Building Cervelo
The genesis of Cervelo started in 1995 when two young engineering students named Phil White and Gerard Vroomen met in the composites lab at McGill University in Canada. Over a span of 15 years they went from building a crazy aerodynamic time trial bike as a university project to creating one of the most disruptive and loved bike brands in the world.
But what many people don’t know is that as wildly successful Cervelo was up until 2011, it was a pressure cooker of constant financial challenges which ultimately led to Cervelo needing to sell the business to Dutch holding company, PON. 2008-2011 saw the perfect storm for Cervelo with the global financial crisis, setting up a professional team that was far more successful than ever imagined, and a private lender which led to the company’s turn of events.
