The Founder Of Electric Vehicle Maker Arrival Is Worth $10.6 Billion After SPAC IPO

An electric vehicle startup that’s yet to put a car on the road has made its founder and chief executive, Denis Sverdlov, a billionaire after trading opened Thursday morning on the Nasdaq exchange in New York.

London-based Arrival, which makes super-lightweight electric trucks and buses, went public at $22.40 per share. The price sunk to $18.30, before closing its first day of trading at $22.80, making Sverdlov—who owns more than 76% of the stock—worth $10.6 billion at the end of Thursday. 

Arrival went public via a merger with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) called CIIC Merger Corp, making Sverdlov the latest in a long line of new SPAC billionaires that includes Chamath Palihapitiya ($1.2 billion), Geeta Gupta-Fisker and Henrik Fisker ($1.6 billion each) and Mat Ishbia ($9.7 billion). CIIG Chairman and ex-Marvel CEO Peter Cuneo said by video on Twitter that, in merging with Arrival, his SPAC found a disruptive company committed to “changing the rules of the game.”

Born behind the Iron Curtain, in the nation of Georgia in 1978, Sverdlov has gone through the gears in technology, from teenage coder to mobile phone developer. He made his first fortune selling Russian phone maker Yota for $1.2 billion in 2012, then did an 11-month stint as Russia’s Deputy Minister of Communications.  

In 2015, Sverdlov moved to London and raised $500 million to invest in high-tech startups. Charge, the original name for Arrival, was his first investment.

In the six years since, Sverdlov has made headlines in the electric vehicle space, inking contracts with operators of delivery vans and buses under competitive pressure to go green. UPS has ordered 10,000 battery-powered commercial vans worth $1 billion, the vehicles are expected to be on the road by late 2021.

Although Arrival is not the first electric vehicle startup to ride the SPAC wave (Fisker, Canoo, Lordstown Motors and hydrogen truckmaker Nikola have all merged with SPACs in the past year), it has a competitive advantage with a price point matching those of diesel- and gasoline-powered vehicles.

As part of its aggressive weight-saving approach, Arrival uses aluminum chassis for its vehicles, while its body panels are made of proprietary composites. The design allows for smaller, cheaper batteries, driving down the cost-per-car expense of its electric vehicles to $40,000.

Arrival CFO Tim Holbrow told investors last year that he expects Arrival to generate $14 billion in revenue by 2024. Tesla, with a market capitalization of over $600 billion, posted revenues of $31 billion for 2020.