Seven-year-old electric vehicle startup Canoo filed for bankruptcy and will “Stop the business immediately.” The company is liquidating its assets in a Chapter 7 proceeding in Delaware Bankruptcy Court.
The company told a press release It announced late Friday that it was “in discussions with foreign sources of funds” that have proved unsuccessful, and also singled out the inability to secure funding from the US Department of Energy’s Office of Loan Programs, which has been on a borrowing spree in the final days of the Biden administration. .
Canoo said in its bankruptcy filing archiving that it owes money to fewer than 49 creditors, with outstanding obligations totaling between $10 million and $50 million. He claimed to have less than $50,000 in assets.
The bankruptcy filing comes just weeks after Canoo furloughed its remaining workers and idled its Oklahoma plant. The company has struggled throughout 2024 to get more than a few of its electric trucks into the hands of prospective customers and suffered several executive departures. He had just $700,000 in the bank in mid-November.
Canoo is the latest EV startup to go bankrupt after merging with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) as a shortcut to going public. Electric Last Mile Solutions was the first June 2022. But since then, Fisker, Lordstown Motors, Proterra, Lion Electricand Arrival filed for different levels of bankruptcy protection in their different home countries. (Canoo bought Arrival’s assets out of insolvency in 2024, though it’s unclear if it ever used any of them.)
Canoo announced plans to merge with a SPAC Hennessy Capital Acquisition Corp. in August 2020 and released in December, raising around $600 million. In the years since it went public, the company has built a small number of its electric trucks and delivered them to partners — some paying — willing to test drive the vehicles. The United States Postal Service, the Department of Defense, and NASA have or had Canoo vehicles.
At one point the company even courted Walmart, which agreed to buy up to 10,000 EVs from Canoo in 2022. But the deal was essentially non-binding and carries little risk for the retail giant.
Canoo was founded at the end of 2017 by a fragmented group of executives who were fed up with the drama surrounding the other EV startup where they were working at the time, Faraday Future. Originally called Evelozcity, these executives developed a modular electric vehicle platform that could power cabs of many shapes and sizes and used advanced technology such as a steer-by-wire system.
The ideas inside Canoo were attractive enough that the startup at one point was in talks with Applewhich was interested in a possible investment or even acquisition as a way to boost the tech giant’s secretive electric car project. Canoo’s former CTO and one-time CEO Ulrich Kranz continued to help run Apple’s car project before it was disbanded in 2024.
However, Canoo suffered several upheavals after going public and got a new president and CEO in Tony Aquila, who had invested in the company before the merger.
A serial entrepreneur, Aquila immediately refocused Canoo away from consumer sales and prioritized commercial fleets. On his watch, Canoo has repeatedly changed plans on whether to build its own electric vehicles or outsource the work. At one point Canoo announced it was moving its headquarters to Bentonville, Arkansas — the home of Walmart — but never followed through. Instead, the company spent years trying to get a foothold in multiple production facilities in Oklahoma.
His financial company Aquila appeared to benefit from his position at the top of the company. In 2023, Canoo spent twice its meager earnings on its company Aquila to pay for the use of its corporate jet. Canoo also leased office space from Aquila’s company, according to regulatory filings.
It was also Aquila’s company that kept Canoo alive in recent months. The company borrowed It burned through a few million dollars to keep the lights on dating back to October. Those loans were secured by a “first priority lien and security interest” on equipment located at Canoo’s Oklahoma City facility.
Signs of bankruptcy bubbled up all week. Reddit users noticed that the company’s billboard outside its office in Justin, Texas had been removed. Many furloughed employees told TechCrunch they received formal termination notices. Some people who had deposited $100 when the company was still planning to sell to regular customers had started getting refunds.
