Rivian, the company that is on its way to become the first EV marker in the world to launch an electric pick up truck, has raked in another $2.65 billion as part of a funding round, just months before it plans on launching its first vehicles in the market.
Rivian immediately turned heads when it first announced its electric SUV back in at the 2018 at the LA Auto Show. Ever since then, it has been attracting attention from investors, the most notable of them being Amazon. In fact, the e-commerce giant signed a contract with Rivian to get 100,000 of its electric pick up trucks for its delivery fleet. Amazon expects to receive the first 10,000 vehicles by 2022.
Back in 2019, Rivian raised $700 million from Amazon, $500 million from Ford and $350 million from Cox Automotive gathering a total of a whopping $2.85 billion in just one year.
Moreover, last year, the company raised another $2.5 billion in a round led by T. Rowe Price Associates.
That’s a lot of capital for a company that does not have a working product yet, but the projects by Rivian are so promising that it was able to justify another $2.65 billion funding.
Moreover, the EV maker has not shied away from spending said money, and has already put in around a billion dollars into an abandoned Mitsubishi Motors plant in Normal, Illinois to equip, renovate and expand the facility ahead of production of its vehicles.
Talking about production, Rivian expects to launch the R1T and R1S in summer 2021, which is only a few months down the road. Earlier, the company had planned to go into production in 2020 but COVID 19 pushed the timeline back. Nonetheless, if it is able to stick to this new launch window, Rivian will still be the first company to launch an electric pick up truck.
We expect that the new funding will be used for the launch of the new vehicles.
No other electric vehicle company has any pickup trucks planned, and the one that has, i.e. Tesla (the CyberTruck), might be looking at a 2022 launch.
