Electric vehicle startup Arrival has shut down operations and made all but one member of staff redundant after a planned sale of the beleaguered company collapsed.
Two separate deals for parts of Arrival’s business fell through at the eleventh hour, according to an administrators progress report filed on Companies House last week. While both sales were in advanced stages, the two bidders pulled out due to their own financing and approvals issues.
The botched deal marks the latest blow to Arrival, which entered administration in early 2024. The company was once considered among Europe’s most successful tech darlings, listing on the Nasdaq via a SPAC in 2021 with a $13bn valuation.
All efforts are now focused on recovery money owed from debtors and selling physical and digital IP assets, the report said.
Europe’s electric vehicle (EV) market has taken a battering in recent months, following the bankruptcy of Swedish battery maker Northvolt late last year. UK-based EV battery startup Nyobolt also announced in its annual accounts in December that without further funding it would run out of cash at the end of Q1 this year. It’s yet to publicly announce a fundraise.
Prior to that, Arrival had raised more than $200m from investors including car manufacturers Hyundai and Kia and BlackRock.
Arrival planned to build electric vans that were greener and cheaper to manufacture than conventional counterparts. Central to that was the idea of small factories around the world which would produce the vehicle, theoretically lowering the cost of shipping them between countries.
But in late 2022 the company missed a series of targets and warned it would struggle to stay afloat in 2023. Arrival laid off half its 800 employees at the start of that year. Months later, the company announced that financing deals worth hundreds of millions of dollars had fallen through.
Since August last year, 74 employees have been made redundant, as the company has moved to wind down operations.
