Arrival, a UK-headquartered electric van and bus developer backed by corporate investors Hyundai, Kia and UPS, agreed a reverse merger with special purpose acquisition company CIIG Merger Corp yesterday.
The merged entity will be valued at $5.4bn once the deal closes and it comes after CIIG, which is sponsored by funds and accounts managed by subsidiaries of investment manager BlackRock, floated on the Nasdaq Capital market in a $225m offering in December 2019.
The transaction will be boosted by $400m in financing from investment and financial services group Fidelity, banking firm BNP Paribas’s Asset Management Energy Transition Fund, Wellington Management and funds and accounts managed by BlackRock.
Arrival is developing commercial vehicles that make use of its own components, materials and software. They will be assembled in dedicated microfactories and are intended to be priced competitively with their fossil fuel counterparts.
The company secured $118m from funds managed by BlackRock last month, having raised $112m from automotive manufacturer Hyundai and its Kia subsidiary at a reported $3.3bn valuation in January this year.
Logistics service provider UPS supplied an undisclosed amount the same month in tandem with an order for 10,000 electric vans. Arrival’s backers, which include investment adviser Winter Capital, will retain their shares once the deal closes.
Denis Sverdlov, Arrival’s founder and chief executive, said: “With Arrival’s products our clients are not forced to compromise between being green and being cost efficient.
“Our focus on the whole EV (electric vehicle) ecosystem, new methods of design and production and our enabling technologies are the key to driving down the cost of EVs and accelerating the transition to zero-emission transportation globally.”
Cowen is lead financial advisor for Arrival on the deal, JP Morgan is financial adviser and Greenberg Traurig is legal adviser. UBS Investment Bank and Barclays are GIIG’s financial and capital markets advisers and Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld is its legal adviser, while Cowen and UBS Investment Bank were placement agents on the financing transaction.
