It’s not an easy time to raise money for an electric vehicle startup, especially given how many have failed or are close to failure. But Los Angeles-based Harbinger has achieved it by taking a hyper-focused approach to electrifying commercial trucks.
The reward is a $100 million Series B co-led by early Tesla investor Capricorn Investor Group and Leitmotif, a new US fund co-founded by the former head of M&A for Volkswagen. Also joining the round were Tiger Global and mobility venture firm Maniv, both of which were existing investors.
“We know how the EV space has gone. We know it’s filled with bodies from the last decade,” said Harbinger CEO John Harris in an interview with TechCrunch. “So we really, really try to keep our goal very focused and we’re very confident high on what we say we will do before we say we will do it.”
Founded in 2022 by a group of former Canoo and QuantumScape employees, Harbinger set out to make an all-electric modular chassis for medium-duty trucks.
Then… he did it, and that was it.
Harbinger maintained its focus at a time when investors poured billions of dollars into startups that claimed they would make hundreds of thousands of EVs, or reshape transportation as we know it. Arrival, for example, started in a similar sector as Harbinger. But as it went public, Arrival claimed it would reinvent auto manufacturing with so-called microfactories, plan to make buses, develop an Uber car and potentially even work on an airplane.
Achievement is now bankrupt. Meanwhile, Harbinger has closed a Series B and is on the verge of entering production.
“Harbinger is just this amazing team of very seasoned operators, with a lot of kind of scar tissue and relevant experience from their previous roles,” Leitmotif co-founder Jens Wiese, a former VW executive, said in an interview. “They’re just laser-focused on this segment and getting the product right.”
Harris said focusing on one product has not only allowed his startup to survive, but is helping to improve the product.
As an example, Harris pointed to the battery packs that power the Harbinger’s chassis. Instead of packing them in stamped steel, which has to be glued together—and could lead to leaks that damage the batteries—Harbinger invested in a 6,500-ton press that uses high pressures to mold the entire enclosure.
Harris said Harbinger was only able to invest in such a specialized tool because it didn’t have to spread its spending across multiple other products. The result: closing battery packs that are only one-twentieth of the normal cost.
Investments like this have allowed Harbinger to make its chassis more affordable from the start, rather than relying on mass scale to achieve attractive unit economics.
And since Harbinger is essentially selling to CFOs of fleet companies, Maniv managing partner Michael Granoff said that’s an attractive proposition.
“The segment that they’re going after, they don’t replace their fleets that often, and when you think about it, they’ve been doing it for several years — and the math becomes so compelling that it’s just inevitable,” Granoff said.
Granoff believes so fully in Harbinger’s opportunity that his firm has invested more in the startup than any other company. Harbinger’s Series B is also the only investment to be joined by Manivi’s second fund, which the firm did not lead.
“We’ve basically already delivered compelling unit economics, and that’s why people who wouldn’t normally be in this space are coming in, (investors) like Tiger,” Harris said. “We have industry-leading unit economics, if you ignore Tesla, but I expect we’ll have better margins than that, probably in another 12 to 18 months.”