Before RJ Scaringe founded Rivian in 2009, he had micromobility on his mind.
More than a decade later, his musings took root in a small skunkworks program inside Rivian that set out to answer one question: Could the company’s technology be condensed down into something smaller and more affordable than its electric vans, trucks, and SUVs?
The answer was yes. But what they also discovered, Scaringe told TechCrunch, was that the skunkworks program was a bigger idea than could naturally exist within Rivian. That skunkworks — now a team of about 70 people hailing from Apple, Google, Specialized, Tesla, REI Co-Op, and Uber — has spun out of Rivian with a new name and $105 million in funding from Eclipse Ventures.
The startup, called Also, will exist as a standalone company from Rivian. But the two will be closely related. Rivian holds a minority stake, Scaringe will serve on its board, and Also will leverage the automaker’s tech, retail presence, and economies of scale. Chris Yu, Rivian’s VP of future programs, will be its president.
Also plans to put its flagship product into production next year for consumers in the United States and Europe. The startup will eventually launch vehicles tailored for consumer and commercial use in Asia and South America.
Scaringe said Also will show off its first vehicle designs at an event later this year. But he and the new company are being coy about what that first product will be — though the Rivian CEO did cop to it having a bike-like form factor.
“There’s a seat, and there’s two wheels, there’s a screen, and there’s a few computers and a battery,” Scaringe said.
He was clear that the goal is to make Rivian-quality micromobility available at affordable prices.
It’s “remarkable that a nice e-bike costs as much as it does,” Scaringe commented. “Like a nice ebike, you can spend $6,000 to $8,000 on, and really nice ones, over $10,000; That’s a reflection of a poorly developed supply chain that’s very, very, very tiered.”
Also’s electric roots
Scaringe initially set his ideas about e-bikes and micromobility aside as he built up a company around electric passenger vehicles like the R1T pickup truck and R1S SUV.
But around 2019, former Rivian chief growth officer Jiten Behl — who spearheaded the funding round from Eclipse Ventures — said he and Scaringe started talking seriously about starting up an effort inside Rivian to seize that opportunity.
“There is a gap here,” Behl told TechCrunch he remembered telling Scaringe. “If you look at our cities, the infrastructure is such that you can’t have large cars driving around. but they still have mobility needs. We need something different, something smaller, something more flexible.”
A few years later in 2022, they brought on Chris Yu, the former chief product and technology officer at bike-maker Specialized to spin up the skunkworks team.
One of the few publicly available hints that Rivian was working on the project came in 2022 when the company filed a new trademark for bicycles and electric bikes, as well as their corresponding structural parts.
Scaringe talked about e-bikes at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2022, and Bloomberg reported in 2023 that Rivian was working on one, but the project remained under wraps.
Leveraging Rivian tech
Many companies have tried to design and sell e-bikes that stand out from the crowd. But Scaringe said those companies were limited in their ability to drive down costs, in large part because they are relying on a scattered supply chain and operating at low volumes.
Scaringe said the “a-ha moment” for Rivian was when he realized his company could change those variables. It also helps that Rivian is working on a lot of technology that is transferable to smaller form factors.
“Most companies in the micro space don’t have, like, a full power electronics team, and don’t have a team that develops the software OS, and are designing and building computers,” he said.
“Oh, wow, we have all this capability,” he remembered thinking.
Scaringe, Yu, and Behl think Also has potential not only as a consumer play, but also on the commercial side.
“You could almost say that the need for small form factor EVs is a little bit more acute on the commercial side than the consumer side, especially within dense metro areas, particularly in Europe [where city centers are] shut down to cars and vans,” Yu said in an interview. “We’ve seen an intense amount of excitement around a scalable platform approach for food, parcel, delivery, et cetera, type vehicles.”
Yu said Also is in “reasonably advanced discussions with some really exciting partners at the moment,” but declined to name any of them.
The Also team has their work cut out for them. They want to build small EVs for consumers and commercial companies across a global market. And they are willing to build pretty much any form factor to serve those needs.
Asked whether that means we could one day see an Also rickshaw, or skateboard, Scaringe said there are some practical limitations to what the company can achieve. But, he said, “never say never on anything” in micromobility.
