Also’s $3,500 e-bike is a $1 billion Trojan horse for autonomous transportation

On Wednesday, the Palo Alto based startup raised a $150 million Series D funding round, Fortune learned exclusively, led by Prysm Capital. Eclipse Capital and Greenoaks also participated. The round pushed the two-year-old startup’s valuation past $1 billion, a big number for a company whose most visible product, so far, is a $3,500 e-bike. 

But what Also actually makes is a small-vehicle technology platform alongside in-house motors, batteries, compute, and software. While the first iteration is in the form of a bike, Also’s technology is designed to be dropped into anything smaller than a car that moves people or goods, such as pedal-assist delivery quads and (eventually) fully autonomous vehicles.

The company spun out of Rivian in early 2025 after running as a stealth project inside the EV maker. Rivian founder RJ Scaringe co-founded the company and has stayed on as chairman of both. The money has moved fast since: $105 million in funding at spinout, a $200 million Series C earlier this year led by Greenoaks with Prysm, and a strategic investment from food delivery company DoorDash. 

The new capital is earmarked specifically to accelerate Also’s autonomous vehicle platform—with the company developing multiple autonomous hardware projects simultaneously for moving both goods and passengers—all built on the EV architecture already underpinning its consumer bike, the TM-B, and its commercial electric delivery quad, the TM-Q. 

“Repurposing a 7,000 pound van, truck or SUV to do across-town trips with one passenger, or to deliver a toothbrush from Amazon or a hamburger on DoorDash, just doesn’t make sense if you’re trying to make that trip as economical and low impact as possible and minimize congestion and time,” Yu told Fortune. “It will become abundantly obvious that different scales and form factors will be the right answer, particularly in these denser metro and suburban environments.”

The goal, he said, is that five years from now  small-form-factor autonomy is a standard and unremarkable part of the transportation mix, alongside self-driving cars.

Also’s latest round is arriving at a rough moment for the category it’s often looped into: e-bikes. Rad Power Bikes went bankrupt; Juiced Bikes collapsed; Porsche quietly walked away from the category altogether. Yet the global micromobility market—which covers e-bikes, e-scooters, and small delivery EVs—is still valued around $50 billion and is projected to more than double by the early 2030s.

Micromobility skeptic David Zipper has pointed to the bankruptcy wave as proof the category is saturated, not underserved. Yu, a former Specialized bike product chief with an aerospace background, pushes back hard on that read: “The performance of existing products within the category is not a signal about the demand and the size of the market, but it is a signal about how hard it is to create truly magical end customer experiences that solve for the existing pain point,” he said, arguing that unreliable batteries and clunky anti-theft locks, not lack of demand, are what’s kept riders on the sidelines.

But where Also stands out beyond being a “nicer e-bike” is on the commercial side. The company’s existing Amazon partnership and its multi-year commercial agreement with DoorDash point toward robots built on the same motors and compute as the consumer bike. 

Yu’s argument is that dense cities will benefit from purpose-built small EVs. Rivian, still a major non-controlling shareholder, factors into that roadmap too, since its growing fleet of on-road vehicles generates the driving data Also will eventually need to train its own autonomy systems. Jay Park, who led the round for Prism, draws a straight line back to why his fund backed Rivian in the first place. “We saw the potential behind wonderfully designed, vertically integrated electric trucks, vans and SUVs,” he said. “Also is applying that same approach to smaller form factor vehicles to address the demands of commercial operators and consumers today.”

The e-bike, in other words, was never really the business.