Rivian raises $2.5 billion earlier than delivery of electrical pickup and SUV

EV startup Rivian has raised $2.5 billion, bringing its complete funding to this expose spherical $6 billion earlier than the starting up of its all-electrical pickup truck and SUV in early 2021. $5.35 billion of that has scheme within the last twelve months and a half of by myself, with Rivian scooping up mountainous investments from Ford, Amazon, and Cox Automobile in 2019.

The unusual funding comes from Soros Fund Management LLC, Coatue (a hedge fund), Constancy Management and Be taught Firm, and funding company Baron Capital Neighborhood. Amazon and but every other old investor, BlackRock, also participated within the funding spherical, which used to be suggested by T. Rowe Build.

The mammoth influx of cash helps extra attach Rivian’s attach as what is probably going presumably the most well-capitalized EV startup within the area. It goes to also bolster the company’s big enhance, as it has already unfolded a half of-dozen places of work in and outdoors of the US and hired spherical 2,400 of us.

Rivian used to be essentially based in 2009 and in the starting up attach attach out to bear a Tesla Roadster-vogue sports actions automobile, but in a roundabout method pivoted to designing an electrical pickup truck and SUV. It stayed extraordinarily mute for nearly a decade, thoroughly emerging from stealth mode in mid-2018 earlier than the starting up of its first two vehicles, the R1T (the pickup) and the R1S (the SUV), at that twelve months’s LA Auto Tell.

The startup has grown hasty since then. And not thoroughly has it taken in an fantastic quantity of cash, but a number of of those offers are strategic, too. Rivian is working with Ford on developing an electrical automobile for its Lincoln label (though one mission used to be already scrapped as a result of the coronavirus pandemic), and it’s building a huge rapid of electrical shipping vehicles for Amazon.