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Logistics startup Stord raises $90M in Kleiner Perkins-led round, becomes a unicorn and acquires a company
When Kleiner Perkins led Stord’s $12.4 million Series A in 2019, its founders were in their early 20s and so passionate about their startup that they each dropped out of their respective schools to focus on growing the business.
Fast-forward two years and Stord — an Atlanta-based company that has developed a cloud supply chain — is raising more capital in a round again led by Kleiner Perkins.
This time, Stord has raised $90 million in a Series D round of funding at a post-money valuation of $1.125 billion — more than double the $510 million that the company was valued at when raising $65 million in a Series C financing just six months ago.
In fact, today’s funding marks Stord’s third since early December of 2020, when it raised its Series B led by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, and brings the company’s total raised since its 2015 inception to $205 million.
Besides Kleiner Perkins, Lux Capital, D1 Capital, Palm Tree Crew, BOND, Dynamo Ventures, Founders Fund, Lineage Logistics and Susa Ventures also participated in the Series D financing. In addition, Michael Rubin, Fanatics founder and founder of GSI Commerce; Carlos Cashman, CEO of Thrasio; Max Mullen, co-founder of Instacart; and Will Gaybrick, CPO at Stripe, put money in the round. Previous backers include BoxGroup, Susa Ventures, Dynamo, Revolution and Rise of the Rest Seed Fund, among others.
Founders Sean Henry, 24, and Jacob Boudreau, 23, met while Henry was at Georgia Tech and Boudreau was in online classes at Arizona State (ASU) but running his own business, a software development firm, in Atlanta.
Over time, Stord has evolved into a cloud supply chain that can give companies a way to compete and grow with logistics, and provides an integrated platform “that’s available exactly when and where they need it,” Henry said. Stord combines physical logistics services such as freight, warehousing and fulfillment in that platform, which aims to provide “complete visibility, rapid optimization and elastic scale” for its users.
About two months ago, Stord announced the opening of its first fulfillment center, a 386,000-square-foot facility, in Atlanta, which features warehouse robotics and automation technologies. “It was the first time we were in a building ourselves running it end to end,” Henry said.
And today, the company is announcing it has acquired Connecticut-based Fulfillment Works, a 22-year-old company with direct-to-consumer (DTC) experience and warehouses in Nevada and in its home state.
With FulfillmentWorks, the company says it has increased its first-party warehouses, coupled with its network of over 400 warehouse partners and 15,000 carriers.
While Stord would not disclose the amount it paid for Fulfillment Works, Henry did share some of Stord’s impressive financial metrics. The company, he said, in 2020 delivered its third consecutive year of 300+% growth, and is on track to do so again in 2021. Stord also achieved more than $100 million in revenue in the first two quarters of 2021, according to Henry, and grew its headcount from 160 people last year to over 450 so far in 2021 (including about 150 Fulfillment Works employees). And since the fourth quarter is often when people do the most online shopping, Henry expects the three-month period to be Stord’s heaviest revenue quarter.
For some context, Stord’s new sales were up “7x” in the second quarter of 2020 compared to the same period last year. So far in the third quarter, sales are up almost 10x, according to Henry.
Put simply, Stord aims to give brands a way to compete with the likes of Amazon, which has set expectations of fast fulfillment and delivery. The company guarantees two-day shipping to anywhere in the country.
“The supply chain is the new competitive battleground,” Henry said. “Today’s buying expectations set by Amazon and the rise of the omni-channel shopper have placed immense pressure on companies to maintain more nimble and efficient supply chains… We want every company to have world-class, Prime-like supply chains.”
What makes Stord unique, according to Henry, is the fact that it has built what it believes to be the only end-to-end logistics network that combines the physical infrastructure with software.
That too is one of the reasons that Kleiner Perkins doubled down on its investment in the company.
Ilya Fushman, Stord board director and partner at Kleiner Perkins, said even at the time of his firm’s investment in 2019, that Henry displayed “amazing maturity and vision.”
At a high level, the firm was also just drawn to what he described as the “incredibly large market opportunity.”
“It’s trillions of dollars of products moving around with consumer expectation that these products will get to them the same day or next day, wherever they are,” Fushman told TechCrunch. “And while companies like Amazon have built amazing infrastructure to do that themselves, the rest of the world hasn’t really caught up… So there’s just amazing opportunity to build software and services to modernize this multitrillion-dollar market.”
In other words, Fushman explained, Stord is serving as a “plug and play” or “one stop shop” for retailers and merchants so they don’t have to spend resources on their own warehouses or building their own logistics platforms.
Stord launched the software part of its business in January 2020, and it grew 900% during the year, and is today one of the fastest-growing parts of its business.
“We built software to run our logistics and network of hundreds of warehouses,” Henry told TechCrunch. “But if companies want to use the same system for existing logistics, they can buy our software to get that kind of visibility.”
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Atlanta’s sundry startups join in global VC funding boom
Mailchimp is selling itself to Intuit in a transaction valued at $12 billion. The deal is a coup not only for companies that eschew venture capital backing — Mailchimp is famous for its bootstrapping history — but also for the city of its founding, Atlanta.
Mailchimp’s mega-exit comes in the same year that fellow Atlanta-based startup Calendly raised a massive $350 million round that valued the technology company north of $3 billion, per Crunchbase data.
The two companies underscore how possible it is to build large startups in markets outside of the traditional collection of cities most associated with technology entrepreneurship in the United States, like Boston, New York City and San Francisco, to name a few.
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Investors are taking note. CB Insights data through Q2 2021 indicates that startups in Atlanta are on a fundraising tear, already surpassing total capital raised in 2020 in just the first half of this year. The city’s venture acceleration is similar to fundraising gains we’ve seen in markets like Chicago.
The Exchange wanted to better understand the Atlanta market, especially regarding how bullish its local inventors are that its current pace of fundraising can continue, and what sort of external interest its startups are enjoying. So, we ran questions by Sean McCormick, the CEO of Atlanta-based SingleOps, a software startup that raised capital earlier this year; Atlanta Ventures’ A.T. Gimbel; and BLH Venture Partners’ Ashish Mistry. We also heard from Paul Noble, CEO of Verusen, a supply chain intelligence startup that raised an $8 million Series A round in January.
The picture that forms is one of a city enjoying a rising tide of venture activity, boosted by some local dynamics that may have helped some of its earlier-stage companies scale more cheaply than they might have in other markets. And there’s plenty of optimism to be found concerning the near future. Let’s explore.
A funding boom
It’s cliche at this point to note that a particular geography is experiencing record venture capital results; many cities, regions and countries are seeing startup capital inflows accelerate. But there are markets where the gains still stand out despite the generally warm climate for private capital investments into private companies.
Atlanta is one such market. Per CB Insights data, the U.S. city saw $2.17 billion in total investment during 2020. In the first quarter of 2021, Atlanta nearly matched its 2020 tally, with its startups collecting some $2.07 billion in total capital. Another $953 million was invested in the second quarter of the year; keep in mind that venture capital data is laggy, and thus what may appear to be a sharp decline may be ameliorated by later disclosures.
But with around $3 billion invested in the first half of 2021, already around a 50% gain on 2020’s full-year figures, it’s clear the city is seeing an unprecedented wave of venture investment.
Dollar volume is half the venture capital activity matrix, of course. The other key data line for the investment type is deal volume. There Atlanta’s activity is less superlative; Q1 2021 saw Atlanta startups attract 57 total deals, the second-best results that we have data for, narrowly losing to Q3 2017’s 59 deals.
But Q2 2021 saw Atlanta’s known venture deal volume fall to 42, a figure that is a slight miss from 2020’s average deal volume, measured on a quarterly basis. The same caveat regarding delayed data applies here, but perhaps not enough to completely close the gap between what we might have expected from Atlanta startups in terms of Q2 deal volume in the wake of the city’s super-active Q1.
Despite the somewhat slack Q2 2021 deal count in Atlanta, per current data, it’s clear that the city is enjoying record venture capital attention. What’s driving the uptick? Let’s find out.
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Saltbox raises $10.6M to help booming e-commerce stores store their goods
E-commerce is booming, but among the biggest challenges for entrepreneurs of online businesses are finding a place to store the items they are selling and dealing with the logistics of operating.
Tyler Scriven, Maxwell Bonnie and Paul D’Arrigo co-founded Saltbox in an effort to solve that problem.
The trio came up with a unique “co-warehousing” model that provides space for small businesses and e-commerce merchants to operate as well as store and ship goods, all under one roof. Beyond the physical offering, Saltbox offers integrated logistics services as well as amenities such as the rental of equipment and packing stations and access to items such as forklifts. There are no leases and tenants have the flexibility to scale up or down based on their needs.
“We’re in that sweet spot between co-working and raw warehouse space,” said CEO Scriven, a former Palantir executive and Techstars managing director.
Saltbox opened its first facility — a 27,000-square-foot location — in its home base of Atlanta in late 2019, filling it within two months. It recently opened its second facility, a 66,000-square-foot location, in the Dallas-Fort Worth area that is currently about 40% occupied. The company plans to end 2021 with eight locations, in particular eyeing the Denver, Seattle and Los Angeles markets. Saltbox has locations slated to come online as large as 110,000 square feet, according to Scriven.
The startup was founded on the premise that the need for “co-warehousing and SMB-centric logistics enablement solutions” has become a major problem for many new businesses that rely on online retail platforms to sell their goods, noted Scriven. Many of those companies are limited to self-storage and mini-warehouse facilities for storing their inventory, which can be expensive and inconvenient.
Scriven personally met with challenges when starting his own e-commerce business, True Glory Brands, a retailer of multicultural hair and beauty products.
“We became aware of the lack of physical workspace for SMBs engaged in commerce,” Scriven told TechCrunch. “If you are in the market looking for 10,000 square feet of industrial warehouse space, you are effectively pushed to the fringes of the real estate ecosystem and then the entrepreneurial ecosystem at large. This is costing companies in significant but untold ways.”
Now, Saltbox has completed a $10.6 million Series A round of financing led by Palo Alto-based Playground Global that included participation from XYZ Venture Capital and proptech-focused Wilshire Lane Partners in addition to existing backers Village Global and MetaProp. The company plans to use its new capital primarily to expand into new markets.
The company’s customers are typically SMB e-commerce merchants “generating anywhere from $50,000 to $10 million a year in revenue,” according to Scriven.
He emphasizes that the company’s value prop is “quite different” from a traditional flex office/co-working space.
“Our members are reliant upon us to support critical workflows,” Scriven said.
Besides e-commerce occupants, many service-based businesses are users of Saltbox’s offering, he said, such as those providing janitorial services or that need space for physical equipment. The company offers all-inclusive pricing models that include access to loading docks and a photography studio, for example, in addition to utilities and Wi-Fi.
Image Credits: Saltbox
Image Credits: Saltbox
The company secures its properties with a mix of buying and leasing by partnering with institutional real estate investors.
“These partners are acquiring assets and in most cases, are funding the entirety of capital improvements by entering into management or revenue share agreements to operate those properties,” Scriven said. He said the model is intentionally different from that of “notable flex space operators.”
“We have obviously followed those stories very closely and done our best to learn from their experiences,” he added.
Investor Adam Demuyakor, co-founder and managing partner of Wilshire Lane Partners, said his firm was impressed with the company’s ability to “structure excellent real estate deals” to help them continue to expand nationally.
He also believes Saltbox is “extremely well-positioned to help power and enable the next generation of great direct to consumer brands.”
Playground Global General Partner Laurie Yoler said the startup provides a “purpose-built alternative” for small businesses that have been fulfilling orders out of garages and self-storage units.
Saltbox recently hired Zubin Canteenwalla to serve as its chief operating officer. He joined Saltbox from Industrious, an operator co-working spaces, where he was SVP of Real Estate. Prior to Industrious, he was EVP of Operations at Common, a flexible residential living brand, where he led the property management and community engagement teams.
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Google alum startup Cartken and REEF Technology launch Miami’s first delivery robots
Self-driving and robotics startup Cartken has partnered with REEF Technology, a startup that operates parking lots and neighborhood hubs, to bring self-driving delivery robots to the streets of downtown Miami.
With this announcement, Cartken officially comes out of stealth mode. The company, founded by ex-Google engineers and colleagues behind the unrequited Bookbot, was formed to develop market-ready tech in self-driving, AI-powered robotics and delivery operations in 2019, but the team has kept operations under wraps until now. This is Cartken’s first large deployment of self-driving robots on sidewalks.
After a few test months, the REEF-branded electric-powered robots are now delivering dinner orders from REEF’s network of delivery-only kitchens to people located within a 3/4-mile radius in downtown Miami. The robots, which are insulated and thus can preserve the heat of a plate of spaghetti or other hot food, are pre-stationed at designated logistics hubs and dispatched with orders for delivery as the food is prepared.
“We want to show how future-forward Miami can be,” Matt Lindenberger, REEF’s chief technology officer, told TechCrunch. “This is a great chance to show off the capabilities of the tech. The combination of us having a big presence in Miami, the fact that there are a lot of challenges around congestion as COVID subsides, still shows a really good environment where we can show how this tech can work.”
Lindenberg said Miami is a great place to start, but it’s just the beginning, with potential for the Cartken robots to be used for REEF’s other last-mile delivery businesses. Currently, only two restaurant delivery robots are operating in Miami, but Lindenberger said the company is planning to expand further into the city and outward into Fort Lauderdale, as well as other large metros the company operates in, such as Dallas, Atlanta, Los Angeles and eventually New York.
Lindenberger is hoping the presence of robots in the streets can act as a “force multiplier,” allowing them to scale while maintaining quality of service in a cost-effective way.
“We’re seeing an explosion in deliveries right now in a post-pandemic world and we foresee that to continue, so these types of no-contact, zero-emission automation techniques are really critical,” he said.
Cartken’s robots are powered by a combination of machine learning and rules-based programming to react to every situation that could occur, even if that just means safely stopping and asking for help, Christian Bersch, CEO of Cartken, told TechCrunch. REEF would have supervisors on site to remotely control the robot if needed, a caveat that was included in the 2017 legislation that allowed for the operation of self-driving delivery robots in Florida.
“The technology at the end of the day is very similar to that of a self-driving car,” said Bersch. “The robot is seeing the environment, planning around obstacles like pedestrians or lampposts. If there’s an unknown situation, someone can help the robot out safely because it can stop on a dime. But it’s important to also have that level of autonomy on the robot because it can react in a split second, faster than anybody remotely could, if something happens like someone jumps in front of it.”
REEF marks specific operating areas on the map for the robots and Cartken tweaks the configuration for the city, accounting for specific situations a robot might need to deal with, so that when the robots are given a delivery address, they can make moves and operate like any other delivery driver. Only this driver has an LTE connection and is constantly updating its location so REEF can integrate it into its fleet management capabilities.
Image Credits: REEF/Cartken
Eventually, Lindenberger said, they’re hoping to be able to offer the option for customers to choose robot delivery on the major food delivery platforms REEF works with like Postmates, UberEats, DoorDash or GrubHub. Customers would receive a text when the robot arrives so they could go outside and meet it. However, the tech is not quite there yet.
Currently the robots only make it street-level, and then the food is passed off to a human who delivers it directly to the door, which is a service that most customers prefer. Navigating into an apartment complex and to a customer’s unit is difficult for a robot to manage just yet, and many customers aren’t quite ready to interact directly with a robot.
“It’s an interim step, but this was a path for us to move forward quickly with the technology without having any other boundaries,” said Lindenberger. “Like with any new tech, you want to take it in steps. So a super important step which we’ve now taken and works very well is the ability to dispatch robots within a certain radius and know that they’re going to arrive there. That in and of itself is a huge step and it allows us to learn what kind of challenges you have in terms of that very last step. Then we can begin to work with Cartken to solve that last piece. It’s a big step just being able to do this automation.”
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Atlanta area gets a 5G incubator courtesy of T-Mobile and Georgia Tech
The Atlanta area is getting a new incubator for startups working with 5G technology courtesy of T-Mobile and Georgia Tech’s Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC), the companies announced today.
It’s an expansion of the T-Mobile Accelerator program and part of the big carrier’s efforts to boost 5G innovation.
Located in the Atlanta-adjacent exurb of Peachtree Corners’ technology development park, which is already equipped with T-Mobile’s 5G services, the incubator will help developers build and test 5G use cases including autonomous vehicles, robotics, industrial drone applications, mixed reality training and entertainment, remote medical care and personal health, the company said.
Startups working with the 5G Connected Future program will work directly with folks at T-Mobile’s accelerator, Georgia Tech and Curiosity Lab, an initiative in the Peachtree Corners campus.
“In addition to the normal startup concerns, entrepreneurs in the 5G space face a unique set of challenges such as regulatory issues at the state and local levels, network security, and integration testing,” said ATDC Director John Avery.
Peachtree Corners’ setup may help folks navigate that rollout. As part of its involvement, ATDC will offer programing, recruit and evaluate startups, and hire staff to manage the vertical in Peachtree Corners, the organization said.
“This collaboration is a great opportunity for ATDC and Georgia Tech, the city of Peachtree Corners and Curiosity Lab, and T-Mobile, a Fortune 50 company, to create a unique collection to work with these companies, refine their ideas into scalable companies, and bring these solutions to market more quickly,” Avery said.
Such a partnership underscores “Georgia Tech’s commitment to enabling tomorrow’s technology leaders, which remains as strong as when ATDC was founded 41 years ago,” said Chaouki T. Abdallah, Georgia Tech’s executive vice president for research. “Innovation cannot take place in a vacuum, which is why entrepreneurs and startups require the knowledge and resources provided through partnerships such as ours.”
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Atlanta-based gaming controller peripheral seller KontrolFreek has been bought by SteelSeries
After nearly a decade selling gaming and console peripherals to gamers looking to spice up their systems, Atlanta-based KontrolFreek has been acquired by the international peripherals retailer SteelSeries.
Terms of the acquisition were undisclosed, but KontrolFreek has shipped more than 2 million units of its flagship product, which is available in over 9,000 retailers in 60 countries and can be found in over 16 online marketplaces.
That’s not bad for a company that was founded 11 years ago with a $50,000 check from BLH Venture Partners, the Atlanta-based investment firm co-founded by Billy L. Harbert and Ashish Mistry. Mistry, a co-founder of Virtex Networks and later an early team member at Air Defense.
Neither Harbert nor Mistry were much for gaming, but they did see the opportunity in selling peripherals to the folks who were, Mistry said in a direct message.
“Huge markets have large niches,” Mistry wrote.
By acquiring KontrolFreek, SteelSeries is further consolidating its position in the console gaming market by folding one of the leading sellers of high-performance controller accessories into its portfolio of products. Earlier this year, SteelSeries nabbed A-volute, which provides three dimensional sound systems for games.
SteelSeries also gets a vibrant user-generated media property in KontrolFreek’s FreekNation community, which boasts 4 million community members.
“With the next-generation consoles at the forefront of the gaming industry’s mind, there’s never been a better time to maximize our ability to provide the best gaming experiences and products to console gamers,” said Ehtisham Rabbani, CEO of SteelSeries. “With KontrolFreek’s expertise and global popularity, we know they’ll open new opportunities to entertain, delight, and assist new gamers across the world.”
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Atlanta-based Sanguina wants to make fingernail selfies a digital biomarker for iron deficiency
Sanguina, an Atlanta-based health technology developer, is launching a mobile app in the Google Play Store that uses pictures of fingernails to determine whether or not someone is getting enough iron.
The app measures hemoglobin levels, which are a key indicator of anemia, by analyzing the color of a person’s fingernail beds in a picture.
These fingernail selfies could be used to determine anemia for the more than 2 billion people who are affected by the condition — including women, children, athletes and the elderly.
Iron deficiencies can cause fatigue, pregnancy complications and, in severe cases, even cardiac arrest, the company said. AnemoCheck is the first smartphone application to measure hemoglobin levels, the company said — and through its app people can not only determine whether or not they’re anemic but also use the app’s information to address the condition, the company said.
Sanguina’s technology uses an algorithm to determine the amount of hemoglobin in the blood based on an examination and analysis of the coloration of the nail bed.
Created by Dr. Wilbur Lam, Erika Tyburski and Rob Mannino, the company was born out of research conducted at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University.
“This non-invasive anemia detection tool is the only type of app-based system that has the potential to replace a common blood test,” said Dr. Lam, a clinical hematologist-bioengineer at the Aflac Cancer and Blood Disorders Center of Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, associate professor of pediatrics at Emory University School of Medicine and a faculty member in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Emory University and Georgia Tech.
So far, Sanguina has raised more than $4.2 million in funding from The Seed Lab, XRC Labs and grants from The National Science Foundation and The National Institutes of Health, according to a statement.
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Splunk acquires Plumbr and Rigor to build out its observability platform
Data platform Splunk today announced that it has acquired two startups, Plumbr and Rigor, to build out its new Observability Suite, which is also launching today. Plumbr is an application performance monitoring service, while Rigor focuses on digital experience monitoring, using synthetic monitoring and optimization tools to help businesses optimize their end-user experiences. Both of these acquisitions complement the technology and expertise Splunk acquired when it bought SignalFx for over $1 billion last year.
Splunk did not disclose the price of these acquisitions, but Estonia-based Plumbr had raised about $1.8 million, while Atlanta-based Rigor raised a debt round earlier this year.
When Splunk acquired SignalFx, it said it did so in order to become a leader in observability and APM. As Splunk CTO Tim Tully told me, the idea here now is to accelerate this process.
Image Credits: Splunk
“Because a lot of our users and our customers are moving to the cloud really, really quickly, the way that they monitor [their] applications changed because they’ve gone to serverless and microservices a ton,” he said. “So we entered that space with those acquisitions, we quickly folded them together with these next two acquisitions. What Plumbr and Rigor do is really fill out more of the portfolio.”
He noted that Splunk was especially interested in Plumbr’s bytecode implementation and its real-user monitoring capabilities, and Rigor’s synthetics capabilities around digital experience monitoring (DEM). “By filling in those two pieces of the portfolio, it gives us a really amazing set of solutions because DEM was the missing piece for our APM strategy,” Tully explained.
Image Credits: Splunk
With the launch of its Observability Suite, Splunk is now pulling together a lot of these capabilities into a single product — which also features a new design that makes it stand apart from the rest of Splunk’s tools. It combines logs, metrics, traces, digital experience, user monitoring, synthetics and more.
“At Yelp, our engineers are responsible for hundreds of different microservices, all aimed at helping people find and connect with great local businesses,” said Chris Gordon, Technical Lead at Yelp, where his team has been testing the new suite. “Our Production Observability team collaborates with Engineering to improve visibility into the performance of key services and infrastructure. Splunk gives us the tools to empower engineers to monitor their own services as they rapidly ship code, while also providing the observability team centralized control and visibility over usage to ensure we’re using our monitoring resources as efficiently as possible.”
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3 views on the future of geographic-focused funds
For many investors, the coronavirus has effectively taken geography out of the equation when it comes to vetting new opportunities.
While this dynamic opens up startups to more investment opportunities, venture capital firms that focus on a specific region are in a thornier spot. The competitive advantage they once had when raising — the notion that they’re focused on an area no one else is — is potentially threatened.
Natasha Mascarenhas, Danny Crichton and Alex Wilhelm of the TechCrunch Equity crew discussed the future of geographic-focused funds given the uptick of remote investing:
- Natasha: Early-stage regional funds can win if they remain focused
- Alex: Geo-focused venture funds will be weakened, but won’t die
- Danny: Geo-focused venture funds are dead (and should never have existed)
Natasha: Early-stage regional funds can win if they remain focused
Since 2014, Steve Case and his team have made an annual bus trip across the country to meet startups in emerging startup hubs. Five days, five cities and at least $500,000 of investment dollars given to startups. Case would even offer to fly out promising and hard-to-reach startups to have them join the trip.
The Rise of the Rest fund, with more than $300 million in assets under management, has invested in over 130 startups across 70 cities, including Austin, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, New Orleans and Washington, D.C.
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Lyft deploys 200 long-range EVs for its rideshare rental fleet in Colorado
Lyft is making 200 new long-range EVs available to rideshare drivers as part of its Express Drive program, the company revealed today. Express Drive is a program that Lyft offers to provide rental cars to drivers on its platform as an alternative to options like long-term leasing. Express Drive members get unlimited miles, as well as included insurance, maintenance and roadside service, with the ability to return the car after a rental period of as little as just a week.
These 200 new EVs (all Kia vehicles for this particular deployment, Lyft tells me) will be available to Express Drive Lyft drivers in December, and the rideshare company says that this is “the largest single deployment of EVs in Colorado’s history,” and there’s good financial reasoning for the timing of Lyft’s introduction of the program — in May, Colorado Governor Jared Polis signed a bill into law that provides rental programs for rideshare operators with the same incentives that it provides consumers at the state level: as much as $5,000 per car purchased.
EV deployments of this nature have benefits across all aspects of the rideshare economy: Lower operating costs for drivers are one immediate effect, for instance, and Lyft says that it has seen costs drop between $70 to $100 for drivers on average based on existing EV fleet deployments in both Seattle and Atlanta. For cities and residents, it’s obviously beneficial in terms of lowering net emissions resulting from cars on the road. The jury is still out on whether rideshare and ride-hailing programs ultimately decrease the total number of cars on the roads, but if programs like this can speed the adoption of EVs and ensure they represent a higher percentage of the mix of vehicles that are driving around cities, that’s a net win.
Large fleets of EVs in operation also provide incentives for infrastructure operators to ensure that there’s a good charging network on the ground for these vehicles to take advantage of. That, in turn, means the infrastructure is present for consumers to take advantage of, which helps with the general EV adoption curve.
Lyft also says it’s aiming to “electrify more of the Lyft fleet each year moving forward,” so expect additional cities and fleet deployments to follow as it works on those goals.
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