These bikers created a backpack that could save your life

Photo credit: alekseyrezin / 123RF.

Gandharv Bakshi keeps his bike near the wall by the door. Backpacks line the walls of his office, and, in the open air, one can hear a little of the quiet street below. He apologizes to me for the dust and asks if I ride a bicycle. When I admit that I can but don’t do it very often, he recommends me some weekend trips.

At its heart, Lumos is a team of bikers that makes hardware for bikers. Winner of Revvx Hardware Accelerator’s first batch’s DemoDay, it landed a presentation spot at HardwareCon next month in the Bay Area.

When it started, Lumos just wanted to charge your phone.

Its latest product is Aster, a backpack that lights up and, via a handlebar sensor and a smartphone app, tells cars behind riders if they’re turning or stopping. That helps with safety – globally, 1.25 million people died in road traffic accidents in 2013, and half of those were motorcyclists, cyclists, and pedestrians.

Lumos’ handlebar sensor.

Gandharv says the company has just crossed 100,000 Aster orders, mostly in the US, Germany, the UK, and Australia. California alone makes up over 10 percent of its orders. But co-founders Gandharv and Lavina Mahbubani didn’t plan for that. When it started, Lumos just wanted to charge your phone.

A solar start

Lumos’ products include the Unplug Solar 2K (US$99), the Thrillseeker (US$134), and the Aster (starts at US$119). The Unplug Solar 2K and the Thrillseeker are based off the co-founders’ original idea in 2014 to build solar backpacks. The Thrillseeker, in addition to being a solar panel, is a 12-liter hydration bag that can also carry a separate three-liter hydration bladder.

The solar panel allows the backpack to charge items like smartphones. That power could then be delivered to your phone or other device via a USB port in the bag. This is helpful if you need your phone to navigate while riding.

The founders are cyclists themselves, and a lot of their feedback comes from their own experiences or experiences of their customers. “We have a guy who went on a 20,000-kilometer ride, across the length and width of India,” shares Gandharv. Via the bag, the biker had charged his phone with the sun for most of the trip.

Gandharv shows off the cross-country biker’s bag (Lumos replaced his when his trip finished).

The solar power was also helpful for powering other mechanisms like bike lights. “Those were things we built for ourselves, not for the outside audience, just because we can,” says Gandharv. They threw the product on Amazon and got buyers from countries including the US, Germany, and their surprise dominating market – Mexico.

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