EV Start-Up Rivian Files to go Public

Rivian Automotive, an electric truck maker backed by Amazon and Ford Motor, recently revealed huge losses and a voracious need for cash as it headed into one of the most anticipated initial public offerings of the year. The company filed its IPO confidentially with the Securities and Exchange Commission in August, and it was made public on Friday and it aims to trade on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol “RIVN.”

According to the S-1 filed with the SEC, Rivian had a net loss of $994 million on revenue of zero for the first half of 2021. Its net loss for full-year 2020 was $1.02 billion, the filing shows. The company wrote in its filing, “We are a development stage company and have not generated material revenue to date. Vehicle production and deliveries began in September 2021.”

Rivian beat Tesla, GM, and Ford to the market with an electric pickup, the R1T, which has received glowing early reviews. The company plans to launch a seven-passenger SUV called the R1S in December, it said in the filing. Rivian says it has pre-orders for just over 48,000 of the R1T and R1S in the US and Canada. The preorder customers had paid fully refundable deposits of $1,000 each, and that’s the company’s only revenue so far.

Rivian expects its revenue initially to come mostly from Amazon, the filing shows; “In the near term… we expect that a significant portion of our revenue will be from Amazon Logistics.” Both Amazon and Ford own more than 5 percent of Rivian, and Peter Krawiec, a senior vice president at Amazon, is on Rivian’s board of directors.

Rivian entered into an agreement with Amazon in 2019, and the filing shows that under the terms of that agreement, Rivian agreed to collaborate with Amazon’s Logistics segment “to design, develop, manufacture, and supply [electric delivery vans]… for use in Amazon’s last-mile delivery operations.” Amazon has some exclusive rights to Rivian’s electric delivery vans (EDVs) for four years, and the right of first refusal for two years after that. The company says it doesn’t expect to ship its electric delivery vans until December as well.