When Also Capital managing partner Mike Annunziata walks around New York City these days, he sees lots of vans — and opportunity.
It’s something he admits he never noticed until he met former SpaceX engineer Sam Shapiro, who is the founder of a new Detroit-based modular electric RV startup called Grounded.
Sometimes, Annunziata told TechCrunch, “you don’t realize how how prevalent something is until you start to think about it, and then you see it everywhere.”
When Shapiro founded Grounded in 2022, he initially set out to customize electric Transit vans from Ford for recreational outdoor use. A year later, he began upfitting General Motors’ BrightDrop vans, which are bigger and have more range. Shapiro told TechCrunch in an interview that Grounded has already logged sales in the double digits of the $200,000 RVs, accounting for around $3 million in revenue.
But Shapiro wants Grounded to be more than just an electric RV provider for the well-off. He says Grounded has received a lot of inbound interest from small businesses that want custom-designed vans for services like mobile medicine, pet grooming, food transport, and more.
The commercial opportunity is one of the driving factors that sparked investor interest. Also Capital and Chicago-based early-stage firm The 81 Collection announced Friday that they’ve led a $3.5 million pre-seed funding round for Grounded.
Now when Annunziata sees those vans, he thinks: “Oh yeah, we’re coming for this. We’re gonna make it.”
Shapiro told TechCrunch in a separate interview that Grounded is already trialing a van in Honolulu for the Healthy Mothers, Healthy Babies Coalition of Hawaii, as well as one geared toward making deliveries for a logistics startup in Brooklyn, New York.
“A lot of those industries and customers want to go electric for all the same reasons of [lower] long-term maintenance costs, yeah, and the sustainability angle. And it just happened that the modular system we developed originally for the RV customer just sort of automatically worked, almost out of the box for some of these other verticals,” he said. “Everything just sort of becomes like optional Lego blocks.”
Shapiro noted that there are already some pretty big aftermarket companies that do custom upfitting, oftentimes working closely with the automakers they’re sourcing the vehicles from. But he says there’s a “huge, long tail” of smaller players that is pretty fragmented.
He believes Grounded’s advantage will be the modular system it has designed — which it describes as “Lego-like” — that lets it custom design vans for drastically different verticals. It’s doing all this work at a 13,000 square foot warehouse around the corner from its headquarters inside Newlab, the mobility startup incubator located in Detroit’s Michigan Central.
Despite some of the recent hesitance to invest in hard tech, Annunziata said he prefers it; Also Capital’s portfolio includes a number of space startups like Varda Space Industries, Radiant, and K2 Space. As he evaluated Grounded, he looked for the qualities he has found valuable at those other startups, like a strong founding team and “an exceptional engineering culture.” He added that he highly regards Shapiro’s background and his drive and called the investment a “no brainer.”
“The reality is, I think it takes a truly exceptional human with a long-term vision that everybody aligns with to get [funding] rounds done today,” he said. “And Sam meets that bar and exceeds it by a lot.”
