Sweden’s Volta to start electric trucks production by the end of this year. It raises $260 million and is evaluated to be $490 million. The startup believes it can build better urban vehicles that are safer and can take minimal carbon footprint compared to internal combustion vehicles. The last round of funding will be used to work on its last round of work before Volta Zero goes into the market.
Earlier, the company has raised €230 million (around $260 million), a Series C round of funding that appears to value the company at just over $490 million (€433 million). Volta will be using the money to fund engineering and business operations ahead of its first trucks rolling off the assembly line. It looks like the company has a healthy list of customers. Volta said that its pre-order book for its all-electric Volta Zero, for the first fully electric, purpose-built commercial freight vehicle designed for urban freight distribution, is currently totaling over €1.2 billion. It is covering more than 5,000 vehicles. Volta’s wider business strategy will be based both on selling trucks as well as offering its vehicles on a trucking-as-a-service model.
New York-based Luxor Capital led the company’s €37 million Series B in September 2021. It is also leading this round. Furthermore, Real estate investment firm Byggmästare Anders J Ahlström (like Volta, based in Stockholm), supply chain services giant Agility, and B-FLEXION (formerly Waypoint Capital) participated in the funding round. Volta has not disclosed its valuation. But Pitchbook data notes that it is now just over $490 million.
Building blocks
Investors are possibly wowed by the success of electric efforts like Tesla with smaller cars. They are putting their money behind these ventures to give them more firepower, and more credibility with would-be customers. Such investments are all essential building blocks for catapulting cars into the next wave of technological innovation. Trucks like Volta’s become hardware platforms capable of gathering and working with massive data sets to help the vehicles and the businesses using them operate at new levels of productivity.
Volta’s growth, along with a large amount of capital it has now raised, has reached over $325 million to date. Startups, tapping into new manufacturing techniques, new battery technology, and new energy infrastructure. They see a ripe opportunity to build new vehicles to disrupt the current status quo with safer and cleaner alternatives along with the advancements. These advancements vary depending on the application they are being used, from faster connectivity to autonomous features.
