It's not an easy time to raise money for an electric vehicle startup, especially given that many companies have failed or are close to failure. But Los Angeles-based Harbinger has done just that by taking a highly focused approach to electrifying commercial trucking.
The fee is a $100 million Series B, co-led by early Tesla investor Capricorn Investment Group and Leitmotif, a U.S. start-up fund co-founded by Volkswagen's former head of M&A. The round also included participation from Tiger Global and mobility venture firm Maniv, both existing investors.
“We know what the EV industry has become. We know it's just a bunch of dead bodies from 10 years ago,” Harbinger CEO John Harris said in an interview with TechCrunch. “So we really, really try to keep our scope very focused and have a very high degree of confidence in what we're going to do before we say we're going to do it. Masu.”
Founded in 2022 by a group of former Canoo and QuantumScape employees, Harbinger set out to manufacture a modular, all-electric chassis for medium-duty trucks.
Then it…did it and that was it.
At a time when investors have poured billions of dollars into startups that claim to build hundreds of thousands of electric vehicles or reinvent transportation as we know it, Harbinger has maintained that focus. For example, Arrival started in a similar space as Harbinger. But once it went public, Arrival claimed it would reinvent car manufacturing in so-called microfactories, plan to build buses, develop Uber and ride-hailing vehicles, and potentially work on aircraft.
Arrival is currently bankrupt. Meanwhile, Harbinger has completed Series B and is about to enter production.
“Harbinger is a great team of highly experienced operators, with a wealth of scars and relevant experience from previous jobs,” said Leitmotif co-founder and former Volkswagen executive Jens Wiese. said in an interview. “They're just focusing on this segment and developing the right products.”
Harris said focusing on one product has not only helped the startup survive, but has also helped it improve.
As an example, Harris pointed to the battery pack that powers Harbinger's chassis. Instead of packaging in pressed steel sheets that must be welded together, which can cause leaks that could harm the battery, Harbinger has invested in a 6,500-ton press that uses high pressure to die-cast the entire enclosure. did.
Harris said Harbinger was only able to invest in such specialized tools because it didn't have to spread its spending across multiple other products. As a result, the battery pack enclosure costs just 20 times less than normal costs.
Such investments allowed Harbinger to make the chassis more affordable from the start, rather than relying on massive scale to achieve attractive unit economics.
And because Harbinger essentially sells to CFOs of fleet companies, Maniv managing partner Michael Granoff said it's an attractive proposition.
“The segments they're pursuing are not replacing fleets that often, and when you're thinking about it, you're doing it for years. And the math is very is compelling, so it is inevitable,” Granov said.
Granov believes so thoroughly in Harbinger's opportunity that his company has invested more in the startup than any other company. Harbinger's Series B is the only investment round in which Maniv's second fund participated and was not led by the company.
“We've basically already provided attractive unit economics, so people who wouldn't normally come into this space are coming on board. [investors] It’s like Tiger,” Harris said. “If you ignore Tesla, we have industry-leading unit economics, but we expect to have higher margins than Tesla, probably within the next 12 to 18 months.”