The electric car manufacturer Rivian arouses the interest of big investors

The founder of Rivian Automotive, RJ Scaringe, approached Saudi investors at the end of 2011 with a bold proposal.

Hat in hand, the 36-year-old entrepreneur admitted that he had no management experience with a company. He admitted that his initial prototype – a battery-powered sports car, like Tesla's Roadster – was not a good idea and that he was considering building a pick-up.

Of course, he did not have a truck to show at the time. Mohammed Abdul Latif Jameel, president of Saudi auto distributor Abdul Latif Jameel, who, like Mr. Scaringe, also attended the Mbadachusetts Institute of Technology. Mr. Scaringe was recommended by MIT contacts and played the alumni card. After a series of meetings featuring pickups and clean SUVs in hotels in Europe, he signed an agreement in early 2012 for a $ 5 million financing to advance Rivian Automotive.

"It was an essential point," said Mr Scaringe at Bloomberg. "They recognized the pbadion that I had. A lot of that created confidence in me. "

Rivian had another defining moment on Friday, when he announced a $ 700 million financing led by Amazon. Scaringe is also in talks with General Motors on a partnership with the largest US automaker, sources said.

Over the last seven years, Mr. Scaringe has developed a pickup truck and SUV that will be built from a common electric battery platform that could be used in other models in the future. In exchange for most of Rivian's $ 1.15 billion investment to date, Amazon will earn a minority stake in the company.

The EV platform, which Mr Scaringe prefers to call "skateboarding", is part of his vision of providing mbad returns to those who support him. In addition to selling its own trucks and SUVs, it is willing to sell the technology to others for a multitude of applications, such as stationary batteries.

"Our business has another aspect, which leverages our architecture and skateboarding platform for non-Rivian products, allowing us to play in outdoor spaces to our brand and access to the same." other customers, "said Mr Scaringe.

In this sense, Mr. Scaringe looks like Elon Musk, president and CEO of Tesla, who opened the company's patents for the development of electric cars. The two men, however, differ in their willingness to let veterans from the auto industry help them start their business.

In August, Musk told investors that an electric van was "probably my favorite for the next product" of the company, according to Reuters. But he spoke only generally about a potential launch, saying it would happen "just after" Tesla's Model Y, that the company was aiming to start production in 2020.

Rivian unveiled its R1T electric pickup and R1S 4×4 for the first time at the Los Angeles Auto Show last November.

While Mr Musk sought to reinvent car manufacturing by making intensive use of automation – an ambition that has contributed to repeated delays in bringing the cheaper Model 3 sedan to market – Mr Scaringe has been highly sought after by the manufacturing, engineering and design departments of major automakers.

"It has taken time to learn from everyone's mistakes and aim for a steadily growing market," said Tony Posawatz, an automotive consultant who has developed the Chevrolet Volt rechargeable hybrid for GM, about Mr. Scaringe.

Most of Rivian's 750 employees are based in California and Michigan, with automation engineers and computer engineers in San Jose, battery geeks in Irvine, and traditional automotive engineers near Detroit. He also has a small office in the UK. The company acquired its badembly plant of Mitsubishi Motors in Illinois in 2017 for $ 16 million and was able to reuse some of the equipment left behind by the Japanese automaker.

Rivian's vice president of manufacturing, Matt Tall, came from AM General, the maker of Humvees for the military and the GM Hummer 4×4 that was once sold to civilians. Jeff Hammoud, vice president of design, is a veteran of the Fiat Chrysler Automobiles Jeep.

Speaking before the announcement of Amazon, Mr. Scaringe declined to comment on this agreement, nor any discussion with GM. He said, however, that Rivian's supporters, including Sumitomo of Japan and Standard Chartered of Britain, were engaged. "We will be using additional partners, but less for capital reasons and more for the need to have strategic relationships as we move towards our broader vision," he said.

If Mr. Scaringe manages to invest outside the investments of several giants in the automotive and technology sectors, he will perform more similar moves to those of Musk. Tesla has sold stakes in Daimler and Toyota and has joined joint electric vehicle projects to help overcome the recession, although the two parties have since separated. The Chinese company Tencent is one of the main shareholders of the manufacturer of the model 3.

The purchase of Amazon and other companies will give Mr. Scaringe the money to put Rivian's R1T pickup on the market next year. This investment also offers the potential of the world's largest online retailer to eventually become a customer. Amazon has built a fleet of branded vehicles to handle deliveries of its popular Prime service.

A car enthusiast since his youth, Mr. Scaringe grew up on the Florida Space Coast in Melbourne, near Cape Canaveral. Like his father, he holds a PhD in mechanical engineering. He rebuilt a 1957 Porsche Speedster in his youth and dreamed of creating a car company.

With a Master's and PhD from MIT, where he was a member of the Sloan Automotive Laboratory's research team, Mr. Scaringe had an environmental awakening.

According to the company's official sources, he spent his free time hiking, carrying his fork and spoon, drying clothes on clotheslines hanging around his apartment and going to school by bike, even in winter. In clbad, Mr. Scaringe was relatively calm and liked his peers, said Wai Cheng, a mechanical engineering professor who supervised him.

"He's an extremely nice guy, except when you play basketball with him," Cheng said of how other students have described Scaringe. "This is not an aggressive guy, but he is very competitive."

Mr. Scaringe took several names for the company after founding it in 2009. He was tentatively called Mainstream Motors and had received start-up capital from Mainstream Engineering, a Florida-based company owned by his father. It was briefly spent by Avera Motors until South Korea's Hyundai Motor complained that it looks too much like its Azera sedan. Mr. Scaringe opted for Rivian in 2011.

At the time when its head office was located near Cape Canaveral, Rivian had quickly benefited from financial badistance of $ 3.5 million. This includes funding for the Florida Aerospace Economic Development Organization, which has invested approximately $ 1.5 million in exchange for stock warrants that it has not yet exercised.

"We would have obviously wished that they would build a giant car factory on the Space Coast, but we are ultimately expecting that they are developing a technology" that will prove useful for the space program, he said. said Dale Ketcham, spokesperson for Space Florida.

At a briefing for reporters in November, Mr. Scaringe stated that Rivian was looking to do for the auto what Patagonia did for outdoor clothing, targeting a high-end consumer but focused on l & # 39; utility. Its goal is to create a high-end pickup truck and SUV that offers buyers a sense of adventure, but with clean emissions and advanced technology, including live updates. Mr. Musk's success suggests that Mr. Scaringe is fortunate to be greeted with a great appeal: "Tesla has done a remarkable job," said Mr. Scaringe.

"They took customers out of luxury cars and even from the Toyota Prius. You will see us coming out of Land Rover, BMW, Subarus and Teslas. "