Sohel Merchant, chief technology officer at electric vehicle startup Canoo, has left the company, two people familiar with his departure told TechCrunch.
Merchant was one of the members of Canoo's founding team that founded the startup in late 2017. His departure leaves just one member of the founding team remaining: chief engineer Christoph Kuttner.
Canoo did not respond to a request for comment. Merchant declined to comment.
The split comes at a time when Canoo is undergoing a major reorganization: The startup is closing its Los Angeles headquarters and asking most of the roughly 200 employees who work there to relocate to either Texas (where Canoo is headquartered) or Oklahoma (where it plans to launch a manufacturing facility).
The company has been constantly reinventing itself since going public as part of a merger with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) in late 2020. Shortly after, Chairman Tony Akila became CEO and reversed plans to sell Canoo's electric vans to consumers. Instead, he began targeting the commercial EV space.
Akila's plans for Canoo have changed since he took over: In late 2021, he announced the company would move its headquarters from Los Angeles to Bentonville, Arkansas, home to Walmart, which Canoo had attracted as a prime customer.
Walmart ultimately signed a deal with Canoo in 2022, but it was an extremely low-risk arrangement for the retailer, and the EV maker has yet to ship any significant volumes of vehicles as part of the deal. The move to Bentonville never actually happened, either. Canoo, meanwhile, has its sights set on Oklahoma, where Aquila has announced plans for a large, yet-to-be-built manufacturing facility. The company is currently testing vehicles for the U.S. Postal Service, NASA and the Department of Defense, but it is short on cash. Last week, the company reported that it had just $19.1 million in cash as of June 30.
Canoo has lost nearly all of its founding members over that time: co-founder and former CEO Stefan Krauss left the company in 2020. His successor, co-founder Ulrich Kranz, left in 2021 to work on Apple's secret EV project for several years, and another core co-founder and chief designer, Richard Kim, left in 2023.
