Sprinting From Stealth to Scale

Having developed its product in stealth for nine years before officially unveiling its flagship SUV (R1S) and pickup truck (R1T) publicly, Rivian came onto the scene with all the building blocks in place to mass produce a truly unique electric vehicle. With the product design, technology, and architecture perfected, a massive domestic manufacturing facility secured, and a multi-faceted business model in place, the company was ready to shift its operations from slow-burning buildup to rapid-fire execution.

All it needed was a major infusion of capital to truly take off. Yet, this was a time when most electric vehicle startups were collapsing under the sheer difficulty and expense of moving from prototype phase to mass production.

But Rivian was unlike any other vehicle company — electric or otherwise. By developing a vehicle with performance attributes that made it exciting on-road, but highly capable off-road, Rivian redefined the prevailing mindset around EVs, instantly becoming an outlier across multiple categories. By developing a full-stack, modular hardware and software platform that underpinned integrated system controls and a proprietary modular battery configuration (referred to as the “skateboard architecture”) that could be used across multiple form factors and targeted both consumer and commercial markets, Rivian instantly became its own category.

In this post, we’ll highlight some of the key points in the rise of Rivian from its quiet beginnings into an almost instant household name, and how the company’s partnership with T. Rowe Price was instrumental as it navigated the challenges of rapid growth — all while forging an entirely new EV path.

These differentiators immediately struck a chord with prospective investors, future customers, and strategic partners during Rivian’s debut at the 2018 LA Auto Show. Finding willing financial backers and prospective collaborators wasn’t the challenge, says Rivian CEO and Founder RJ Scaringe — it was figuring out who to partner with.

“A big question for us was thinking through our potential partners,” says Scaringe. “Jiten and I spent a lot of time developing our partnership with Amazon — we correctly saw this as a partnership with a very long-term trajectory.” Moreover, the decision to go with Amazon, which ordered 100,000 delivery vans from Rivian, established the fledgling startup as a viable enterprise partner to one of the world’s largest companies, while effectively insulating the company against any perceived risks of its consumer-focused business. This was the kind of clear-eyed vision for an enduring business in the crowded EV field that legendary investor T. Rowe Price was looking for.

As one of Tesla’s largest institutional investors, T. Rowe Price had played an instrumental role in the growth of the EV trailblazer at a similarly definitive time in the company’s existence. The firm first backed the company in 2011, shortly after it began stamping out the body shells for its Model S. To growth investor Joe Fath, who had led T. Rowe’s Tesla investments, Rivian appeared to be at a comparable inflection point, with all of the foundations in place to become the next generation’s EV leader.

“We were already sold that EVs were the future, but we hadn’t seen a company with this kind of promise since Tesla,” says Fath, who now leads growth investing for Eclipse. “But as soon as I met RJ and Jiten, I said, ‘these people are building something different’.”

Fath says Rivian’s appeal was in its use of first principles to build and design the vertically integrated business (namely the flexibility of the skateboard chassis), along with the fact that they were going after bigger form factors: SUVs have been the fastest-growing car category by size for the last decade, and the sector continues to drive EV growth.

During a whiteboard session, where RJ and Jiten mapped out the company’s long-term vision, Fath was sold. “We went through a whole box diagram which had real logic behind it,” says Fath.

“They had done all the market research, they knew where the right place to be was, and they were going to develop the right product for it.

Thus began Rivian’s long relationship with T. Rowe, which would go on to be one of the company’s largest investors. The firm became Rivian’s first institutional investor when it led the company’s $1.3 billion Series D round, and went on to lead all subsequent rounds until the company’s 2021 IPO.

Enough capital to grow doesn’t ensure company success, of course. It just ensures the company doesn’t fail because of lack of capital. Executing on the company’s vision meant significantly expanding the team, constantly recalibrating priorities due to sudden challenges — both expected (like maintaining brand identity and customer connection during rapid scaling) and unexpected (like supply chain disruptions during the COVID pandemic) — and a discerning mindset when making critical decisions about potential business avenues, investors, and partnerships. Paradoxically, this is more difficult to do when a company has amassed a war chest of funding, compared to the early days when capital constraint is actually beneficial in terms of forcing teams to focus and persevere during challenges.

This is where the two-way trust and confidence between Rivian and T. Rowe ended up determining the company’s trajectory, say Behl and Fath.

From T. Rowe’s perspective, Rivian continually showed progress that deepened the firm’s conviction that the company was building something truly unique with staying power. For instance, when T. Rowe first invested, Rivian hadn’t yet built out its software component, which was a key differentiator for the company.

For Rivian, navigating the complexities of scaling often meant knowing when to say ‘No’ to other potential partners.

“The time before and after T. Rowe got involved are two very different stories for Rivian,” says Behl. “We were oversubscribed for every single round and we had the choice on who came onto the capital table and how (and why) they were going to help us get the company to launch and scale. T. Rowe was a critical partner because they had the insight from their history investing in complex global businesses such as Boeing and GE to guide us to the right decisions.”

For example, Fath’s advice not to take a lucrative strategic investment from Chinese tech companies and investors (which were investing in nearly every EV startup at the time) proved to be especially prescient, says Behl. While it’s obvious today why a Chinese investment is risky, that wasn’t the case back then, and the prospect of access to the world’s most powerful manufacturing capabilities, supply chain partners, and end market was attractive. But it also could create unbalanced dependency, along with distraction and loss of control.

“There were still a lot of strategic reasons why it would have made sense for us to take the investment, but we made the right call to listen to Joe even though it was not the consensus mindset at the time,” says Behl. “That was some of the best advice we ever received.”

As Rivian scaled — growing from 250 employees at the time of its 2018 product unveiling to more than 10,000 by its IPO three years later, while launching four vehicles in a span of six months along the way— staying true to its original mission, identity, and values was among its greatest strengths. The company’s connection to its customers was as critical as its strategic financing and engineering decisions, says Larry Parker, who was an early Rivian employee and served as the company’s Creative Director and Head of Brand until 2023. Rivian started around a product portfolio, not a brand, so the company’s identity took shape based on early research on the concepts of all-electric adventure vehicles. Discovering that it resonated with people who spent a lot of time outdoors, and had deep reverence for the places in which they spent their time, Rivian understood they had to connect with people on a foundational, personal level.

The company has managed to hold onto that connection throughout its existence, Parker says, by always keeping marketing in-house, and prioritizing a slow and methodical brand evolution over splashy PR right out of the gate. With its enterprise customers, the focus has been on marketing campaigns that take out the “bravado” that massive organizations tend to have by highlighting the people behind the scenes.

“It’s always been a slow burn, very rooted in people, which is why Rivian has managed to feel real and authentic as it has grown,” Parker says.

Rivian’s focus on deep customer connection, vertical integration, and diversified business model has carried through into Also, its micromobility spinoff that launched in March 2025 with $105 million in financing led by Eclipse. Also was valued at $1 billion in July after an investment from Greenoaks Capital, and unveiled its product line October 22, 2025.

“When you have scalable tech that applies to more than your initially launched product, and you can use it between large customers and individuals, you have to actively build deep relationships that become embedded into your product development lifecycle,” says Scaringe, who serves as Also’s Chairman. “These are the skills operators have to have if you are launching entirely new industries.”

In physical industries, generational companies are built by founders who don’t primarily focus on what’s wrong with the sector they are operating in, but on what could go right if they apply technology in a way no one else has ever thought of — or isn’t willing to try. They need equally bold partners who can see their vision, share their conviction, and are driven to prove that it is possible (and hugely impactful) to transform the world’s most foundational sectors.

More on the unveiling of Also’s product line from Bloomberg.

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