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MW Amazon-backed EV company Rivian files for IPO

By Levi Sumagaysay

Electric vehicle company intends to sell trucks and SUVs to consumers, delivery vans to Amazon

Rivian Automotive Inc., which is working on electric delivery vans for Amazon.com Inc. in addition to electric trucks for consumers, filed for an initial public offering Friday.

Rivian launched the R1T, an electric pickup truck meant for consumers, in September. The company said in its filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that it intends to launch and deliver the R1S, a sport-utility vehicle, in December, and plans to deliver electric delivery vehicles, or EDVs, to Amazon $(AMZN)$ in December.

"Rivian was started from a clean sheet--there was no money, no team, no technology, no suppliers, no brand, and no production infrastructure," founder and Chief Executive Robert Scaringe said in a letter to investors included in Friday's filing. "The lack of constraints was intoxicating for the imagination."

Among the investors in the Irvine, Calif.-based company, which was launched in 2015 and has raised $10.5 billion, are Amazon and Ford Motor Co. $(F)$ According to its filing, Rivian's fate will be closely tied to Amazon. The company will exclusively provide last-mile delivery vehicles to Amazon for four years, and from years four to six, Amazon will have the right of first refusal to buy its EDVs.

Rivian, which confidentially filed for its IPO in August, said it had less than $1.07 billion in revenue in its last fiscal year and that its 2020 loss rose to $1.02 billion from $426 million the previous year. Besides the vehicles it is making and developing, the company offers FleetOS, a fleet-management subscription platform.

The company named a target raise for the IPO of $100 million, but that is typically a placeholder amount that will be updated in future filings. Rivian has applied to list on the Nasdaq under the ticker "RIVN," and Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan were listed as the lead underwriters among 22 banks involved in the offering.

-Levi Sumagaysay

$(END)$ Dow Jones Newswires

October 01, 2021 18:46 ET (22:46 GMT)

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