Hebron Sher remembers daydreaming in 2019 when Elon Musk promised Tesla’s cars would become robotaxis, capable of going out in the world to make money for owners. Sher was already a user of the car-sharing platform Turo, and the idea of turning a Tesla into an even bigger moneymaker was an attractive proposition. But as years went by, Musk failed to follow through on that promise. So, in 2021, Sher assembled a small team and brought on co-founder Saimah Chaudhry to start his own company. “Hey, we’re just going to do this ourselves,” he thought at the time. What they built was a new peer-to-peer car-sharing startup called Zevo, which is broadly similar to Turo, but focused exclusively on electric vehicles. The Dallas-based startup has been in operation for around 10 months, and on Friday it announced it has raised $6 million in funding as it looks to expand across more major U.S. cities. Sher told TechCrunch that Zevo is already tracking over $8 million in annualized recurring revenue (ARR), and has a wait list of more than 3,500 customers — all with essentially no marketing to date. On the renter side, an overwhelming portion of that interest is coming from gig workers, Sher said. Some 90% of people using Zevo to rent an EV are doing so to ferry passengers on Uber or Lyft, or make DoorDash deliveries. Sher said he thinks Zevo has “the secret sauce on how to make car sharing very lucrative for the host and very affordable for the renter.” So what’s the secret sauce? “It’s gonna sound crazy, but the secret sauce is not raising hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars to build something that can be a powerful marketplace,” Sher said. “We very intentionally raised private capital. We rejected VC capital for that reason. I didn’t want to be on a 12-month to 18-month runway of ‘spend, spend, spend, spend,’ which is how corporate America likes to do things in this world.” Bootstrapping Zevo allowed Sher to gather good engineers, develop a strong go-to-market strategy, ...
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