Revoy Raises $27 Million to Electrify Existing Diesel Trucks

Revoy (revoy.com) has raised a $27 million Series A to expand production of a detachable electric unit that slots between a truck's tractor and its trailer, giving a conventional diesel rig an electric drivetrain without replacing the truck. Standard Capital led the round, with XYZ Venture Capital, Doerr Capital, Time Ventures, Paul Graham, Y Combinator, Leap Ventures and others also participating, Bloomberg reported. Y Combinator, Root Ventures, Pioneer Fund, James Tamplin and others were among the backers of the company's seed round.

The premise is that fleets will not swap out working equipment. A new battery-electric heavy truck costs multiples of a diesel one, and even at lower prices, turnover of the roughly three million heavy-duty trucks registered in the US would take years. Revoy's electric dolly carries its own motor and batteries and hooks into an existing rig, which means the capital outlay sits with Revoy rather than the carrier.

Fully charged, the unit can haul an 80,000-pound truck more than 200 miles, and the company estimates it cuts carbon emissions by as much as 85%. The longer-term plan is a chain of swap points along freight corridors where a driver picks up a charged dolly instead of waiting on a plug.

Reinhardt, who also runs carbon-removal company Charm Industrial, said in an interview with Bloomberg that operating costs match diesel at pre-war prices, a bar that has moved in Revoy's favor: US retail diesel now runs roughly 40% above the pre-war level of about $3.80 a gallon. Fuel accounts for more than a fifth of a truck owner's operating costs.

Founder and CTO Ian Rust, a founding engineer at Cruise before starting Revoy, frames the product as a robotics problem rather than a vehicle problem. The dolly reads what the driver is already doing: press the accelerator and the diesel engine begins to pull, at which point the unit applies electric torque and the engine backs off. Braking runs the motor in reverse to recharge the pack. Rust has compared the approach to collaborative robotics, where a powered exoskeleton amplifies a person's own movement instead of replacing it.

Revoy was founded in 2020 and went through Y Combinator's Winter 2022 batch. It cleared review by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration in 2023 and completed a year-long technical pilot with Ryder in 2024. Its first commercial deployment starts later this year on a 200-mile route near Portland, Oregon, using four dollies assembled from Chinese components, with partners buying second-hand diesel tractors and Revoy training their drivers.

The new capital goes toward a second-generation dolly with a smaller, cheaper battery pack that Revoy expects to deliver the same range. The company aims to have dozens of units running by the end of next year.