It’s Over for Canoo: The Electric Startup Is Officially Bankrupt

The seven-year old EV company said Friday. in a bankruptcy filing it would "cease operations immediately"

A grim financial situation has come to a head for Canoo Inc.

Last Friday, Canoo Inc. announced that it filed a voluntary petition for Chapter 7 (liquidation) bankruptcy with the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for Delaware. That means the fledgling electric automaker adds to the heap of failed EV startups, with the likes of Lordstown Motors and Fisker Inc., as it struggled to find long-term financial support through “foreign sources of capital” or through a U.S. Department of Energy loan (more on that in a moment).

Chairman and CEO Tony Aquila said of the news: “We would like to thank the company’s employees for their dedication and hard work. We know that you believed in our company as we did. We are truly disappointed that things turned out as they did.” Aquila thanked state and federal agencies with which Canoo reached agreements to deliver vehicles, including NASA, the U.S. Postal Service and the State of Oklahoma.

In its release, Canoo informed shareholders that, with the Chapter 7 filing, it would cease operations immediately. Moving forward, a court-appointed trustee will oversee liquidation of the company’s assets, though it’s unclear at this point in time who will scoop up the insolvent automaker’s property, both tangible and intellectual.

Leading up to Canoo’s apparent demise, the U.S. Department of Energy did finalize several loans in the last few days of the Biden administration. One of the larger transactions was a $6.6 billion loan to Rivian, which the DoE finalized on January 16 to complete construction of the automaker’s Georgia manufacturing facility and ramp up production of its R2 and R3 models.

As part of its bankruptcy filing (readable here), Canoo listed approximately $126 million in assets, while also being encumbered with $164 million in total liabilities. At the point where the company furloughed its employees just before Christmas 2024, Canoo said it had about $700,000 in the bank, as of mid-November.

In August 2020, Canoo Inc. went public through a merger with Special Purpose Acquisition Company (SPAC) Hennessy Capital Acquisition Corp., raising $600 million. From there, it reached some promising high-profile deals with the earlier mentioned agencies. It even tried to woo Walmart into as many of 10,000 of its small electric vans, though the deal never formally came to fruition.

Although it’s obviously not happening in this iteration, one of the most popular videos on our TFLEV channel featured the Canoo van, which you can see below: