Trucks Venture Capital co-founder Reilly Brennan has spent more than a decade building — and investing in — entrepreneurs building the future of transportation, including autonomous vehicle technology, electric air taxis, EV charger maintenance, mobility data platforms and more.
Now, Brennan and partners Jeffrey Shox, Catherine Shox, and Puneeth Meruva, are looking for the next batch of early-stage startups and have a new $70 million fund to help them grow. Trucks is not naming investors in the fund, but Brennan noted that there are seven strategic limited partners, including an automotive supplier, tire manufacturer, insurance company and airline carrier.
It is a San Francisco based company Third fund And it's the biggest ever.
Truck VC The fund plans to make about 30 seed investments, with plans to write checks ranging from $500,000 to $2 million at seed and pre-seed stages. Trucks generally aims to achieve about 10% ownership as part of its strategy.
Trucks has already invested in several startups from the new fund, including charger installation-as-a-service startup Treehouse, zero-emission jet airline JetZeroLow cost high frequency kinetic launch firm Auriga Space, and KarvisWhich created an AI master technology to support the mechanics.
The firm's investment strategy has evolved somewhat since its founding in 2014, but Brennan notes that it's still fundamentally the same as when they started. In particular, never look for startups that fill a slot, or sector
“Our core strategy is so good that the best founders have to have conversations with you early on, hey, in this fund, I want to have four hydrogen companies and four EV charging companies; We tend not to do it,” he explained.
A significant change in strategy occurred about six years ago. Instead of coming up with an idea and finding founders, Trucks changed course and focused on great founders.
“When we would develop an idea and then find a founder to work on it, we tended to make bad decisions simply because we were looking for an idea, a founder, to confirm our bias,” he said. “We realized we were seeing somewhere between 100 and 150 new companies per month and thought 'why don't we wait and see if there's a great founder that opens us up to a new idea we hadn't thought of.' I think in some ways, it gave us the flexibility to start things like aviation or space that we certainly weren't part of our mission in 2015.”
Some of Truck's past investments include Bear Flag Robotics, which was acquired by John Deere; and Zendrive, which Intuit bought last year. Trucks has also invested in Joby Aviation, autonomous company Gatic and automated flight control startup Skyris.