It’s not an easy time to raise money for an electric vehicle startup, especially given how many have failed or are close to failing. But Los Angeles-based Harbinger has pulled it off by taking an hyper-focused approach to electrifying commercial trucking.
The reward is a $100 million Series B, co-led by early Tesla investor Capricorn Investor Group and Leitmotif, a new U.S. fund co-founded by the former M&A head for Volkswagen. Also joining the round were Tiger Global and mobility venture firm Maniv, both of which were existing investors.
“We know how the EV space has gone. We know that it’s just littered with bodies from the decade past,” Harbinger CEO John Harris told TechCrunch in an interview. “So we really, really try to keep our scope very focused and have very high confidence in what we say we’re going to do before we say we’re going to do it.”
Founded in 2022 by a group of former Canoo and QuantumScape employees, Harbinger set out to make a modular all-electric chassis for medium-duty trucks.
Then it… did that, and only that.
Harbinger maintained its focus at a time when investors threw billions of dollars at startups that claimed they’d make hundreds of thousands of EVs, or reshape transportation as we know it. Arrival, for instance, started out in a similar sector as Harbinger. But as it went public, Arrival claimed it would reinvent vehicle manufacturing with so-called microfactories, planned to make buses, developed a ride-hail car with Uber, and was potentially even working on an aircraft.
Arrival is now bankrupt. Harbinger, meanwhile, has closed a Series B and is on the verge of entering production.
“Harbinger is just this amazing team of very seasoned operators, with kind of a lot of scar tissue and relevant experience from their previous roles,” Leitmotif co-founder Jens Wiese, the former VW exec, said in an interview. “They’re just laser focused on this segment and getting the product right.”
Harris said focusing on one product has not only allowed his startup to survive, it’s helping make the product better.
As an example, Harris pointed to the battery packs that power Harbinger’s chassis. Instead of packaging them in stamped steel, which needs to be welded together – and can lead to leaks that harm the batteries – Harbinger invested in a 6,500 ton press that uses high pressures to die cast the entire enclosure.
Harris said Harbinger was only able to invest in such a specialized tool because it didn’t have to spread its spending across multiple other products. The result: battery pack enclosures that are just one-twentieth of the normal cost.
Investments like this have allowed Harbinger to make its chassis more affordable from the outset, instead of relying on massive scale to reach attractive unit economics.
And since Harbinger is essentially selling to CFOs of fleet companies, Maniv managing partner Michael Granoff said that’s a tantalizing proposition.
“The segment they’re going after, they don’t replace their fleets that often, and when they’re thinking about it, they’re doing it for a number of years – and the math gets so compelling that it’s just unavoidable,” Granoff said.
Granoff so thoroughly believes in Harbinger’s opportunity that his firm has invested more in the startup than any other company. Harbinger’s Series B is also the only investment round Maniv’s second fund has joined that the firm didn’t lead.
“We’ve basically delivered compelling unit economics already, and that’s why people come in who normally wouldn’t be in this space, [investors] like Tiger,” Harris said. “We have industry leading unit economics, if you ignore Tesla, but I expect us to have better margins than them, probably in another 12 to 18 months.”
