B2B News | Nine years after launching with promises that seemed too bold to be true, Damon Motors has reached its real endpoint — not a dramatic bankruptcy filing or a farewell press release, but a storage locker in Vancouver that was sold because no one paid rent.
Our latest article about Daemon’s downfall was in April, when the company’s website shut down without warning, replaced by a clear ‘site not found’ message. At that time, leadership had already fallen apart: both co-founders were gone, the CTO was gone, the original engineering team disintegrated, no manufacturing facilities were left standing. That article ended on an open question. It is not there anymore.
From storage wars to selling
A Vancouver storage facility auctioned off an outstanding 10-by-15-foot locker after its tenant — believed to be connected to Damon — failed to settle an outstanding balance of nearly $2,500 in fees, RideApart reports. Neither the buyer nor the auction house could confirm who actually owned the unit, as Canadian privacy laws protect that information even from the winning bidder. The only clue presented was that the locker belonged to ‘a corporation’.
Due to copyright restrictions, We invite you to view all the photos from the original article on RideApart.
Inside, the buyer and his sibling found a half-assembled Damen HyperSport prototype – reportedly the same MK2 generation that was once tested on the track by outside journalists – along with several generations of bodywork, a hollow display unit of the company’s HyperDrive motor, charging equipment, a 2024 maintenance checklist, and, oddly enough, a 12-foot Christmas tree.
The prototype is missing the front end and carbon fiber front wheel, and the provenance of its actual parts remains unclear: early prototypes of the Demon reportedly relied on BMW switchgear and a Yamaha-derived frame and swingarm. But what matters is not the perfection of the bike. It is that, as far as anyone can determine, this is the first and only Damen motorcycle to fall into the hands of a private individual – not through a sale, but through an abandoned estate auction.
a decade of promises
Founded in Vancouver in 2017 by Jay Giraud and Dominic Kwong, Damen introduced numbers that dwarfed anything in the electric motorcycle sector at the time: 200 horsepower, 200 mph top speed, and 200 miles of range from the flagship HyperSport. The bike was outfitted with an ambitious AI safety suite — a collision-warning system called CoPilot and a riding-position mechanism called Shift that can reconfigure the bike’s ergonomics mid-ride.
The company went public on the Nasdaq through a reverse merger in November 2024, but its stock price fell soon after. Manufacturing timelines were repeatedly pushed back, from the original 2021 target, eventually pushed to 2024 and beyond, variously attributed to COVID-19, production facility changes, and changes in partnerships. By the end of 2025, the company had moved away from hardware entirely and was rebranding around a software platform called Daemon I/O, built on rider telemetry and machine learning.
This did not save the company. A string of departures came in early 2026: CFO Bal Bhullar, board member Karan Sodhi, and finally CEO Dom Kwong himself, whose exit in February left Damen without a functioning board. A skeleton crew of two named employees remained listed on the company’s own website for weeks before disappearing entirely.
More than 3,000 waiting
The most consequential unresolved thread is the more than 3,000 reservation deposits Damon collected over the years from prospective riders, each hoping for a bike that, by the company’s own admission, was never more than 70 percent complete, even in prototype form. Amber Spencer, Damen’s former CMO, told RideApart that the deposit was fully refundable. With no functioning leadership, no accounts anyone can find, and reportedly multiple lawsuits now pending, this promise is currently unattainable.
Damen’s investor relations page technically remains live — a strange artifact of a company that otherwise no longer exists in any operational sense. At the time of writing there is still no Damen Inc. trading in the OTC market. Can buy shares of Rs. Whether it means anything is a different question altogether.
what is left
What started as an announcement that the motorcycle was being revived ended with parts, fairings, and a half-built prototype being sold to strangers who didn’t know what they were bidding on until after they won. It’s a fitting, almost absurd coda to a company that spent nine years promising revolution and, in the end, delivered a locker full of unfulfilled dreams.
