US-based sustainable truck developer Rivian Automotive raised a $700m round, which was led by e-commerce and cloud computing group Amazon. Amazon, for whose core operations electric trucks and trucking technology is of obvious strategic importance, is not the only corporate that has backed the company. Rivian had previously closed financing from diversified conglomerate Sumitomo and car distributor Abdul Latif Jameel (ALJ). Details on previous funding rounds were not disclosed, although the company had reportedly raised over $1.5bn to date, including $200m in debt financing from financial services firm Standard Chartered Bank in 2018. Automotive manufacturer General Motors was also rumoured as a potential investor or partner of the company but it reportedly only remains in talks with it for the moment.
Founded in 2009, Rivian is currently developing all-electric pick-up truck and sports utility vehicle, both expected to be commercially available in the US in late 2020 and, subsequently, in Europe. The company plans to manufacture vehicles at a facility in the state of Illinois.
This is the first sizeable corporate-backed deal for 2019in the electric vehicle space, which has been on the radar of corporate investors, as the below GCV Analytics bar chart suggests, though there was a slight drop registered last year. The number of corporate-backed deals went down from 32 in 2017 to 27 in 2018 and so did the total capital estimated in those rounds – from $7.17bn to just north of $4bn.
