Big electric trucks are having a hard time. The Cybertruck is a bust, Stellantis just canceled the Ram 1500 EV, and even sales of Ford’s promising F-150 Lightning have been on the decline.
But the United States loves trucks. So is the key to making them love electric trucks… a very small one?
That’s the bet that California-based startup Telo has been making since its inception in 2022. The company has designed a bite-sized truck called the MT1 with an admittedly not-so-small starting price of around $41,000.
Now, investors want in on that same bet: Telo announced Tuesday it has closed a $20 million Series A funding round. The round was co-led by designer Yves Béhar and Tesla co-founder Marc Tarpenning (who are also Telo co-founders), with additional investment from Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, and early stage funds like TO VC, E12 Ventures, and Neo.
In the world of automotive manufacturing, $20 million does not go very far. To contrast, Slate Auto, which is building its own wild take on a small electric pickup truck, has raised more than $700 million, to date. Startups like Fisker Inc., Canoo, and Lordstown Motors also raised hundreds of millions before they all collapsed.
Telo has far more modest goals and a sharper aim than those companies, though.
“Our hyper-focus is on trucks for the downtowns of cities,” co-founder and CEO Jason Marks told TechCrunch on a video call while bouncing around Telo’s 10,000-square-foot San Carlos facility — which shares a backyard with the original Tesla headquarters.
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While Telo may someday embrace other markets — Marks said some small farmers are quite interested in the truck — the company considers those to be secondary. It’s cities that Marks wants to conquer first; the CEO said he’s spent far too much time circling San Francisco streets looking for parking to focus on any other use case.
Telo is not promising to build hundreds of thousands MT1s. Instead, it’s got a pre-order list of around 12,000, and Marks said Telo initially plans to build around 5,000 per year via contract manufacturing.
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