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Welcome to Flywheel, an exploration of micromobility, light electric vehicles (LEVs), and the technologies that enable them. This week’s edition features an interview with Justin Kosmides, the co-founder of Bloom, about how Bloom’s digital trade rep aggregates demand, derisks critical supply-chain partnerships, and leverages modularity and targeted domestic assembly to fundamentally transform how hardware companies scale in America.

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Observation of the Week

The Digital Trade Rep for American Manufacturing

U.S. manufacturing is at a critical juncture. Companies reshoring production face steep challenges around costs, capacity, and complex supply chains that aren't optimized for medium-volume, high-mix products—issues that can make or break hardware businesses. In response, Bloom is building an integrated ecosystem platform to streamline domestic manufacturing, logistics, and financing specifically for hardware startups. This week on Flywheel, I spoke with Justin Kosmides, co-founder of Bloom, about how their digital trade rep aggregates demand, derisks critical supply-chain partnerships, and leverages modularity and targeted domestic assembly to fundamentally transform how hardware companies scale in America. Please welcome Justin:

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Puneeth: Welcome Justin, thanks for being here. We’ve obviously known each other for a while, but could we maybe start with your background, your co-founder's story, and what inspired Bloom for the audience?

Justin: Chris and I often pitch our backgrounds as part of the first wave of the micromobility hype cycle, though we joined at different times. Chris brought well-known brands into the US like Riese and Muller and helped scale them,, while I initially joined as an investor before fully diving into operating an e-bike brand. Both of us were outsiders of sorts—my background was in banking and consulting, and Chris’s experience was in army logistics. Early on, Chris toured factories in Europe, and I was trying to help companies shift production from China to Detroit. All the founding members, including Tarani Duncan, who launched Citi Bike, and Kevin Klein, the former North American GM of Cake, come from mobility and have firsthand experience with the pain points of operating micromobility and hardware devices. We learned valuable lessons from the early excitement and challenges of launching new products, and these lessons informed our approach with Bloom.

Puneeth: Bloom has evolved significantly since I’ve known you. Can you explain its transition from the original vertically integrated model to the now broader ecosystem platform model?

Justin: It's partly semantics and word choice, but fundamentally, we were always heading towards creating a back-end support system for hardware—whether electric scooters, bikes, EV chargers, drones, or small robotics. All hardware companies need efficient back-end support for manufacturing, distribution, and servicing, which is distinct from developing the technology itself. We've consistently aimed to streamline these less glamorous operational aspects, allowing brands to focus on their core competencies and differentiators. Hardware brands immediately understood our value proposition, but investors and others outside micromobility needed clearer explanations. External factors like tariffs and industry shifts toward efficiency also drove our evolution. This goes back to how we initially pitched the model—it just took slight adjustments in the puzzle pieces and external validation from market shifts. In the first version of Bloom, we wanted to provide all the back-end support ourselves. The new version acts more as a marketplace or matchmaker that helps hardware companies find the right service partners to help with manufacturing, distribution, and servicing.

Puneeth: In Bloom’s current model, how do you vet ecosystem partners, and what's your role once connections are made?

Justin: We call it matchmaking and discovery. If a company needs production moved from China to a more local option, we run an RFP across multiple partners. Unlike platforms with ratings, we rely on detailed information about past projects and capabilities and use that historical data to develop our own metrics for a partner’s capabilities. Right now, this matchmaking and discovery on the Bloom platform is done manually by us, though we do rely on automation to facilitate financing, billing, and some logistics. Manual matchmaking is essential at this stage because the level of detail and data required to connect a partner with a customer doesn't yet exist. But over time with more repetition and matches, we can collect the data and patterns required and automate more of the matchmaking process. We're essentially acting as digital trade representatives, that helps hardware companies find the best fit partners for their needs.

Puneeth: How does Bloom help smaller hardware companies negotiate better terms with larger manufacturers?

Justin: We aggregate volumes across customers and help standardize partner/service requests, which streamlines interactions and makes transactions more efficient. On the partner side, we also reduce their risks by guaranteeing timely payments through our platform, simplifying onboarding processes, and offering invoice factoring and extended credit terms, which allows them to offer their services at lower costs. This helps to replicate the financial advantages historically unique to overseas manufacturing domestically.

Puneeth: What are your risks in offering financing services/factoring and payment guarantees, and how do you manage them?

Justin: We've partnered with OatFi, a B2B marketplace credit provider with strong underwriting capabilities. This helps us manage initial risks, but long-term, we aim to offer diverse financial products like inventory financing and extended credit to enhance customer stickiness and operational efficiency. Financial services are central to our long-term strategy—when investors start insisting companies use Bloom for efficient scaling, we'll know we've succeeded.

Puneeth: One of the key issues marketplaces often face is disintermediation, where people leave the marketplace once they’ve been matched with someone they’re content with. Why should customers remain on Bloom rather than dealing with each other directly after the match is made?

Justin: Hardware-related decisions typically aren't isolated—they're interconnected and influence multiple operational aspects simultaneously. Bloom’s integrated network, which encompasses manufacturing, logistics, and servicing, intentionally addresses this complexity and provides access to all of it under one platform. We charge a low membership fee that represents the cost savings and operational efficiency Bloom provides. Many of our customers effectively see us as part of the operational team, and the membership fee is a reinforcement of that perspective. This structure naturally encourages sustained participation. This goes back to our original intent—to address operational inefficiencies comprehensively rather than through isolated services. As we begin to offer more financial services, we think the product will only become stickier and more customers will want to handle their transactions through Bloom.

Puneeth: One of the big macro talking points right now is around bringing back US manufacturing. While accelerated by the tariffs, the reshoring movement has been gaining momentum for quite some time. In your opinion, what are the biggest challenges hardware companies face when attempting to reshore their manufacturing and other operations?

Justin: Historically, US manufacturing has excelled in high-volume, low-mix segments or highly specialized low-volume, low-mix sectors like aerospace. However, it struggles with medium-volume, high-mix production. We think that by aggregating volume across companies and both standardizing and modularizing hardware in general, we can convert the individual medium-volume, high-mix production demands of our customers into a blended high-volume, low-mix demand that our CM partners can service. It’s a matter of bringing more viable production density. Visibility and matchmaking inefficiencies for domestic manufacturers have also historically been a significant hurdle, which is another key value prop of Bloom. Additionally, the underlying supply chain, such as motors and battery packs, remains a weak spot for reshoring efforts.

Puneeth: One of the points you mentioned is around modularity and standardization. There's an interesting tension between modularity and differentiation, and many hardware companies often see custom components and designs as a way to stand out from competitors. How do you see this desire to differentiate while reducing manufacturing costs/challenges playing out?

Justin: Mobility learned the hard way that redesigning established components rarely adds real value. Increasingly, differentiation should come from unique software and design elements rather than basic hardware components. For example, DJI, Bosch, or Bafang motors are perfectly performant enough for various hardware applications, and no matter how much companies convince themselves they are adding value by customizing standard components, it typically just isn't the case. It’s more practical to stick with proven standardized parts and focus differentiation efforts elsewhere, like in software or unique user experiences.

Puneeth: To wrap things up, what’s Bloom’s current status, and what excites you about the next few years of the business?

Justin: We recently closed our pre-seed round, which helped us significantly expand our engineering team and automate more of our discovery and matchmaking processes. Now, our focus is on expanding our service provider, enhancing platform quality, building better partner profiles, and increasing member engagement. There’s a growing demand to stand up more and more hardware operational services in the US, and we want to be the enabling ecosystem layer to help the industry get there.

You can learn more about Bloom here. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

For more observations and resources on micromobility and LEVs, check out rideflywheel.com/resources.

That’s it for this edition. Thanks again for joining, see you next time!

- Puneeth Meruva