Rivian Automotive, a company developing electric vehicles, including commercial delivery vans for Amazon, filed for an initial public offering on Friday. The company aims to trade on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol “RIVN.”
Its paperwork shows a $994 million net loss on zero revenue in the first six months of 2021. In 2020 the company’s net loss came to $1.02 billion.
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.
CEO RJ Scaringe, who has a Ph.D. from the Sloan Automotive Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, founded Rivian in 2009. The company is based in Irvine, Calif., with 6,274 employees as of the end of June. It operates a vehicle assembly plant in Normal, Illinois.
Amazon and Ford each own more than 5% of the company. Peter Krawiec, Amazon’s senior vice president of worldwide corporate and business development, sits on Rivian’s board.
Rivian’s commercial vehicle business will be highly dependent on Amazon for the foreseeable future. The company said Amazon has some exclusive rights to purchase electric delivery vehicles from Rivian for at least four years, and the right of first refusal after that.
Like Tesla, Rivian remains a non-unionized automaker for now. The company’s filing acknowledged that this status could change and impact labor costs.
