A Bay Area startup designing an electric mini pickup truck has raised some fresh capital and added one of Tesla's co-founders to its board.
Based in San Carlos, Telo Trucks announced on Wednesday that it had closed a $5.4 million strategic investment from Neo, Spero Ventures and several angel investors.
Alongside the funding, Spero's venture partner Marc Tarpenning will join Telo's board. Tarpenning co-founded Tesla with Martin Eberhard in 2003.
Telo's fresh infusion of capital brings its total funding to just over $7 million. The company previously raised around $1.8 million in a pre-seed round from investors including GoAhead Ventures, Underdog Labs, WorkPlay Ventures and famed designer Yves Béhar.
Béhar and his studio Fuseproject are also working with Telo on its truck design.
The company is aiming for a full commercial launch of its first model by 2026, and expects to price the mini pickup starting at $50,000.
The team is currently building out a prototype and validating safety features as it works on developing a road ready consumer vehicle.
Telo also released images of a drivable chassis with an exposed rollover cage, and the company told me it anticipates unveiling the car in early 2025.
The company says it has clocked more than 2,000 pre-orders since mid-2023, as well.
"We're really trying to go to market as fast as we can, and streamline that path using things that have been certified and are already validated and ready to go," CTO Forrest North told me in an interview last year.
North co-founded Telo in 2022 with CEO Jason Marks.
Marks previously worked in the autonomous software, advanced driver safety and lidar sectors, while North was a mechanical engineer at Tesla during its early years.
They decided to shrink down a full-sized pickup truck bed into a much smaller footprint in order to make it a more practical purchase for consumers living in dense urban areas, like San Francisco, where parking is expensive and smaller is often better.
So they chopped off the front where traditional combustion engines usually sit and also pared down other unnecessary gaps and materials, leading to a full-sized pickup truck that's nearly the same size as BMW's compact Mini Cooper.
The company is using off-the-shelf software and components for things like its advanced driver safety system, battery cells and chips. It will also work with an existing original equipment manufacturer, or OEM, to manufacture its vehicles but hasn't announced that partnership yet.
It has also garnered attention from commercial fleet managers, TechCrunch reported on Wednesday.
“It’s a unique opportunity, because we have this massive hole in the market,” Marks told TechCrunch. “We will still want to address the early users, and we want to intermingle that with delivering to bigger fleet customers at the same time.”
