Trucks Venture Capital co-founder Reilly Brennan has spent more than a decade looking for — and investing in — entrepreneurs building the future of transportation, including autonomous vehicle tech, electric air taxis, EV charger maintenance, mobility data platforms, and more.
Now, Brennan along with partners Jeffrey Schox, Kathryn Schox, and Puneeth Meruva, are on the hunt for the next batch of early-stage startups and have a new $70 million fund to help them build. Trucks isn’t naming the investors in the fund, but Brennan noted there are seven strategic limited partners, including an automotive supplier, tire manufacturer, insurance company, and airline carrier.
This is the San Francisco-based firm’s third fund and its largest to date.
Trucks VC plans to make about 30 seed investments from the fund, with a plan to write checks between $500,000 to $2 million at seed and pre-seed stage. Trucks typically aims to obtain about 10% ownership stakes as part of its strategy.
Trucks has already invested in several startups from the new fund, including charger installation-as-a-service startup Treehouse, zero-emissions jet aircraft company JetZero, low-cost high frequency kinetic launch firm Auriga Space, and Carvis, which has developed an AI master tech to support mechanics.
The firm’s investment strategy has evolved a bit since its founding in 2014, but Brennan noted it still is fundamentally the same as when they started. In particular, has never looked for startups that fill a slot, or sector.
“Our main strategy is be so good that the best founders have to have a conversation with you early, as opposed to looking for, hey, in this fund, I want to have four hydrogen companies and four EV charging companies; we tend to not do that,” he explained.
One notable change in strategy occurred about six years ago. Instead of coming up with an idea and seeking out the founder, Trucks changed course and focused on great founders.
“When we would develop an idea and then go find a founder that was working on it, we tended to just make bad decisions because we were kind of just looking for an idea, a founder, to confirm our bias,” he said. “We realized we were seeing somewhere between 100 and 150 new companies a month and thought ‘why don’t we wait and see if there’s a great founder that opens us up to a new idea we hadn’t thought of.’ I think in some ways, it gave us the flexibility to start doing things like aviation or aerospace that we definitely wasn’t part of our mission back in 2015.”
Some of Trucks’ past investments include Bear Flag Robotics, which was acquired by John Deere; and Zendrive, which Intuit bought last year. Trucks also has invested in Joby Aviation, autonomous company Gatik, and automated flight control startup Skyryse.
