Daniel Kim

Kim is the founder and chief executive officers of Lit Motors, a startup electric motorcycle company based in San Francisco. His eight years of research in vehicle architecture and ecology has resulted in eight utility patents. With his eclectic background, Kim’s leadership represents the intersection of business, engineering, and design. At the age of 23, he completely redesigned, engineered, and built two biodiesel Land Rover SUVs, more than doubling their efficiency from 15 to 31 mpg. He worked at the Boston-based startup Local Motors, consulted in Vehicle Architecture for MIT’s Vehicle Design Summit, collaboratively strategized on a ride-share company Goloco, was a research assistant for Squid Labs/Makani Power, and was the project leader for the development of an inductive charging station at MIT Media Lab’s Smart Cities. A native of the Portland, Oregon area, Kim studied Physics and Biology at Reed College, Architecture at UC Berkeley, and finished at the Rhode Island School of Design with a degree in Industrial Design and Sustainable Transportation. He is currently building a full-scale proof-of-concept prototype of a two-wheeled, fully-enclosed, gyroscopically-stablized vehicle with his engineering design team at Lit Motors’ California vehicle laboratory.