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Los Angeles is known for its charm, but there’s also a lot of grit in the air — literally. Thousands of containers are moved to and from ships at the region’s two main ports every day, almost always transported by polluting diesel trucks. This has made Los Angeles a hotbed for all kinds of new electric vehicle and charging infrastructure projects.
A new startup company called Nevoya He pounces on the opportunity.
“It’s the best place in the country” for electric trucks, founder Sami Khan told TechCrunch in a recent interview. “The incentives are the strongest, and there is a huge market here,” he noted.
Nevoya seems to be making some progress already. The startup loads goods on electric trucks in the Los Angeles area for Fortune 500 companies, which Khan declined to identify. Nevoya also revealed to TechCrunch that it has raised $3 million in a seed round led by Third Sphere and RedBlue Capital, as well as Necessary Ventures, Ciri Ventures, and Never Lift.
Nevoya bills itself as “the first zero-emissions technology and trucking platform” in the United States. The startup exclusively buys electric trucks — all Freightliner eCascadias, so far — to offer to shippers that want to move goods cleanly. It is also using artificial intelligence software to optimize the utilisation, routing and charging of its trucks, which Nevoya says allows it to keep its prices lower than diesel.
Khan and his co-founders form a trio of free experiences that seem appropriate for such an endeavor. Khan spent a few years at McLaren Applied Technologies, the British carmaker’s innovation arm, but also spent half a decade working in private equity. John Verdon led business development and business partnerships at Waymo. Tom Atwood built a predictive analytics startup that was sold to supply chain company Project44, where he spent the past two years working on route optimization and infrastructure planning software.
The funding will go toward growing operations, but not to purchase trucks. Khan said these purchases will be done with debt, a strategy he is comfortable with following his experiences in private equity. Khan believes this approach makes Nevoya more attractive to investors, an environment in which there is still a lot of hesitation about solid technology. While he said his team “kissed a lot of frogs,” the process led them to investors like RedBlue — run by former co-founder of transportation fund Maniv Mobility, Olaf Sackers.
“These were the people we had our first conversation with, and within a week it was on the term paper, because they got it, and they understood,” he said. “The size of the pie and the opportunity are so huge.”
Khan stressed that competing with diesel trucks in terms of cost will be difficult. But that pressure is alleviated by how easy it is to have conversations with companies that ship goods through the Los Angeles area.
“All Fortune 500 brands are looking to reduce their revenue Scope 3 emissions (Indirect emissions) and there are no actual solutions.” With Nevoya, Khan’s promise to these companies is: “There’s no difference in your business, because we take care of the shipping. We have drivers. We have the trucks.”
Even as Nivoya is still working to achieve cost parity with diesel, Khan said these major companies hardly care. “They want decarbonization so badly that they’re willing to pay a premium, so for those (customers), we’re actually getting out at a higher rate than diesel.”
“What’s so exciting about building this business is that you’ll have access to any shipping company in the United States,” Khan said. “We haven’t failed there once — as soon as you say you have electric cars, they answer the phone. They’re ramping up.”
As it signs on with more companies, Nevoya can efficiently move shipments from different customers to make the most of the electric trucks in its fleet. This helps it reduce costs.
Khan said Nevoya is currently moving between different charging locations — this is another place where the optimization program should really shine — but it eventually wants to create its own charging infrastructure. At that point, Khan said he could see Nivoya moving into smaller-class trucks as well.
Nevoya is also looking to expand geographically in the United States. This installment began with a market as different from its home base as one could find: Texas.
Despite its myriad social and political differences, Khan views Texas as a state well-suited to mobilizing business. It may not have as big incentives as California, but Khan said Texas’s more flexible regulatory framework and cheap electricity put it on par with the financial model his team put together for NV.
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