Trucks Venture Capital co-founder Reilly Brennan has spent more than a decade scouting for—and investing in—entrepreneurs building the future of transportation, including autonomous vehicle technology, electric air taxis, EV charger maintenance, mobility data and more.
Now, Brennan along with partners Jeffrey Schox, Kathryn Schox and Puneeth Meruva, are looking for the next batch of early-stage startups and have a new $70 million fund to help them build. Trucks did not name the investors in the fund, but Brennan noted that it has seven strategic limited partners, including an automotive supplier, tire manufacturer, insurance company and airline carrier.
This is the San Francisco-based firm’s third fund and its largest to date.
Trucks VC plans to make about 30 seed investments from the fund, with a plan to write checks from $500,000 to $2 million at the seed and pre-seed stage. Trucks typically aims to take about a 10% ownership stake as part of its strategy.
Trucks has already invested in several startups from the new fund, including charger-as-a-service startup Treehouse, zero-emissions jet company JetZero, low-cost kinetic firm Auriga Space, and Carvis, which has developed a technology AI master to support mechanics.
The firm’s investment strategy has evolved a bit since its founding in 2014, but Brennan noted that it’s still essentially the same as when they started. In particular, it has never looked for startups that fill a country or sector.
“Our core strategy is to be so good that the best founders have to have a conversation with you early on, as opposed to looking, hey, in this fund, I want to have four hydrogen companies and four EV charging companies; we tend not to do that,” he explained.
A notable change in strategy occurred about six years ago. Instead of coming up with an idea and looking for a founder, Trucks changed course and focused on great founders.
“When we developed an idea and then went to find a founder who was working on it, we tended to make bad decisions because we were just looking for an idea, a founder, to confirm our preconceptions,” he said. “We realized we were seeing somewhere between 100 and 150 new companies a month and thought ‘why not wait and see if there’s a great founder who opens us up to a new idea we hadn’t thought of.’ I think in some ways, it gave us the flexibility to start doing things like aviation or aerospace that we definitely weren’t part of our mission in 2015.”
Some of Trucks’ past investments include Bear Flag Robotics, which was acquired by John Deere; and Zendrive, which Intuit acquired last year. Trucks has also invested in Joby Aviation, autonomous company Gatik and automated flight control startup Skyryse.
