Slate Auto, which came out of stealth mode earlier this year with a surprising – and surprisingly affordable – customizable electric truck, has raised $700 million to date.
But long before the EV startup broke cover, it quietly raised a Series A round of more than $100 million in 2023. And while Jeff Bezos was involved in that round, as TechCrunch originally reported, he was not alone. A regulatory filing submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission shows as many as 16 investors were involved.
Slauson & Co., a Los Angeles venture firm that launched five years ago, is one of the few investors in Slate’s Series A to speak publicly about why they backed the company.
Slauson & Co. partner Ajay Relan told TechCrunch in an exclusive interview his firm is well aware of the many EV startup bankruptcies that have occurred in recent years, as well as the headwinds coming from the Trump administration for anything green energy-related.
Regardless, Relan said he and his partner Austin Clements believe in the startup’s mission of providing “more affordable, reliable, and customizable vehicles that are domestically manufactured.”
Relan and Clements started Slauson & Co. in 2020. Friends since high school, they both grew up off of Slauson Avenue in South Central Los Angeles, which Relan wryly categorized as being “not necessarily known for its tech and venture capital innovation.”
“But it definitely is a source of cultural capital that gets repackaged and distributed to more developed areas and other parts of the world,” Relan said. Slauson & Co.’s mission is to bridge the gap between those two worlds by funding and empowering people who have “historically just not had their perspective represented in the innovation economy.”
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Relan said they got turned on to Slate by Jeff Wilkie, the former Amazon consumer division CEO who co-founded Re:Build Manufacturing, an incubator that Slate spun out of. Wilkie, who Relan has known since before founding Slauson & Co, first introduced them to the secretive project in 2023.
Relan admits investing in an EV startup is a bit outside of his firm’s “primary themes.” But the duo was intrigued by Slate’s mission to make a more affordable and approachable car.
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