Rivian's Spinout Company Also Just Raised $150 Million for Self-Driving Vehicles

Also, a startup that makes electric bikes and delivery vehicles and was originally part of Rivian, has raised $150 million in new funding. The round was led by an investment firm called Prysm Capital, with participation from existing backers Eclipse, Greenoaks, and MVP Ventures. The company has now raised $455 million total since it was founded less than two years ago, according to TechCrunch.

Also says the new money will speed up development of self-driving technology and several types of autonomous vehicles at once. Here is the interesting part: the company plans to build its future self-driving vehicles on the same basic electrical system it already designed for its pedal-assist bike and its delivery quad. Think of it like a smartphone operating system that can power both a phone and a tablet. Also designed its system from the start to work across different vehicle types, rather than trying to add self-driving capability later as an afterthought.

Also's products are starting to reach customers. Its e-bike Launch edition, which was delayed for months, has started shipping. Pre-orders are now open for performance and standard models, with deliveries expected this fall. Last October, the company showed off its first products: a $4,500 two-wheeler called the TM-B and two quad vehicles, one of which will go to Amazon.

The company moved fast to get here. Also started as a small experimental team inside Rivian, pushed by founder and CEO RJ Scaringe's interest in micromobility, which refers to small, lightweight vehicles like bikes and scooters. It became its own company in 2025 with $150 million in initial funding and a team hired from Apple, Google, Specialized, and Tesla. Eclipse invested $105 million in that spinout. Rivian still owns a minority stake, and Scaringe sits on Also's board.

This latest funding round follows a $200 million round led by Greenoaks a few months earlier, which also included Prysm Capital and a strategic investment from DoorDash. That earlier round came with a business angle: DoorDash signed a multi-year deal with Also to develop and deploy autonomous delivery vehicles. The partnership gives Also a committed partner for last-mile delivery, the final step where a package reaches the customer's door. It is a part of the logistics business where self-driving vehicles face intense pressure to keep costs low per delivery, even before the technology is fully ready.

Prysm Capital co-founder Jay Park said his firm is backing Also for the same reason it invested early in Rivian. The firm's participation in both recent funding rounds shows continued confidence as Also shifts from launching products to developing self-driving technology. Also is based in Palo Alto, California, per Bloomberg.

The funding path here stands out. A company under two years old, just starting to ship its first e-bikes and delivery quads, has now raised nearly half a billion dollars and is pointing the newest money squarely at self-driving technology. The order of operations matters. Also is building autonomy on top of a system already tested in lower-speed, lower-risk vehicles, rather than starting with a full-size self-driving car program and working backward. Whether that approach leads to deployable self-driving vehicles faster than building the technology from scratch is the question this $150 million is essentially paying to answer.

The DoorDash and Amazon relationships give Also two different ways to get its vehicles into the real world, one through consumer delivery and one through commercial logistics. For a company developing multiple autonomous vehicle types at the same time, having committed partners in different areas could shorten the time between building something and learning how it performs on the road.

The broader context worth weighing is that micromobility has been a tough business for investors. Several well-known companies in the space have collapsed, and profit margins have been thin. Also's bet, reflected in this funding, is that a shared electric platform covering bikes, quads, and eventually self-driving vehicles can spread engineering costs across enough products to make the numbers work. That kind of platform strategy is more common in software than in physical products. Whether vehicle manufacturing allows the same logic is the open question.