Revoy has announced a $27 million Series A led by Standard Capital, with XYZ Venture Capital, Doerr Capital, Time Ventures, Paul Graham, Y Combinator and Leap Ventures participating. Total raised is now $41 million. I was a seed investor and I'm delighted to be along for the next leg.
This is the third company of Peter Reinhardt's that I've backed. I wrote a seed check into Segment when it had just come out of Y Combinator in 2011, back when YC was itself a young and unproven experiment, and the company wasn't doing anything with data at all. It took two pivots before Peter and his cofounders landed on the boring problem of routing customer data, and figured out it was actually a very large business. It became one. I backed Charm Industrial, where Peter is turning agricultural waste into bio-oil and putting carbon back underground. And now Revoy. Three companies, in three completely different industries, one founder with an unusual ability to find the unglamorous, mechanically hard problem that everyone else is stepping over.
Revoy's problem is the American long-haul truck. There are roughly three million Class 8 tractors on U.S. roads, nearly all diesel, and the electric replacements on offer cost several times as much, weigh more, and need charging infrastructure that doesn't exist yet. Revoy's answer isn't a new truck. It's a powered electric dolly that slides in between the tractor and the trailer of the truck a fleet already owns. The dolly's battery drives its own axle, pushing the rig with electric torque for over 200 miles on a charge, recapturing energy through regenerative braking, and cutting fuel burn and emissions by up to 85 percent. When it's depleted, the driver swaps it for a charged one at a station in a few minutes and keeps going. The fleet buys nothing. Revoy owns the dollies and sells the miles.
Revoy can compete with diesel at cost, which no other electric truck in the U.S. can claim. That was true when the round was raised. It's more true now with diesel prices soaring to record highs. Fuel is the largest variable cost in trucking, and carriers are telling the trade press they're paying double. Every dollar of that increase makes the math on a Revoy dolly better.
The funding goes toward a second-generation dolly with a smaller, cheaper battery at the same range, and commercial operations start later this year on a 200-mile freight corridor near Portland. Congratulations to Peter and the Revoy team. I'd back him a fourth time.