I loved them and would buy one in a heartbeat if it had decent offroad chops.
I believe the board agreed recently to sell all of the company’s assets to the former CEO (for a criminally cheap sum). It’s not clear if he is going to gut it and sell it all, or try to rebuild it.
Very very shady though.
Edit: found an article. The bankruptcy trustee is the one who approved the sale.
Basically helped the CEO steal the company for pennies on the dollar.
The CEO of Canoo is buying nearly all of the defunct EV startup's assets out of bankruptcy, according to a court filing. A new entity controlled by the
techcrunch.com
“The CEO of Canoo is buying nearly all of the defunct EV startup’s assets out of bankruptcy, according to a court
filing.
A new entity controlled by the CEO, Anthony Aquila, has offered to purchase “substantially all” of the assets for $4 million in cash. The sale will also wipe clean a more-than-$11 million debt Canoo owed to a financial firm run by Aquila, which loaned money to the startup during its final months.
The sale proposal comes just six weeks after Canoo filed for a Chapter 7 bankruptcy liquidation in Delaware and wound down its business. The startup, which went public in 2020 as part of a merger with a special purpose acquisition company, never sold more than a handful of its electric vans to government entities like NASA, the United States Postal Service, and the Department of Defense, before it failed.
Canoo has told the court that as of February 24 it had around $145 million in assets and $175 million in liabilities, and around $12 million in cash and equivalents. Other interested parties can submit “higher and better offers” for the company’s assets before a deadline of March 28, according to a filing.
But the bankruptcy trustee wrote in the filing that the “best course of action” would be to proceed with the sale to Aquila. The trustee cited a number of reasons for this, such as a “lack of financing currently available” to support EV manufacturing.
He wrote that the failure of other EV startups (like Fisker and Nikola, though he did not name them specifically) has produced a “glut of EV related assets” that are available “at fire-sale prices.” He also wrote that Canoo’s estate doesn’t have the money to cover “rents, security costs, and insurance necessary to maintain the integrity of the assets.”
As long as it goes through, Aquila’s new entity — called WHS Energy Solutions, Inc. and created in Delaware — will receive Canoo’s manufacturing equipment, completed vehicles, intellectual property, contracts, and other inventory and assets. WHS Energy Solutions is not taking over any of Canoo’s leases, and will not be responsible for any of the claims other creditors have against Canoo’s estate.“