Electric pickup maker Rivian is said to be looking at an IPO that will trade for $ 50 billion later this year.
EV SPAC Frenzy
In the past few months, there has been a strong trend for electric vehicle companies to go public through SPAC reverse merger deals.
Fisker, Arrival, Lion Electric, Lordstown Motors, Proterra, Faraday Future, and others have all finalized or announced SPAC deals.
The trend started when Tesla delivered incredible performance in the stock market and other EV companies tried to use the momentum and raise more money.
While some of the deals have been criticized for the fact that several of those companies have little to no revenues and / or don’t get close to manufacturing, it has also helped put more money into the transition to electric vehicles.
Rivian is going the good old way
Rivian is one of the few EV companies that hasn’t jumped off the SPAC train.
The main reason is that they have no problem raising money privately.
In February 2019, Rivian received a $ 700 million round of funding led by Amazon, and Ford invested $ 500 million in starting up the electric pickup truck just two months later.
The startup also added Cox Automotive as an investor with a $ 350 million round in September. It topped off its 2019 with a massive $ 1.3 billion round of funding in December.
In 2020, the company went back to the bank and managed to raise an additional $ 2.5 billion from existing investors and also from T. Rowe Price Associates, a major investor in Tesla.
They kicked off 2021 strongly with another $ 2.6 billion round of funding last month.
Now Bloomberg reports that Rivian is looking at an IPO later this year with a valuation of about $ 50 billion:
Rivian Automotive Inc., the electric vehicle startup supported by Amazon.com Inc. and Ford Motor Co., plans to go public in September with a valuation of about $ 50 billion and maybe more, according to people familiar with the matter. ”
Unlike the aforementioned companies, Rivian would go the traditional IPO path instead of making a SPAC deal.
With its first deliveries scheduled for June, the carmaker would wait until it had some revenue before going public.
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