By Nick Carey
LONDON (Reuters) -Electric truck maker Volta Trucks said on Tuesday it has decided to file for bankruptcy proceedings in Sweden, after difficulties at suppliers made it hard for the startup to raise funds.
Volta, which is headquartered in Sweden and has operations in the United Kingdom, said the bankruptcy in August of electric vehicle parts supplier Proterra and uncertainty over its battery supplier had cut the number of trucks it was able to produce and made it hard to raise sufficient capital.
Volta said it will also shortly file for bankruptcy in Britain.
In a statement, the company’s board of directors said it had “not taken this course easily or lightly and is fully aware of the significant impact this will have on the organisation’s dedicated workforce”.
The electric truck maker had raised around 300 million euros ($316 million) from investors and said it had an order book of more than 5,000 vehicles.
Volta Trucks had picked a factory in Austria to make its trucks and had been working toward mass production.
In the last few years a number of other EV startups raised billions of dollars from investors, but most have struggled to get to mass production, and as fundraising has become tough for startups amid rising interest rates, a few have gone bankrupt including Proterra and Lordstown.
($1 = 0.9484 euros)
(Reporting by Nick Carey, Editing by Louise Heavens and Sharon Singleton)
