Jonathan Gitlin / Ars
Upstart electric vehicle maker Rivian has extra $2.5 billion to its war chest, the enterprise announced on Friday.
It’s Rivian’s fifth fundraising round in just 18 months. The firm lifted $2.85 billion in four former fundraising rounds amongst February and December of 2019. This provides Rivian extra than $5 billion to expend on producing ability for its forthcoming electrical vehicles and SUVs.
Rivian is setting up to build two customer vehicles that were being both released to the public in 2018. There’s an electrical truck named the R1T and an SUV known as the R1S. Both are based mostly on the same battery-powered all-electrical skateboard platform and boast ranges up to 400 miles.
We named Rivian’s truck the star of the New York Automobile Show in 2019. “You may not have read of Rivian nevertheless, but you happen to be heading to,” my colleague Jonathan Gitlin wrote past 12 months.
Rivian also has a offer to manufacture 100,000 electric powered delivery vans for Amazon, aspect of Amazon’s effort and hard work to reduce its carbon footprint. Amazon invested in Rivian very last yr and place extra income into the business in the most up-to-date round.
Rivian also counts Ford amid its investors—though plans to make an SUV for Ford’s Lincoln brand name based on Rivian’s technology have been shelved.
The following couple of a long time will be big ones for startups building electric vans. Rivian is because of to introduce the R1T upcoming calendar year, in which it will contend head-to-head with Tesla’s Cybertruck and another truck from electric car or truck startup Bollinger.
Tesla is also slated to release its Semi truck upcoming yr. Nikola motors, a startup that debuted on the inventory market very last month, is owing to launch a semi truck of its possess in 2022.
