Einride is a category-defining company providing three new key technologies - digital, electric, and autonomous - to the road freight transport market. By using new technologies, the Einride platform makes it possible to ship goods sustainably and cost-competitively today.

Founded in 2016, Einride became in 2019 the world’s first company to operate an autonomous, electric freight vehicle on a public road, and the first company to receive approval to operate the vehicle on a US public road in 2022. Today, it partners with several Global Fortune 500 brands, deploying its Freight Capacity as a Service offering with customers such as Heineken, Mars Inc, and Maersk. Its vision is to make Earth a better place through intelligent movement.

We sat down with Founder and Deputy CEO Linnéa Kornehed Falck to discuss Einride’s journey to date with transforming road freight. An edited version of the conversation follows.

The Climate Brick: What was your approach to scale, and were there any particular technical roadblocks?

Linnéa: Einride was founded on the idea that there needed to be a better way to move goods, one that was more sustainable and efficient. Today, road freight is accountable for up to 8% of global CO2 emissions, while an average truck is hitting around a 20% utilization rate, meaning there is tremendous room for improvement. Einride believes that the way to create change is through deploying digital, electric, and autonomous technologies. Digital technology makes things easier by reducing manual input and administration, helping create new efficiencies, and allowing full fleets to have better uptimes and higher utilization rates, translating into lower costs per pallet shipped. Electric enables a sustainable option for road freight that can drastically lower emissions and as the price per vehicle goes down as it has for electric cars, it will be cheaper to use electric than fossil fuel-based options. On top of that, autonomous will unlock unseen efficiency gains and make the operations even cheaper.

When Einride started, there was significant criticism around whether electric trucks would be able to be a viable option for road freight; and if it would, it was the common belief anything heavier than chips wouldn’t be possible. Einride has worked to show that not only is electric operation possible, but it is capable of a variety of flows, including heavy haul, and is increasingly competitive.

Autonomous technology has faced questions over the years and on when it will be commercially viable. There has been a backlash against autonomous companies over the last year. While the competition bet that autonomous would happen overnight as soon as the AI was mature enough, Einride took a more modest approach by introducing autonomous operations where the environment complexity was lower and increasing the complexity of the environment as the technology matures.

The Climate Brick: How important were partnerships for Einride's success?

Linnéa: Both public and private partnerships have been essential in bringing new technology and new ways of working to market. Not only do they help to create trust with customers, but it also is how true scaled impact can be possible.

On the commercial front, building trust with customers has helped us to scale our overall operations. Many of our customers are working with end consumers, a group with a strong passion for sustainability. With that in mind, it’s been vital for our team to share what impact our operations can make to build more market trust and understanding. Sharing successes with one customer has allowed us to open doors with similar shippers looking for new technology and solutions, a trend that continues to snowball as we grow.

The Climate Brick: How has Einride's financing journey taken shape to date?

Linnéa: Einride has been fortunate to have the backing of strong investors since our Series A in 2019, which was led by EQT. This marked a significant milestone for the company in starting to scale operations.

In 2021, with the Series B round, Einride found it essential to broaden our investor base to include more global financing. $100m was raised in this round, from both pure financial investors such as Temasek, as well as other strategic investors such as Maersk, which also is an Einride customer. At the end of 2022, we announced a funding close of $500m, which included an equity round and debt financing from our partners at Barclays that looks to finance our electric vehicle fleet.

The Climate Brick: How do you think a climate tech playbook will help?

Linnéa: Having the ambition to go out and create change, specifically in the climate tech space, requires a large amount of passion, hard work, and innovation from the people who are spearheading this change. However, society is at a point where we need to look at challenging structures to ensure we can be more resilient in the future, not just from a sustainability aspect but also from an overall aspect of society operating in the best way possible.

It is a tough environment right now for all players in this space, but the time to create impact is now so it is important that founders in this space get support and resources to get the job done. Ideas like The Climate Brick will help to enable the next generation of impact companies to be successfully created.

The Climate Brick: What is your key advice for new founders?

Linnéa: As a founder, you’ll receive plenty of advice, and it’s crucial that you build a filter to know what to act on and when you may know best. A few pieces of advice that have helped in my own journey include:

● Have a clear point of view. Define what your business is about, and trust yourself. You’ll often question if you are on the right path. Always go with your instinct.

● Focus on the output. Make sure to create a process, but the delivery is key. Without it, a business won’t stand on its own. Never set a process that stands in the way of the output.

● Stick to your values. Know what you and your company are about, and don’t shy away from your core.