Today, Swedish electric and autonomous truck firm Einride has announced a $500 million round of investment as it seeks to introduce its electric and autonomous trucks into new international markets. A $300 million financing facility and a $200 million equity investment make up the funding. While Barclays Europe headed up the debt financing, existing and new investors like Temasek, EQT Ventures, and Swedish pension fund AMF provided equity capital.
The Swedish firm said it has secured $300 million in debt funding led by Barclays Europe, which will be used significantly to bolster its fleet of vehicles as it expands further into new and existing markets across Europe and North America. The cash injection constitutes an equity-based $200 million Series C portion from backers including Northzone, EQT Ventures, Temasek, Swedish pension fund AMF, Polar Structure, and Norrsken VC.
Einride was established in Stockholm in 2016 and first created a self-driving freight truck without a cab that can also be operated remotely by people if necessary.
Commercial testing of these “pods” has already begun, but regulatory challenges have forced Einride to pursue a two-pronged strategy that also includes human-driven electric trucks as a transitional step toward autonomy.
With the help of its Saga platform, which aids clients in managing and maximizing their fleets, these vehicles are already accessible to shipping businesses and carriers in Sweden and the United States.
Drive for expansion
Since its September launch in Germany, Einride has been on somewhat of an expansion drive, so to speak. This week, it expanded to Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg, and it has ambitions to expand to Norway in the future. When you take into account the expenditures involved with constructing hundreds of trucks and the supporting software, serving large corporations like Electrolux and GE Appliances—with which Einride has collaborated to deploy completely autonomous pods as part of a U.S. pilot—is a very capital-intensive endeavor.
And that is essentially the reason Einride, which has already collected about $150 million since its creation (including its $110 million Series B last year), has to raise such a sizable amount of funding at this time.
Einride has never disclosed its valuation at any of its previous funding rounds, and it isn’t changing its strategy with this latest round either, so it’s impossible to know how the economic downturn has affected it. However, many companies have raised follow-on rounds of funding this year at noticeably lower valuations.
Despite the effects of the worldwide pandemic and other macroeconomic issues, the freight trucking sector, which was valued at $2.1 trillion in 2020, is predicted to increase to around $3 trillion over the next five years, according to studies. There have undoubtedly been numerous indications throughout the year that investors are generally optimistic about any technology that benefits the freight and logistics industries.
Robert Falck, the founder and CEO of Einride, said in a statement that “the time is now to act on not only developing but speeding the adoption of technology that will produce a cleaner, safer, and more effective way to move goods.”
In addition to a $90 million convertible note that it raised earlier this year, Einride announced that the first half of its $300 million in debt funding will start to trickle out in January.
