Oyika

Southeast Asia moves on two wheels. Hundreds of millions of motorbikes weave through Jakarta, Bangkok, Phnom Penh and Kuala Lumpur, carrying commuters, food orders and parcels. Electrifying that fleet is one of the region's largest climate opportunities - and one of its hardest logistics problems. Batteries are expensive, charging is slow, and a rider who earns by the delivery cannot afford to sit idle while a pack fills up.

Oyika, founded in Singapore in 2018, built its business around sidestepping both obstacles at once. Instead of selling riders a battery, it keeps ownership of a fleet of swappable packs and sells access to them. Instead of asking riders to charge, it asks them to swap. A depleted battery goes into an automated cabinet; a fully charged one comes out. The whole exchange takes less than a minute - roughly the time it takes to top up petrol at a kiosk.

“The way to go” - the company's tagline reads less like a slogan than a route instruction.

The model is called Battery-as-a-Service, or BaaS. A single swap is reported at about a dollar and buys roughly 50 kilometres of range. Riders choose from pay-per-use, weekly and monthly plans, and the battery is often bundled with the motorbike itself. The effect is to turn the largest capital cost of going electric into a predictable subscription, budgeted like a phone plan rather than a car loan.

The founders came to the problem from the power industry rather than the auto industry. Jinsi Lee, Oyika's chief executive, previously ran international markets for the solar firm Sunseap; co-founder and president Carl Wong has a background across solar and hydropower. That lineage shows in how Oyika describes its cabinets - not as fuel pumps with cables, but as nodes in a distributed energy network. Each battery is IoT-connected, carrying GPS, 4G telematics, anti-theft and health monitoring, which lets the company track degradation, balance supply across stations, and even repurpose packs when they retire from the road.

That reframing produced Oyika's most distinctive feature: its batteries are bike-agnostic. Rather than lock riders into a single manufacturer, the packs are designed to fit most mass-market electric motorcycles, from brands such as Yadea, Niu and Gesits to Selis, Rakata and others. Where some competitors sell a closed ecosystem, Oyika sells the energy layer beneath many of them - a strategy that turns rival bike-makers into potential customers.

The same hardware does a second job. In rural Cambodia, where Oyika partnered with the United Nations Development Programme, the swappable packs serve as portable clean-energy sources for off-grid communities. A battery that moves a motorbike by day can help light a home that never had a reliable grid connection. It is an unusually literal example of infrastructure doing double duty.

Investors have taken the network seriously. In 2021, the energy group Yinson backed the company through its green-technology arm. In 2023, Oyika closed a US$10.8 million Series B led by Banpu NEXT, the clean-energy subsidiary of Thailand's Banpu group, with Yinson Venture Capital participating. The round valued the company at about US$62.7 million and was earmarked for exactly the unglamorous thing that determines whether battery swapping succeeds: more cabinets, in more places, always stocked.

Density is the moat. In Jakarta, Oyika has deployed more than 250 swap cabinets, aiming to put a swap point within roughly three kilometres of any rider. It runs some 200 stations across Indonesia, around 100 in Malaysia's Klang Valley, and about 70 across Bangkok and Phuket following an official Thailand rollout in May 2024. A swap network, like any network, grows more valuable with each node - the more stations, the less any rider has to think about running flat.

Oyika is not alone in the category. Taiwan's Gogoro pioneered battery swapping at scale, and regional players such as SWAP Energi and Volta compete for the same Indonesian streets. The incumbent, though, remains the petrol motorbike - and Oyika's argument against it is practical rather than moral: for a delivery rider counting minutes and rupiah, a 60-second swap at a dollar a time is simply the cheaper, faster option. That is the wager. Not that people want to save the planet, but that they want to save time and money, and that clean energy can be the way they do it.