Our Solution
3BO is not a tracker bolted onto a bike. It is an Assure-Tech stack — detect, decide, respond — built so the bike you already love comes home in minutes, not as an insurance write-off.
The moment it started
Every 3BO conversation eventually circles back to a single moment: a bicycle, checked in at an airport in Spain, gone before its owner had cleared security.
Carinus Lemmer, 3BO’s founder, was among other things a professional cyclist, and later the COO of Cycling South Africa, before he became a technology entrepreneur. He understands bicycles the way few people do — not as commodities, but as instruments people build a relationship with over thousands of kilometres. When his own bike was stolen while he was travelling, the experience exposed a gap he could not ignore: every tracker on the market at the time was built for cargo, pets, or phones. None were built for the split-second window in which a stolen bicycle is still recoverable.
As Lemmer has recounted publicly, the bicycle was stolen at the airport while he was still checking in — gone within the few minutes it took to hand over his luggage.
He has always carried insurance, and always will. A claim would eventually have put money toward another bicycle. That was never the wound.
What disappeared at the airport was not a commodity on a schedule — it was his bike: the saddle worn to his shape, the pedals and bars set just so, the colour he had chosen, the fit that only arrives after thousands of kilometres and the places those kilometres had taken him. It was an extension of his body and his memory of the road. A replacement from an insurer is a stranger; it does not restore the relationship.
That is the gap 3BO endeavours to close. The point is not a smoother claims process (though it can help). The point is recovery of the bike you already love, smoothly, measured in minutes — so the relationship continues instead of becoming a write-off.
That gap became our founding brief: build a system that does not just record where a bicycle went, but actively closes the window between theft and recovery — measured in minutes, not in insurance paperwork.
Our philosophy: the Assure-Tech stack
3BO does not describe itself as a tracker company. Lemmer frames the product as an Assure-Tech stack for cycling — hardware, software, and human response designed together, not bolted on after the fact.
| Layer | Philosophy |
|---|---|
| Detect | Motion and tamper detection must be instant. A thief deciding whether to commit has a window measured in seconds — so the alert has to fire before the lock is cut or the garage door pried open. |
| Decide | The owner gets the fastest possible decision point: a single message asking, in effect, “was this you?” No app to open, no login, no friction between alert and action. |
| Respond | If it wasn’t you, the live location becomes shareable in one tap — to friends, family, neighbourhood security, or a contracted response partner — turning a single victim into a coordinated recovery network. |
Behind every layer is a simple belief: 3BO is built by cyclists, for the people who ride — and for the people who love them. The loved one still at home when the ride runs late, watching the clock, asking the quiet questions: Why haven’t they returned? Are they still moving? Are they safe? That silence is its own kind of emergency. A live link does not replace trust; it answers the fear with something solid — movement, a last place seen, the normal route — before worry turns into a blind search down every possible road.
When something goes wrong, you do not open a new app and hope a stranger answers. You turn to your mom, your dad, your aunt, your brother, or your WhatsApp neighbourhood community — the people who will drop everything. 3BO meets them where they already are, puts a live picture of the bike in their hands, and lets them help in the first critical minutes.
And they are not left alone with that responsibility. The same escalation features bring in professional response — contracted security and recovery partners (as with medical, home security, and motor retrievals).
Community courage, backed by professionals. That is our Respond layer.
The guiding belief is that recovery is a speed problem before it is a technology problem. 3BO’s own operational data in Stellenbosch — where the company is based — backs this directly.
“We lose bicycles in Stellenbosch and we get them back in minutes.”
Carinus Lemmer — Sunday Times / BusinessLive, October 2025
Source: “Beating bicycle theft with tech,” Arthur Goldstuck
The speed is deliberate: removing or tampering with a 3BO unit takes more time than the average opportunistic thief has, and forced removal risks damaging the bicycle in a way that defeats the thief’s own purpose.
The same idea scales to fleets. A common failure mode for bike shops, teams, and rental operators is the organised raid: a window broken, a storage door forced, multiple bikes gone before anyone notices. 3BO’s answer is that every bike fires independently the moment it is touched — a multi-point alert in the moment, not a discovery the next morning.
No app. No friction. Just WhatsApp.
One of 3BO’s most deliberate product decisions is the refusal to build a dedicated mobile app. Cyclists, fleet managers, and first responders already live inside messaging — in South Africa, that is WhatsApp — so 3BO meets them there instead of asking them to download, register, and remember another piece of software.
Every interaction — arming a device, receiving a tamper alert, confirming a theft, sharing a live tracking link, or putting a bike to sleep after a false alarm — happens inside a WhatsApp thread. No apps, no delays: fast recovery. Other messaging platforms are on the roadmap; WhatsApp is the right starting point for the South African market.
Hardware in the field
Day-to-day 3BO runs on proven Teltonika LTE trackers. Two field reports show what the packs actually do:
- ATC700 — standard bike asset · charge & discharge · resolution soak
- TMT250 — personal-style unit with on-device cues · charge & discharge
Ready to protect a bike?