Rivian's mega-IPO was built with a truckload of private capital

Update: This article was updated at 7:30 p.m. on Nov. 9 to reflect Rivian's IPO share price.

Electric vehicle maker Rivian makes its public market debut on Wednesday in one of the largest automotive IPOs on record. The automaker raised $11.9 billion in its IPO after selling 153 million shares at $78 each.

The offering valued Rivian at nearly $77 billion on a fully diluted basis—just shy of the $80.4 billion market cap held by Ford, its primary rival in the US pickup industry.

PitchBook has mapped out a timeline of Rivian's road to public markets, its current ownership breakdown and some key financial measures.
 

The automaker is the latest high-profile company to go public, following in the footsteps of Robinhood and Roblox earlier this year. Rivian will begin trading Wednesday on the Nasdaq under the ticker RIVN.

The company was valued at $27.6 billion earlier this year, and has raised more than $11 billion in private capital since it was founded, with most of that coming in the last few years, according to PitchBook data.
 

Rivian was founded by RJ Scaringe, who remains the company's CEO. He controls 11.1% of  voting power—a far cry from other tech companies that have recently gone public, whose founders frequently hold a majority of the voting rights through dual-class share structures.

Amazon is Rivian's largest investor with a 22.4% stake that is worth $12.5 billion at the IPO price. The online retail giant led a $700 million investment in early 2019, making it one of the earliest large backers.

T. Rowe Price has amassed an 18.8% stake after leading several mega-rounds in recent years. Ford was also a relatively early investor and remains one the company's largest backers.
 

Although Rivian was founded in 2009, it took several years for it to raise any significant amount of capital. The company survived off of angel investors and various grants until reportedly receiving a $450 million investment from Sumitomo Corp., Standard Chartered Bank and Abdul Latif Jameel, a Saudi Arabian investment group.

From there, the company ratcheted up its fundraising pace, with Ford, Amazon and T. Rowe Price all leading rounds. Since the start of 2019, Rivian has raised nearly $10.5 billion, according to PitchBook data.
 

Rivian's revenue is minimal, as it has only recently started to deliver vehicles, and its losses have increased over the years. In the first half of 2021, it lost around $1 billion, primarily due to research and development spending.

However, the company believes the total addressable market for its products is around $9 trillion, and already has more than 55,000 non-binding customer preorders for its electric trucks and SUVs in the US and Canada, according to company filings. Additionally, Amazon has placed a commercial order for 100,000 vehicles.

In the long term, Rivian hopes to make a substantial amount of recurring revenue from services such as software, memberships, financing and a charging network.

Featured image by Joey Schaffer/PitchBook News