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Rivian spinout Also raises $150M Series D to fund autonomous driving push

Martin HollowayPublished 2month ago4 min readBased on 4 sources
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Rivian spinout Also raises $150M Series D to fund autonomous driving push
Photo by Jay8g / CC BY-SA 4.0

Also, the micromobility and autonomous vehicle startup spun out of Rivian, has raised $150 million in a Series D round led by Prysm Capital. Existing backers Eclipse, Greenoaks, and MVP Ventures participated. The round brings Also's total funding to $455 million since the company's founding less than two years ago, according to TechCrunch.

Also said the new capital will accelerate development of its autonomous driving technology and the simultaneous progression of multiple autonomous form factors. The company's future autonomous vehicles will be built on the same electric architecture developed for its consumer pedal-assist bike and commercial delivery quad, suggesting the underlying platform was designed from the outset to scale across vehicle types rather than being retrofitted for autonomy after the fact.

The company's product line is beginning to reach customers. Also's e-bike Launch edition, delayed for months, has started shipping. Pre-orders and configuration access have opened for the performance and standard models, with initial deliveries of those expected in fall. Last October, Also revealed its first products: a $4,500 two-wheeler called the TM-B and two quad vehicles, one of which will be supplied to Amazon.

Also's path to this point has moved quickly. The company began as a skunkworks project inside Rivian, driven by founder and CEO RJ Scaringe's interest in micromobility. It spun out in 2025 with $150 million in initial funding and a team assembled from Apple, Google, Specialized, and Tesla. Eclipse put in $105 million as part of that spinout round. Rivian retains a minority stake, and Scaringe sits on Also's board.

The Series D follows a $200 million round led by Greenoaks with participation from Prysm Capital and a strategic investment from DoorDash, raised a few months prior. That earlier round came with a commercial dimension: DoorDash struck a multi-year agreement with Also to develop and deploy autonomous delivery vehicles. The partnership gives Also a committed deployment partner in last-mile logistics, a sector where autonomous platforms face steep unit-economics pressure even before technical readiness is resolved.

Prysm Capital co-founder and managing partner Jay Park said his firm is backing Also for the same reason it was an early investor in Rivian. The firm's continued participation across both the Greenoaks-led round and the Series D signals sustained conviction as Also transitions from product launches to autonomous development. Also is headquartered in Palo Alto, California, per Bloomberg.

The capital trajectory here is notable. A company under two years old, shipping its first e-bikes and delivery quads, has now accumulated nearly half a billion dollars in funding while explicitly directing the newest tranche toward autonomous driving. That sequencing matters: Also is building autonomy on top of an electric architecture already proven in lower-speed, lower-stakes form factors, rather than starting with a full-size autonomous vehicle program and working backward. Whether that architecture-first approach yields a faster path to deployable autonomy than building a dedicated AV stack from scratch is the question this $150 million is effectively underwriting.

The DoorDash and Amazon relationships give Also two distinct deployment channels, one in consumer delivery and one in commercial logistics. For a company pursuing multiple autonomous form factors simultaneously, having committed partners across different use cases could shorten the feedback loop between development and real-world operation.

The broader context worth weighing is that micromobility has been a difficult category for investors. High-profile collapses and thin margins have made the sector unforgiving. Also's bet, as reflected in this funding, is that a shared electric platform spanning bikes, quads, and eventually autonomous vehicles can spread engineering costs across enough products to change the unit economics. That is a platform thesis more commonly seen in enterprise software than in hardware. Whether the physics of vehicle manufacturing cooperates with that logic remains the open variable.