Trucks Venture Capital co-founder Reilly Brennan has spent over 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 platforms and more.
Now, Brennan, along with partners Jeffrey Schox, Kathryn Schox and Puneeth Meruva, are on the hunt 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 there are seven strategic limited partners, including an auto supplier, a tire manufacturer, an insurance company and an airline.
This is the San Francisco-based firm’s third fund and its largest to date.
VC trucks plans to make about 30 seed investments from the fund and write checks for between $500,000 and $2 million in early production and development. Trucks typically aims to acquire around 10% ownership stakes as part of its strategy.
Trucks has already invested in several startups from the new fund, including a charger-as-a-service startup Treehousezero emission aircraft company JetZerolow cost high frequency kinetic launch company Auriga Spaceand Carviswhich has developed a major AI technology to support engineers.
The firm’s investment strategy has evolved a bit since its inception in 2014, but Brennan noted that it’s still essentially the same as when they started. In particular, he never looked for startups that fill a slot or a 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 at, 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 the founder, Trucks changed course and focused on great founders.
“When we developed an idea and then went to find a founder who worked on it, we tended to make bad decisions because we were just looking for an idea, a founder, to confirm our bias,” 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 a way, it gave us the flexibility to start doing things like aviation or aerospace that were certainly not 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 bought last year. Trucks has also invested in Joby Aviation, autonomous company Gatik and automated flight control startup Skyryse.
