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

Chris Yu will tell you his micromobility company, Also, is much more than an e-bike maker.

Its market is every vehicle smaller than a car.

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.