Infinite Machine raises $9M a16z-led round to convince Americans to buy scooters | TechCrunch

Oct 29, 2024

Infinite Machine turned many heads when it revealed its metallic, cyberpunk-style electric scooter in 2023. Now one of Silicon Valley’s biggest venture capital firms is backing the startup’s vision of filling the world’s cities with Infinite Machine’s futuristic vehicles in a big way.

The New York-based startup has closed a $9 million seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz’s American Dynamism team as it preps for production and initial deliveries next year of the $10,000 “launch edition” of its P1 scooter. Also participating in the round were VC firms Adjacent and Necessary Ventures, as well as the founders of womenswear company Reformation, software platform Replit, and AI startup HuggingFace.

“While others are kind of leaning out [of hard tech], they’re leaning in,” Joseph Cohen, who co-founded Infinite Machine with his brother Eddie, told TechCrunch in a recent interview about securing a16z as an investor. “They want to do hard things, and they recognize a kindred spirit in what we’re doing.”

This is an interesting choice for this a16z unit, which is better known for its defense tech investments like Anduril or Skydio. However, the gist of the American Dynamism thesis is to back tech that improves American lives through everything from defense to manufacturing.

“The cities of the future are going to look very different, and companies like Infinite Machine are pushing the boundaries on building futuristic urban transit with their first product P1,” David Ulevitch, General Partner at a16z American Dynamism, said in a statement to TechCrunch. “I’m excited to back the Cohen brothers as they bring form, function and sustainability to the next generation of mobility.”

Cohen is entering the mobility world after spending a decade running his previous startup Universe, a no-code website service. Infinite Machine is, perhaps, a bold move into a market that has recently struggled. Scooter company Bird, electric motorcycle startup Cake, and e-bike darling VanMoof have all gone through bankruptcy restructuring processes since the pandemic began. Others have completely gone out of business.

Cohen said he’s not fazed, and that he thinks now is a “way better” time to try to sell U.S. customers on electric two-wheelers.

“A lot of those companies wasted a lot of money, and a lot of investors are therefore wary of the category because of those early failures,” he said. “But the way we look at it is, wow, this is amazing, like we get to benefit from all those learnings for free, and we get to hire their best people, and we get to build and use all their infrastructure that already exists.”

That said, Cohen acknowledged Infinite Machine is “not a consensus bet,” meaning it’s not the kind of business VCs were pounding the doors down to fund again. Many companies have tried to sell U.S customers on the scooter form factor, and almost none have succeeded. Fellow New York startup Revel completely abandoned its scooter business in New York City in favor of operating a more traditional ride-hailing fleet of Tesla EVs. Others, like Taiwanese company Gogoro, have avoided coming stateside altogether. Even Piaggio, the maker of the famous Vespa scooter, has failed to make an impact with its electric offering in the U.S.

Cohen pointed out that most of those companies operate very different businesses from what Infinite Machine is building, which is quite simply a direct sales model. Although the brothers have big goals, they want to start small, even hand-delivering the vehicles to customers instead of outsourcing delivery and logistics from the get go.

Cohen also noted that Infinite Machine is not trying to do everything on its own. The company is outsourcing a lot of componentry, and even its manufacturing, to companies outside the U.S. (He declined to say where the scooters will be built initially.)

The brothers have ideas to bring some of those processes in-house in the future – including potentially manufacturing the vehicles at a 13,000-square-foot headquarters across the river from Manhattan.

For now, they’re content with focusing on product design and marketing. In fact Cohen thinks that focus will help activate consumers who may be (or have already been) indifferent to the idea of using an electric scooter to get around. They don’t even use the word scooter in their marketing – instead calling it a “radical new personal electric vehicle” and, in some places, a “non-car.”

Cohen said he thinks that will help Infinite Machine distance itself from other companies that have tried and failed to make the form factor succeed in the U.S.

“We think that what we can bring as an American company is an amazing product sensibility that doesn’t exist with the products in the market, and that’s the angle that we’re taking,” he said. “We are coming into this category and saying, you know, these plastic things that look like printers, we can do it better. We can make something that feels like your favorite car – but not a car, but something that extends to the city.”

In that sense, he said, “We are much more like a Rivian or a Tesla than we are like a Revel.”

With those comparisons in mind, Infinite Machine’s plan of attack is no surprise. It’s starting with an incredibly high-priced vehicle, but it hopes to move into more affordable categories as it scales.

“You know, we’re brothers. This is what we want to do for the foreseeable future, and we are planning to operate this company for the rest of our career,” Eddie Cohen told TechCrunch. “All the decisions that we make are in service of that. That’s why we’re so obsessive with the product, because we know that the product is everything, and we have to build consumer trust over the long run.”

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Sr. Reporter, Transportation

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