Nuked The deal between Canoo and Hyundai to build electric vehicles appears to be dead. The California EV startup is moving away from trying to sell its electric vehicle technology to other automakers.
Canoo’s CEO was also absent from the call. The company announced earlier in the day that its CFO had resigned to take another job.
Roth capital analyst Craig Irwin said’these are significant surprises on the call today, and that’s not ideal’.’this are significant surprising surprising on the phone today,’ he said.
The deal with Hyundai was announced in February 2020. Hyundai called it a’key partnership’. Hyundai did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Aquila took over Canoo as part of the startup’s merger with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) in 2020, which netted it around $ 600 million. Canoo’s desire to sell its technology at one point even drew the interest of Apple, as the verge previously reported.
Canoo’s planned engineering services business presented a’significant market for contract engineering services’. The Securities and Exchange Commission documents filed before and after the merger.
Canoo said it was’in discussions with a number of other partners and expects to be in a position to announce many more partnerships in due course’.
Canoo will focus even less on the idea of selling its electric van to consumers through a subscription model. The company has so far announced a delivery vehicle, a pickup truck, and a van.
Canoo quietly uploaded a new investor presentation to its investor relations website on Monday that no longer mentions Hyundai. It was n’t until Monday that he explained how far he is willing to take that strategy shift shift.
Aquila said he believes that this will make for a more sound business with less risk. Aquila explained he believes this will be for a better business.
Aquila, who invested $ 35 million into Canoo before the SPAC merger, pointed to the startup’s prior leadership. Aquila said they were’a little more aggressive’ than he would’ve been with some of their public statements.
‘you’ve got to be careful with statements you make,’ he said.’so, you know, again, I think it was a little premature’, he said.
Aquila was asked if Krause’s replacement, Canoo cofounder Ulrich kranz, was still CEO. kranz’s contract was recently renegotiated and he was removed from the board of directors.
