Startup electric truck manufacturer Zeus Electric Chassis Inc. has closed on a $674,000 seed round, it announced earlier this April.
Zeus also raised an additional $77,000 from CEO Wayne Kugel, bringing the total amount raised to over $751,000 according to a regulatory filing.
The round was led by Silicon Prairie Capital Partners and was limited to private investors. Over 60 people took part in the round.
White Bear Lake-based Zeus Electric Chassis has six employees and a handful of contractors. and is working on a purchase agreement with its first customer, Kugel said. That customer, the Sacramento Municipality Utility District, would buy five vehicles from Zeus, including a flatbed truck, a dump truck and a dry van trailer, in a deal worth $1.2 million.
Zeus' technology hinges on its electric chassis, which can be designed to customer specifications and can support different vehicle bodies and cabins. The vehicles run on lithium-ion batteries, similar to other electric vehicles like those made by Tesla.
Zeus plans to ramp up its production by about 10 times each year. In 2020, it built its first vehicle. By the end of 2021, it hopes to have built 10 and will build 100 in 2022, Kugel said. The company currently manufactures in White Bear Lake but hopes to soon acquire a 400,000-square-foot space in Oklahoma to help it scale up its production capacity.
"It takes a while to make sure you’ve got all the processes to build at scale," Kugel said.
The firm will support that growth by hiring as many as 25 people in Minnesota and remotely, he said. It is also working on an A round of venture capital. That round could be as large as $50 million and Zeus plans to raise at least $5 million of that by June.
