Becoming The Mr. CTO · · 2 min read

Becoming The Mr. CTO - E12: Grunner MA1, the Bike with a Brain

Becoming The Mr. CTO - E12: Grunner MA1, the Bike with a Brain

After the early Grunner bikes, it was time to go all in.

We built our first production version. Stronger frame. Better electronics. Fully connected. We called it Grunner MA1, but inside the team, we called it Dinosaur, because of its ribbed design, and because it was built to take a hit and keep moving.

Of course, I worked through the night before the exhibition. Last-minute changes. Wires. Testing. Stress, but the good kind. The kind that tells you something real is about to happen. I was exhausted, but I enjoyed every second of it.

Once we packed everything - bike, tools, equipment, backup boards... I ended up riding in the back of the car. We were heading to Geneva, one of the biggest innovation and bike expos in Europe.

The moment we rolled the bike onto the floor, I knew we’d built something special. We won three awards. Dealers started asking questions. People stopped to look twice. The bike wasn’t just a bike anymore, it was a full tech platform.

I built an AI system into it, called EMMA - Evolved Modular Mainframe. It collected terrain data while riding, optimized power consumption, and recommended better routes. Yeah, AI on a bike, before everyone was talking about AI. We also had a custom app, remote control, route tracking, cloud sync, everything built from scratch. And it worked.

The media picked it up. We hit headlines again. We started selling custom electric bikes and vehicles. For the first time, I felt like this wasn’t just a side project, it was a business. Grunner MA1 taught me how to ship a product, how to present it under pressure, and how to make people care about something most still saw as just “a bike.” It wasn’t.

It was our proof of concept that innovation could live outside a lab or pitch deck. It was a machine with brains. And it put us on the map.

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