Volta Trucks, a Sweden-based developer of commercial electric vehicles (EVs), secured €230m ($260m) in series C funding yesterday from investors including logistics services provider Agility.
Luxor Capital led the round and was also joined by real estate holding company Byggmästare Anders J Ahlström and B-Flexion. The company is not disclosing its valuation, but TechCrunch pegged it at over $490m, citing Pitchbook data.
Founded in 2017, Volta is developing a 16-tonne fully electric freight vehicle for urban logistics and has pre-orders in excess of 5,000 units in place and an orderbook value of over $1.36bn.
Logistics services provider DB Schenker pre-ordered nearly 1,500 of the trucks in November 2021, a transaction billed as the largest zero-emission truck order in Europe to date.
The company will use the proceeds to fund its engineering and operations through the start of the production of its vehicles at the end of this year, covering the production of design verification prototypes and further tests.
The first Volta vehicles will be available for product verification testing by customers in London and Paris in mid-2022.
Volta is working on 7.5 and 12-tonne trucks but plans to make bigger 18-tonne trucks down the line. It intends to manufacture 5,000 vehicles over the course of 2023 and grow production to 14,000 in 2024 and 27,000 in 2025.
Commercial electric vehicles are coming off a big year. Electric bus producer Proterra agreed to a $1.6bn reverse merger in February 2021 backed by a $415m private investment in public equity financing that included automotive manufacturer Daimler’s Daimled Trucks division.
Commercial EV manufacturer Xos, which counts conglomerate Grupo Proeza as a backer, agreed to its own reverse merger the same month at a $2bn valuation.
Like the wider EV space, the availability of charging infrastructure has been a bottleneck for commercial fleet uptake. But that has changed in the past few years as more services come to the market offering charging as a service or as part of a wider range of on-site fleet services.
Volta Trucks’ CEO, Essa Al-Saleh, said: “The successful and oversubscribed conclusion of our series C funding round gives us a positive external validation of our journey. As an innovator and disruptor in commercial vehicles, we are working at industry-leading pace and have significant ambitions.
“Today’s closing of the series C funding round, bringing €230m into the company, gives us the financial runway to be able to deliver on all our goals as we transition from a startup to a manufacturer of full-electric trucks.”
Luxor Capital led Volta’s $43.6m series B round in September 2021, investing alongside Proterra, Agility and Byggmästare Anders J Ahlström, having also led its $20m series A round eight months earlier.
Photo courtesy of Volta Trucks.
