Swedish EV reaches 63% of crowdfunding goal within hours

Swedish EV startup Uniti has achieved 63% of its investment goal from 68 crowd investors in the first four hours after launching on FundedByMe yesterday.

The company, which is developing a lightweight electric city car – effectively Sweden’s first urban electric car – had as its goal the raising of €500.000 for 5,1% ownership in the company on the global equity crowdfunding platform.

The Uniti crowdfunding campaign will run until November 15. A total of 50,000 shares are available for crowd ownership at a minimum of €500 per investment. This round will provide the seed funding required for Uniti to build a production-ready prototype, which is scheduled for 2017.

Uniti began as an open innovation research project at Lund University where the team studied the underlying logic of modern mobility, the core problems that need to be solved, and the emerging technologies that should form the basis of the next generation of automotive. “Our findings show that city streets don’t need to be dominated by heavy combustion engine vehicles, or even oversized electric vehicles as they typically only carry an average of 1.2 people for short distances at low speeds,” says founder and chief executive Lewis Horne.

This resulted in the creation of Uniti – an electric city car that is designed to match the needs of the modern urban commuter with a light and lean construction designed to maximise the benefits of electric car technology, utilising sustainable materials and the highest quality ‘off-the-shelf’ solutions from suppliers.

Uniti’s main source of revenue in the short-term will be through licensing the core technologies to other auto manufacturers, while in the long-term it will be through the direct sale of Uniti-branded vehicles.

“We decided on crowdfunding as it’s the funding method that complies closest with what Uniti is as a company – open and innovative,” says Horne. And FundedByMe co-founder and chief executive Daniel Daboczy agrees. “Uniti is pushing for change in an industry where things have been done in a certain way forever, which strongly appeals to the FundedByMe mindset of changing the status quo and allowing everyone to become a shareholder.”

View the Uniti campaign on FundedByMe here: www.fundedbyme.com/uniti