EV startup Canoo files for bankruptcy and ceases operations

Seven-year-old electric vehicle startup Canoo has filed for bankruptcy and will “cease operations immediately.” The company is liquidating its assets in a Chapter 7 proceeding in the Delaware Bankruptcy Court.

The company said in a press release published late Friday that it was “in discussions with foreign sources of capital” that proved unsuccessful, and also singled out an inability to secure funding from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Loan Program Office, which has been on a lending spree in the waning days of the Biden administration.

Canoo said in its bankruptcy filing that it owes money to fewer than 49 creditors, with outstanding liabilities totaling between $10 million and $50 million. It claimed to have less than $50,000 in assets.

The bankruptcy filing comes just a few weeks after Canoo furloughed the remainder of its workers and idled its factory in Oklahoma. The company struggled throughout 2024 to get more than a few of its electric vans into the hands of prospective customers, and suffered numerous executive departures. It had just $700,000 in the bank in mid-November.

Canoo is the latest EV startup to go bankrupt after merging with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) as a shortcut to going public. Electric Last Mile Solutions was the first in June 2022. But since then, Fisker, Lordstown Motors, Proterra, Lion Electric, and Arrival all filed for different levels of bankruptcy protection in their various home countries. (Canoo bought Arrival’s assets out of insolvency in 2024, though it’s unclear if it ever put any of it to use.)

Canoo announced plans to merge with SPAC Hennessy Capital Acquisition Corp. in August 2020, and went public that following December, raising around $600 million. In the years since it went public, the company made a small number of its bubbly electric vans and handed them over to partners — some paying — willing to trial the vehicles. The United States Postal Service, Department of Defense, and NASA all have or had Canoo vehicles.

At one point, the company even courted Walmart, which agreed to purchase as many as 10,000 EVs from Canoo in 2022. But the deal was essentially non-binding and bore little risk for the retail giant.

Canoo was founded in late 2017 by a splinter group of executives that were fed up with the drama surrounding the other EV startup where they worked at the time, Faraday Future. Originally called Evelozcity, those executives developed a modular electric vehicle platform that could power cabins in multiple shapes and sizes, and utilized advanced technology like a steer-by-wire system.

The ideas inside Canoo were attractive enough that the startup at one point was in talks with Apple, which was interested in a potential investment or even acquisition as a way to boost the tech giant’s own secretive electric car project. Former CTO and at one point CEO of Canoo, Ulrich Kranz, went on to help run Apple’s car project before it was disbanded in 2024.

But Canoo underwent numerous pivots after it went public and gained a new chairman and CEO in Tony Aquila, who had invested in the company prior to the merger.

A serial entrepreneur, Aquila immediately refocused Canoo away from selling to consumers and prioritized commercial fleets. On his watch, Canoo repeatedly changed plans on whether it would build its own electric vehicles or outsource the work. At one point Canoo, announced it was moving its headquarters to Bentonville, Arkansas — the home of Walmart — but then never really followed through. Instead, the company spent years trying to stand up multiple manufacturing facilities in Oklahoma.

Aquila’s own financial firm appeared to benefit from his post atop the company. In 2023, Canoo spent double its meager revenue to Aquila’s firm to pay for the use of its corporate jet. Canoo also rented office space from Aquila’s firm, according to regulatory filings.

It was also Aquila’s firm that kept Canoo alive in recent months. The firm loaned Canoo a few million dollars to keep the lights on dating back to October. Those loans were secured by a “first priority lien and security interest” on the equipment located at the Canoo’s Oklahoma City facility.

Signs of a bankruptcy were bubbling up all week. Reddit users noticed that the company’s billboard outside its office in Justin, Texas had been taken down. Multiple employees who were on furlough told TechCrunch that they received official termination notices. Some people who had placed $100 deposits when the company was still planning on selling to regular customers had started to get refunds.