As the only B-Corp-registered car rental company in the APAC region, and the only electric-only car-sharing marketplace in Australia, it’s fair to say sustainability and impact are core to growth strategy for evee.
Led by founder Slava Kozlovskii, evee is a peer-to-peer car-sharing network, allowing electric vehicle owners to rent out their cars and offset the cost of ownership.
At the same time, those considering purchasing an EV get a chance to try before they buy.
“I wanted to do something to try and encourage more people to embrace the electrification of transport sooner,” Slava says.
“The easiest way was to give them a personalised experience of driving an EV.”
Revving up
evee first hit the road in 2016, “when there were probably about 500 electric cars in the whole country, and the most affordable EV was a $140,000 Tesla Model S,” Slava says.
Today, there are about 200,000 EVs in Australia, and you can knock $100,000 off the starting price.
evee has a fleet of 250 vehicles spread across Australia and New Zealand, and a customer base of more than 10,000 people.
And Slava’s try-before-you-buy theory seems to be proving true — 30% of customers buy an EV within six months of renting one, he says, while 70% report an increased intention to buy.
“Renters can speak with the owners of the car and ask questions about how it works, where to charge, how far it will really go on one charge,” Slava explains.
“It’s different to just turning up at a car rental desk and picking up the keys.”
Part of the goal is to alleviate any lingering reservations about EVs in general… and to bust one specific myth that persists.
“In over 10,000 customers, we’ve only had one that’s run out of charge,” Slava says.
“And that was a perfect storm of lots of things going wrong.”
Fuelling up
evee launched with a personal investment from Slava and his wife, who purchased the first car for the platform.
Once Slava established proof of concept, he started to bring in angel investors — largely early adopters of EVs themselves, keen to back a sustainability-minded business in this space.
At the same time, he was having conversations with VCs and corporate investors. However, none of those conversations resulted in funding.
“VCs are generally looking for 10x growth in three years, and that’s just not going to happen in the EV space,” Slava says.
“The business is growing fast, but it’s not software that can be scaled into 100 countries that quickly. We don’t tick the box of global scalability at the moment, even though the business model is scalable.”
In 2023, evee raised $1.6 million from 600+ investors in its first equity crowdfunding campaign. In 2024, it raised a further $280,000 from 169 investors.
For Slava, crowdfunding was a simple way to bring several high-net-worth angels into a single round.
But it also opened an investment opportunity to more people; people who share the startup’s values, who are already in the community, and who want to be part of the journey, but who wouldn’t usually be able to invest in a startup.
Investments ranged from $500 to more than $120,000, Slava says.
“We did have sophisticated investors leading the round, but that allowed a couple of hundred people to follow,” Slava notes.
“We’re a community-based company. At the time of the raise we had about 8,000 customers. It was a no-brainer to try and engage them as investors as well.”
Bringing Tractor on board
evee has also received bridge funding from Tractor Ventures. In this instance, the loan allowed for some breathing room — time for Slava to weigh up the various long-term funding options, without having to rush into anything.
“It helped boost cashflow and allowed us to explore the VC funding path for a bit longer, before proceeding with crowdfunding,” Slava explains.
At the same time, he feels securing the loan acted as a kind of proof of concept. In those conversations with investors, a Tractor loan was a tick of approval; an indication that the business is viable and growing.
“There are requirements in terms of revenue and sustainability as a business,” he explains.
“So even if they didn’t eventually invest, investors looked positively on the fact we had Tractor funding.”
Navigating by your values
It hasn’t always been a smooth road for evee.
Ahead of a growth spurt in 2019, Slava grappled with huge insurance costs, and more recently the business has been hit by an economic downturn, coupled with large rental companies over-exposing themselves to EVs and bringing the whole market down.
When navigating tough times, Slava is guided by the mission driving the business.
There are elements of the business he’s not willing to compromise: carbon neutral operations and stringent verification processes, for example.
Some advisors have “strongly encouraged” Slava to bring hybrid vehicles onto the platform, he says.
“We’re restricting ourselves to just 0.5% of the total vehicle market for our fleet. So we could have expanded that,” he muses.
“But it just doesn’t sit right.”
According to Slava, hybrids may be worse for the environment than petrol vehicles, generating emissions through producing the battery, and throughout their lifecycle. For EVs, there’s the environmental cost of generating a battery, but very low emissions from there on out.
“That’s probably stifled our growth a bit, but it was a conscious, ethical decision,” Slava says.
When weighing up your options for capital, he believes it’s crucial to keep your values front-of-mind, to ensure you end up on the path that’s right for you, your business and your customers — and a path that’s true to your vision.
“Having a principle and an ethical framework for a business is really important. I’m doing this for the future — for my kids and other kids, and for future generations,” he says.
“We’re trying to make the world a little bit better. If we’d just focused on the finances, we wouldn't have survived.”
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