STORY: Alum's Vivant Cycleworks Aims to be Key to a Greener, More Connected Future

February 17, 2025

For James Nee '15, 2024 was a year of big dreams and making them a reality. He's been busy creating and launching an electric cargo bike with a mission to reduce the environmental impact of personal transportation, putting us on a path towards a safer and more sustainable future. And with his American-made Vivant Cycleworks, the road ahead is clear.

From cutting carbon emissions to creating safer, community-oriented streets, Nee, Vivant founder and CEO, believes cargo e-bikes are the key to a greener, more connected future. Nee spent about a year-and-a-half designing and building up Vivant, launching late last year with their first cargo bike, Juno, with a mission to replace cars.

And he credits Olin courses and experiences in helping him to get where he is today.

An Olin Foundation

It could be said Nee's path to founding Vivant Cycleworks started at Olin in 2011.

As a mechanical engineering major, Nee enjoyed some career and life-defining influences at Olin - both inside and outside the classroom where he worked in the Olin Shop and on a multidisciplinary team with fellow students and industry sponsors.

"Really, my entire Olin experience has influenced my journey thus far. The Olin course, User-Oriented Collaborative Design (UOCD), is a big one because it helped me get out of my comfort zone and actually talk to users, learn from them, and try to read between the lines to discover what they really need," says Nee '15.

Nee's learning in UOCD - now just Collaborative Design, was augmented during his senior year with the opportunity to serve on the founding Olin SCOPE team for the Santos Family Foundation - an opportunity that helped to open his eyes to the need to reduce the environmental impact of personal transportation. 

"This SCOPE project further honed my user-oriented, product development skills, but also introduced me to the harsh realities facing non-car road users, and how dangerous and unsafe car-centric living is for human health and safety," says Nee.

While at Olin he was also able to invest time and energy into improving his nascent welding capabilities.

"I welded and fabricated a lot of parts on the Juno platform, and I was able to work part-time at a local makerspace to help keep costs down and gain access to tools. Knowing how to use those tools, and when to outsource certain parts, expanded my flexibility to answer the "build vs. buy" question that is central to the engineering challenge."

And because he could build so much himself, and knew what was worth buying, thanks to his early Olin days, Nee was able to be extremely capital efficient with the e-bike prototype. 

Designing for Sustainability 

Thinking about the question of "why cargo e-bikes?" when looking to design for a more sustainable future, Nee approaches it from both a macro view and the need to be bold. To start, the infrastructure needed to support car-centric urban planning is fundamentally unsustainable, says Nee. Not just from an environmental perspective, but also from a financial one. 

"Cities are struggling just to raise enough tax revenue to maintain aging infrastructure. We have to think more radically. We have to go smaller; we must more efficient, and to me, cargo e-bikes are that ideal solution."

One of the most innovative and efficient features of the Juno e-bike is the detachable and modular cargo box, which has a 200 LB capacity. The main benefit of this box, Nee says, is to enable the platform, the entire vehicle, to change and evolve to meet different user needs.

And with a knotty topic such as modern transportation, with advanced technology, entrenched user habits, and the myriad means of getting people and goods from one place to another, there could be an unlimited list of user requirements to design for. 

Nee has thought the details through and keeps the messaging and the value proposition simple.

"Anything that you would want to use your car to do, run errands like going to the grocery store, dropping off young children at daycare or at school, certainly anything that's in and around town, you could do that by cargo e-bike."

And because Vivant's mission is to reduce the environmental impact of personal transportation, not to mention Nee's own climate change, eco-conscious goals to reimagine the field, Nee wants to make it easy to repair and reuse his e-bike.

"This is one of the great challenges of building anything hardware related, but especially with something that is large format, decentralized, and has a high bar for safety," says Nee. 

To address this, one of the primary design requirements going into the prototype was that Nee needed to use readily available, off-the-shelf bicycle parts wherever possible.

"I'm pragmatic about the risks associated with a hardware start-up, and bespoke parts not only cost me more to make, they also risk stranding the user," he adds.

The goal is that Nee's early customers can learn everything they need about how to repair and rebuild their own bikes, even if Vivant no longer makes that model of Juno, or, unfortunately, is no longer incorporated. Plus, a doubly exciting aspect about the modular concept Nee has developed is that it makes repairs that much easier. By quickly removing the appliance (i.e. cargo unit), a customer has easy access to the suspension and steering elements.

Alumni, Along for the Ride!

When it comes to the journey of the past year-and-a-half, Nee's tapped into the expertise of many fellow alumni and of current students, who've each lent their own knowledge and passions to both sides of the project. For example, some of the photos and the video embedded in this story were directed and filmed by Sean Lowen '16. 

Keep an eye out for Ari Chae '15, Derek Redfern '15, and Evan Dorsky '16 who help add some friendly faces to the launch video. 

And in some cases, one Oliner led to another.

"On the user-oriented side, Rachel Boy '15 was actually the person I talked to that got me thinking about building Juno as a bike for young families, and then that led to me interviewing Maggie Su '15, Brooke Moss '25, Andrew Tsang '09, and Rachel Bobbins '13. Chris Hill '14 also helped me to expand my frameworks around user interviews and inspired me to start taking photos of cargo e-bikes out in the wild," says Nee.

Dan Greely '10 and Arpan Rau '19 assisted with course correcting along the start-up journey, especially when Nee began thinking about how to find and sell to users, and Steven Zhang '12 was a source of encouragement, Nee says, since the very beginning.

Nee also had the backing of his co-founders from Research of Electric Vehicles at Olin (REVO), Mark Muraoka '14 and Nicholas Ostrom '14, both experienced in the automotive and electric vehicle space. James Regulinski '13, Jake Felser '10, Ally Bell '24, and Juliette Chevallier '15, all shared "great insights to consider when fundraising and structuring a start-up."

Ankur Das '16 and Elliott Wyse '15 helped review Nee's designs and emergency repairs, while Brendan Caporaletti '16 and Jack Fan '16 were "an incredible source of support when I temporarily lose faith in the long-term vision of more dense, walkable cities." 

The Platform 

Regarding the specs, Juno is equipped with a powerful Class 3 Hub motor, 750 Watts peak power and with a top speed of 28 MPH. It also has five levels of Torque Sensing Pedal Assist, an 11-speed cassette, and is designed and built on one very cool platform.

"What is exciting to me about Juno as a platform is that there are two product lines in one, the base vehicle platform and the modular cargo unit," says Nee.

And there's still much to keep Nee busy in the coming months, as he works to improve both cargo box and the Juno platform.

"One big piece of feedback I've been getting is that potential customers want to know how their children might be seated in the box. I'm currently working on drawing and rendering new box concepts as a low-cost and quick way to better learn what people want and help bridge the gap between building more prototypes and learning from users."

And the Juno platform itself still has plenty of opportunities to be improved, but according to Nee, the form factor and design is largely set, "very much in a Pareto, 80/20 fashion." 

Steps to Success 

While Nee shares that the last year-and-a-half working on his own company has given him some of the greatest joys and most harrowing heartbreaks, he loves the freedom to set his own schedule and to be completely autonomous. This comes, of course, at the cost of being the go-to person for every design oversight and strategic misstep.

But having the ability and skill to work and succeed at both ends of the product cycle - an adeptness forged from an Olin educational foundation, is invaluable, says Nee.

It also helps keep things in perspective and sows confidence when facing late-night worries that a new design element isn't going to work.

"My Olin education gave me the strength-of-will to recognize that every failure was a step towards success, and the fundamentals necessary to properly assess what went wrong, how to fix it, and then to execute correctly the first time," says Nee.

"That comes from years of over-ambitious Design Nature, PoE, and SCOPE projects, and what I believe is the most unique benefit Olin has provided me: being able to build. Not only can I design great products, but I can also implement those designs, and having deep experience with both those skill sets has been an unparalleled blessing."