Zevo’s EV-only car-share fleet is helping Tesla owners make money

Hebron Sher remembers dreaming in 2019 when Elon Musk promised that Tesla’s cars would become a robotaxis, capable of going out in the world to earn money for the owners. Sher was already a user of the Turo car sharing platform, and the idea of ​​transforming a Tesla into even greater money was an attractive proposal.

But over the years, Musk has failed to follow this promise. Thus, in 2021, Sher gathered a small team and brought the co-founder Saimah Chaudhry to start her own business. “Hey, we’re just going to do this ourselves,” he thought at the time.

What they built was a new startup for peers called Zevowhich is largely similar to Turo, but focused exclusively on electric vehicles.

The startup based in Dallas has been active for about 10 months and Friday, he announced that it had raised $ 6 million in funding while seeking to develop in larger American cities. Sher told Techcrunch that Zevo already followed more than $ 8 million in annualized recurring income (arr) and has a waiting list of more than 3,500 customers – all with essentially no marketing to date.

On the tenant’s side, an overwhelming part of this interest from concert workers, said Sher. Some 90% of people using Zevo to rent an EV do so to transport passengers on Uber or Lyft, or make DOORDASH deliveries.

Sher said he thought Zevo has “secret sauce on how to make the sharing of cars very lucrative for the host and very affordable for the tenant”.

So what is the secret sauce?

“It will seem crazy, but the secret sauce does not bring hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars to build something that can be a powerful market,” said Sher. “We have very intentionally lifted private capital. We have rejected capital VC for this reason. I didn’t want to be on a 12 -month -old track to 18 months of “spending, spending, spending, spending” is how business America likes to do things in this world. “

Bootstrap Zevo has enabled Sher to bring together good engineers, develop a solid marketing strategy and cause a “real disturbance,” he said.

Keeping focused, Sher said Zevo was able to send more money to vehicle owners than they would get on platforms like Turo.

Sher also talked about Zevo’s “contactless” process, which allows owners and tenants to share a car without having to hand over keys or key cards.

This is not new – many other carshar services have adopted a similar contact without contact. But Sher argued that Zevo’s contactless nature is front-and-center because the service only uses electric vehicles, which tend to be more technologically capable and therefore easier to integrate into a smartphone application.

This connectivity also facilitates the integration of other important elements of the equation for the sharing of self -sharing, such as commercial insurance, said Sher. The abolition of administrative formalities as this has made the platform so attractive for concert workers, he said, especially since many of them do not have the credit scores required by the greatest car-sharing or rental services. Sher said that a user compared ZVO to the metropcs of car rental.

“There is [usually] Many administrative formalities: insurance cards, accessories securities, tolls, overeating, invoices, reimbursements. We have been able to really automate all of this, “he said. Add in that electric vehicles tend to require less maintenance – which means more availability – and it is easy to understand why concert workers are interested.

The result of all this is that, at the beginning, Zevo sees a middle rental of around 80 days. The hosts, on the other hand, can redo between 35% and 65% of the cost of their car in just one year, according to Sher. Since 90% of vehicles on the platform have been tested, which is quite confident that it has been able to find a different way to keep Musk’s promise from 2019.

Of course, Tesla is finally on the precipice of Launch of a Robotaxi service in Austin, TexasAnd potentially other American cities later this year. There are many unanswered questions about the operation of this service, which Tesla’s autonomous software behaves safely, and how easy it will be for owners to put their cars on the network. But it seems that Tesla is closer than ever to put Musk’s vision to the test.

But that is not worried about Sher. He said Zevo was focused on the laser to disrupt the sharing of the automobile, and does not want to play with the carpooling part that Tesla is looking for. He thinks that Zevo can break 100 million dollars round with staff of only 30 people and a minimum future investment.

Even if Tesla could eat in the concert economy with a fleet of Robotaxis – which remains very large if – Sher said that Musk should find a way to make millions of additional cars to meet the total demand for walks and deliveries.

“There are enough for everyone here on the table,” he said.