make sense financially. Why would you start at a $5,000 motorbike? Well, "because more people will buy it." But that's not true. A $5,000 motorbike, if you're lucky, has a 10% profit margin. You can't build a business on a 10% profit margin. You don't wake up in the morning and build the lowest cost Volkswagen Jetta.

The smallest mass-produced car company in the world, Porsche, bought one of the largest car companies in the world. Because Porsche makes more money. There are higher profit margins in fancier cars. And you don't have to make as many of them. So that was a business decision - the margin is in the super bikes.

It's just strategy, because if you make a $5,000 motorbike, you don't have a powertrain that could become a $30,000 motorbike - you can't scale up. But you can always scale down. So you make a powertrain capable of 200 miles per hour, 200 horsepower, and 200 miles of range, and then you can make everything below that.

You build it as a platform. You can have an 11, 15, or 20-kilowatt-hour pack all inside one design. One motor, one frame, one architecture, one cooling system, one set of ECUs, one set of battery management systems, and you can have three different ranges, sizes, and weights. All offering the same power and acceleration. It's economies of engineering. You create a halo product!

Building From the Ground Up

EV technology has come a long way in recent years, but the HyperSport didn’t just adopt what existed — it needed to outclass it. The current systems were good, but not enough to deliver the safety, performance, and integration the bike demanded. Building from the ground up wasn’t a whim; it was the only way to push past the limits of existing technology and create a machine that could truly set a new standard.

There is an incredibly small amount of space between the front and back tire of a motorbike - it's a design thing. There are no motors that are small and light enough, and no battery packs that are small and light enough, that could deliver the kind of performance we needed. The bar was high, so we had to build a new one. We had to design everything from scratch in order to fit it between the two tires. It's just that simple.

Energica started off with an off-the-shelf motor and an off-the-shelf air-cooled pack,* just like Zero**. And the result was a very limited product that sold limited numbers for many many years. To sell high volumes we had to be as good as a gas bike, if not better.

If I can go 100 miles (160 kilometres) on a gas tank, I need to go twice that far on an electric bike, because there's not as much charging available and it takes longer to fill-up. It's just simple. You need the ability to do a round trip. So working backwards from 200, 200, 200 necessitated these designs from scratch, because when we scoured the market, the technology didn't exist and we couldn't buy it off the shelf. And we knew that, because if it did exist, Energica or Zero would have more range and more power.

Throttle Trials: From Zero to Track Testing

By 2023, the HyperDrive and HyperSport were rolling on the track, racking up lap times that would make any gas bike wince. Their benchmark? A BMW S1000R — the standard they were determined to shatter.

We were beating our own lap times and crushing the BMW S1000R by seconds. We didn't have to change gears in between corners, and the bike had more power; it's just a more efficient system. We were on and off the power, in and out of the corners, shaving milliseconds, but it added up to multiple seconds of lap time improvement. We extracted the data to prove it, and that came out in a press release in January 2024.

Even in the thrill of track testing and crushing lap times, Jay’s mind couldn't drift from the business side of the ride. Investors were watching, funding rounds loomed, and the market demanded results. Every mile on the track was proof that the company had to deliver on its promises — not just to thrill riders, but to secure the financial confidence and backing that kept the vision alive.

You don't want an 'electric versus gas' fight in the market. People want to buy the better product. If it had to be hydrogen, if it had to be a hybrid, if it had to be frikking Coca-Cola in the tank, they just want better. That's what inspires people to buy, that's what inspires the company to launch, it inspires investors to invest. That's why you build the best bike in the world.

The HyperSport quickly became a highly coveted bike. From Silicon Valley innovators and European city commuters to tough-as-nails, diesel-loving truck drivers, riders were queueing at the door to stake their claim. Deposits kept rolling in, proof that people from every corner wanted this machine in their garage. The vision was confirmed — The HyperSport became the name on every rider’s radar.

And that's why we had hundreds of deposits. They [our buyers] didn't give a shit if it was gas or electric. They didn't even want to bring that up. They didn't even understand why we were talking about it. It weirded them out. They just wanted a transforming f-ing superbike.

Whether it was the commuter aspects, the no emissions aspects, the instant torque aspects, the quieter-than-a-loud-super-bike aspects, or the "I want my bacon protected with side-view blind spot detection" aspects, there was something that related to everyone.

The Price of Innovation

Building a superbike isn’t cheap. Building any vehicle from the ground up? That’s the kind of math that makes billionaires curl up in a ball and cry themselves to sleep. To gain some perspective, let’s briefly pivot to the car industry: when a major OEM launches a completely new platform, development, tooling, certification, and production ramp-up can easily run into the several-billion-dollar range — think a minimum of US$5 billion.

And it doesn’t stop there. BMW has said it spent “well over €10 billion” on its Neue Klasse vehicle architecture, covering new models, motors, batteries, and an entirely new factory. In the first half of 2024 alone, BMW poured €4.17 billion into R&D, much of it going straight into Neue Klasse development.***

A superbike is a smaller beast, of course, but the numbers still sting. Zero Motorcycles is in the adult lane with hundreds of millions in investor confidence fuelling their electric crusade. From a scrappy $5 million start-up round back in 2010 to Hero MotoCorp’s $60 million lifeline and a fresh $120 million raise in 2024.**** Energica’s motorcycle platform didn’t come cheap either, with years of R&D, production headaches, and investor lifelines - Ideanomics first dropped $13.2 million for a 20% stake in 2021, then went all-in buying out about 70% of the company in 2022.*****

This kind of cash doesn’t just fund new bikes — it bankrolls the evolution of an entire platform, the kind of R&D burn that separates garage tinkerers from companies rewriting the rules of motorcycling.

Jay and his team weren’t playing small. By late 2022, they had pulled in over $65 million in investor funding and claimed more than $100 million in credit-card-backed reservations. But even that wasn’t enough — they needed more to turn the HyperSport into a reality.

$85 million wasn't enough. It was $60-odd million at the end of 2022, and when the financial markets went way upside down, and venture capital went from $500 billion invested a year to $4 billion, the air got sucked out of the room. Thousands of companies around the world starved to death.

$100 million is peanuts. It's nothing. More money gets thrown at software companies every day. Look at the money going to AI right now. These are seed-stage start-ups getting $9, $10, $20 billion on day one.

With millions raised and a world-class bike in the garage, the hardest battles were still to come. But they weren’t fought on the track — they were battled out in the boardroom.

Next week: When Vision Meets Reality — the exit, the regrets, and what comes next. See you there.

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You can find Jay on his YouTube channel - Founder Whisperer - and if you're a new or experienced founder yourself, you can ride on Jay's advice through his coaching services. He can be contacted via LinkedIn

Notes and Citations:

*According to Energica, during its early development phase (circa 2012–2016), the company sourced key motor and controller components externally. From 2021 onward, Energica introduced its in-house-designed, liquid-cooled EMCE motor and updated battery architecture.

Sources: Energica Motor Company Investor Presentation (Jan 2021); BikeSocial Interview (July 2022)

**Zero Motorcycles states that its Z-Force® powertrain components — including the battery pack, motor, and controller — are “designed by Zero Motorcycles in California, the product of years of research, development, and testing.” From Zero’s own website: “The Z-Force® motor was developed from the ground up by Zero Motorcycles to be optimized for efficiency, power, and compact size.”

***BMWBLOG, Sep, 2025; BMWBLOG, “BMW R&D spend hits €4.17 billion in H1 2024,” Aug, 2024.

****TechCrunch (Jan 2010); Business Standard (Sep 2022); TechCrunch (Oct 2024); Finsmes (Sep 2022)

*****Cleantechnica, March, 2021. MarketScreener, March 2022.