EV Startup Profile: Aehra

Saturday, July 27, 2024

US patent US-D1001010-S1

Founded by quantum physicist and investment banker Hazim Nada in 2020, along with fellow aviation enthusiast Sandro Andreotti, the venture includes design veteran Filippo Perini (Lamborghini, Italdesign) and engineering veteran Franco Cimatti (Ferrari, Lotus). This four-man team is aiming to lead the monumental effort of bringing to market both an SUV and a sedan under the Aehra name.

So far, they have one US patent (above) for the design, $7.5 million in Series A funds, and around 10 employees. The design was released last year at the Milano Monza Motor Show, and they are aiming for first customer deliveries by 2026.

In a recent interview with EV Magazine, Hazim Nada said he is feeling "bittersweet" about the process ahead—a soft statement considering that they are embarking on a ten-year journey to manufacturing and scale in an arena littered with the burning carcasses of the likes of Proterra, Arrival, Volta, Sion, Lightyear, and lately Fisker.

All of them had successfully passed lengthy homologation, had at least one product on sale or very close to and large rounds of capital raising yet the bringing to market part of the journey did not work out for them, in the case of Fisker the software clearly did not help either.

My opinion is that Aehra could be well-suited to striking a deal with Lucid and/or Rimac for components (propulsion, battery) and manufacturing/homologation with Magna Steyr, who would be on the lookout for new business after the Fisker collapse and the end of the two SUVs it was building for Jaguar.

But the big wild card nowadays in automotive is software, Tesla is successful partly because it poached a sizeable proportion of Apple engineering force really early on, old players like Volkswagen are turning to partnering with startups like Rivian when their own software efforts (CARIAD) fail, Fisker unfortunately hoped to make it by fixing the software later and that bet failed, I hope fresh startups like Aehra do not follow suit and learn from that lesson.

One big software player, Apple itself, started an internal electric car project when they noticed the continuous brain drain going the way of this new unknown car company called Tesla back in 2014. I wrote about this in my piece on CarPlay and I think what Apple really missed the boat on was becoming that one huge global provider of a reliable and reputable software stack that all fledgling EV startups can tap into.

If only there were such a software company, Google Auto doesn’t seem to be quite there, Rivian and Lucid seem to be the ones ahead and open to partnerships (Tesla keeps saying that it is open but nothing really materializes in terms of their collaborations)

After all, Aehra has the designs sorted; they now have to sort homologation and manufacturing. Adding software to all of that is seemingly an impossible task, but then again, Rivian and Lucid serve to prove that on the higher end of the market spectrum, there is hope. I wish Aehra all the best and hope to see them succeed as well.