Seven-year-old electric vehicle startup Canoo has filed for bankruptcy and Carry On “Cease operations immediately.” The company is liquidating its assets in a Chapter 7 proceeding in Delaware Bankruptcy Court.

The company said in a press release published late Friday that it was “in discussions with foreign sources of capital” that proved unsuccessful, and also chose the inability to obtain funding from the US Department of Energy’s Loan Program Office, which lends in the waning days of the Biden administration.

Canoo said of its bankruptcy FILING that it owes money to less than 49 creditors, with outstanding liabilities totaling between $10 million and $50 million. It claims to have less than $50,000 in assets.

The bankruptcy filing comes just weeks after Canoo’s laid off the rest of its workforce and shut down its factory in Oklahoma. The company is struggling throughout 2024 to get more than a few of its electric vans into the hands of prospective customers, and is suffering many executive departures. it THERE Only $700,000 in the bank in mid-November.

Canoo is the latest EV startup to go bankrupt after merging with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) as a shortcut to going public. Electric Last Mile Solutions is the first of June 2022. But since then, Fisker, Lordstown Motors, Proterra, Lion Electricand Reaching all filed for varying degrees of bankruptcy protection in their various countries. (Canoo bought Arrival’s assets out of insolvency in 2024, though it’s unclear whether it will use any of them.)

Canoe Office has partnered plans to merge into a SPAC Hennessy Capital Acquisition Corp. in August 2020, and went public the following December, raising about $600 million. In the years since it went public, the company has produced a small number of bubbly electric vans and handed them over to partners – some paying – willing to test the vehicles. The United States Postal Service, Department of Defense, and NASA all have or have Canoo vehicles.

At one point the company even courted Walmart, which agreed to buy 10,000 EVs from Canoo. in 2022. But the deal is essentially non-binding and carries little risk for the retail giant.

Canoo was founded in late 2017 by a splinter group of executives fueled by the drama surrounding another EV startup where they were working at the time, Faraday Future. Originally called Evelozcity, those executives created a modular electric vehicle platform that enables cabins of many shapes and sizes, and uses advanced technology such as a steer-by-wire system. .

The ideas inside Canoo are attractive enough to be a starting point in talks with Applewhich is interested in a potential investment or even acquisition as a way to boost the tech giant’s own secret electric car project. Former CTO and at one point CEO of Canoo, Ulrich Kranz, went on to help run Apple’s car project before it Disruption in 2024.

But Canoo went through several pivots after it went public and got a new chairman and CEO in Tony Aquila, who invested in the company before the merger.

A serial entrepreneur, Aquila quickly steered Canoo away from consumer sales and focused on commercial fleets. On his watch, Canoo repeatedly changed plans on whether it would build its own electric cars or outsource the work. At one point Canoo announced it was moving its headquarters to Bentonville, Arkansas — the home of Walmart — but never followed through. Instead, the company spent years trying to get a foothold in multiple manufacturing facilities in Oklahoma.

Aquila’s own financial firm appeared to benefit from his position at the top of the company. In 2023, Canoo doubled its modest income from Aquila’s company pay for the use of his corporate jet. Canoo also leases office space from Aquila’s company, according to regulatory filings.

Aquila’s company has also kept Canoo alive in recent months. The strong lent Canoo spent several million dollars to keep the lights on since October. Those loans are secured by a “first priority lien and security interest” on equipment located at Canoo’s Oklahoma City facility.

Signs of bankruptcy have been brewing all week. Reddit users noticed the company’s billboard outside its office in Justin, Texas has been taken. Several employees on furlough told TechCrunch that they had received official termination notices. Some people who put down $100 deposits when the company was still planning to sell to regular customers started getting refunds.