Sohel Merchant, the chief technology officer of electric vehicle startup Canoo, has left the company, two people with knowledge of the matter tell TechCrunch.
Merchant was one of the founding team members of Canoo, which launched the startup in late 2017. His departure means only one founding team member, senior engineer Christoph Kuttner, remains.
Canoo did not respond to a request for comment. Merchant declined to comment.
The split comes as Canoo undergoes a significant reorganization. The startup is closing its Los Angeles headquarters and asking most of its nearly 200 employees to relocate to Texas (where Canoo is headquartered) or Oklahoma (where it plans to set up a manufacturing facility).
The company has been in a state of constant reinvention since going public as part of a merger with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) in late 2020. Soon after, Chairman Tony Aquila took over as CEO, and Canoo veered away from its plans to sell electric vans to the general public. Instead, he began targeting the commercial EV space.
Aquila’s plans for Canoo have changed over the years since he took over. He announced in late 2021 that he would move the company’s headquarters from Los Angeles to Bentonville, Arkansas, the home of Walmart, which Canoo had been courting as a blue-chip customer.
Walmart eventually signed a contract with Canoo for 2022, but it was a very low-risk deal for the retailer, and the EV manufacturer has yet to ship any meaningful vehicles as part of the deal. The move to Bentonville never actually happened. Meanwhile, Canoo has set its sights on Oklahoma, and Aquila has announced plans for a massive manufacturing facility that has yet to be built. The company is currently testing vehicles for the U.S. Postal Service, NASA, and the Department of Defense, but it’s running low on cash. As of June 30, it reported it had just $19.1 million in cash.
Canoo has steadily lost most of its founding team over the years. Co-founder and former CEO Stefan Krause left the company in 2020. His successor, co-founder Ulrich Kranz, resigned in 2021 and spent several years working on Apple’s secret EV project. Another key co-founder and chief designer, Richard Kim, left the company in 2023.
