Hebron Shah remembers the fantasies of 2019 when Elon Musk promised that Tesla’s car would become a Robotaxis. Shah is already a user of the car sharing platform, and the idea of turning Tesla into an even bigger money maker was an appealing proposition.
But as the years went by, Musk was unable to follow that promise. So in 2021, Shah formed a small team and brought co-founder Saima Chaudhry to set up his own company. “Hey, we’re just trying to do this ourselves,” he thought at the time.
What they built was a new peer-to-peer car sharing startup called Zevo. This is broadly similar to the Turo, but focuses solely on electric vehicles.
The Dallas-based startup has been operating for about 10 months and announced its $6 million funding on Friday as it looks to expand in more U.S. cities. Sher told TechCrunch that Zevo has already tracked more than $8 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) and has a waiting list of over 3,500 customers.
On the tenants’ side, the overwhelming interest comes from gig workers, Shah said. Approximately 90% of people using Zevo to rent EVs make passengers ferries and Doordash delivery via Uber or Lyft.
Shah said he believes Zevo has a secret source of “secret advantage for hosts and how to do carsing very affordable for renters.”
So what is the secret sauce?
“It’s going to sound crazy, but the secret sauce hasn’t raised hundreds of millions of dollars to build something that could become a strong market,” Shah said. “We very intentionally nurtured private capital, which is why we rejected VC capital. I didn’t want to be a 12-18 month runway of ‘expenditure, spending, spending, spending’.
Zevo’s bootstrap allowed Shah to bring together great engineers and develop strategies for a strong market, causing “real disruption.”
Shah said by focusing things, Zevo can send more money to the vehicle owner than he would ride a platform like Turo.
Shah also spoke about Zevo’s “contactless” process. This allows the owner and tenant to share the car without giving them keys or key cards.
It’s not novel. Many other car sharing services employ similar contactless processes. However, Shah argued that Zevo’s contactless nature is frontline and center, as the service uses only EVs.
This connectivity also makes it easier to integrate other important parts of the car sharing equation, like commercial insurance, Shah said. Removing such red tapes made the platform very attractive to gig workers, he said. Shah said one user compared Zevo to Metrop, a car rental.
“There’s (usually) a lot of deficits: insurance cards, accidentals, tolls, supercharges, bills, refunds. We were able to really automate all of that,” he said. Add that EVs tend to require less maintenance — meaning more uptime — and it’s easy to understand why gig workers are interested.
All of this results, Zevo is looking at the median rentals for about 80 days early. Meanwhile, the host can return between 35% and 65% of the car’s cost in just one year. With 90% of vehicles on the platform being Teslas, Shah is confident that from 2019 he will be able to find another way to fulfill his mask promise.
Of course, Tesla has finally become a cliff that launches Robotaxis services in Austin, Texas, and other US cities later this year. There are many unanswered questions about how the service works, whether Tesla’s autonomous driving software works safely, and how easy it is for owners to put their cars on the network. However, Tesla appears to be more close than ever to putting mask vision into testing.
But it doesn’t bother Shah. He said Zevo is focused on lasers on the destruction of Carsing and doesn’t want to ruin the riding piece Tesla wants. He believes Zevo can beat $100 million with just 30 staff and minimal future investments.
Even if Tesla could eat to the gig economy with the fleet of Robotaxis – this is a very big case – Shah said that masks need to find a way to make millions of cars already to meet the aggregate demand for vehicles and delivery.
“It’s enough for everyone here to be at the table,” he said.