Exclusive: Canoo's chief technology officer is out amid wider reorg

EV startup Canoo’s chief technology officer Sohel Merchant has left the company, two people familiar with his departure have told TechCrunch.

Merchant was one of the members of Canoo’s founding team, who created the startup in late 2017. His departure from the company means that only one of those founding team members remains — chief engineer Christoph Kuttner.

Canoo did not respond to a request for comment. Merchant declined to comment.

The split comes at a time when Canoo is going through a sizable reorganization. The startup is closing down its Los Angeles headquarters and asking most of the nearly 200 employees who work there to relocate to either Texas (where Canoo has a corporate office) or Oklahoma (where it’s trying to stand up a manufacturing facility).

The company has been in a constant state of remaking itself since it went public in late 2020 as part of a merger with a special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC. Shortly after that happened, chairman Tony Aquila took over as CEO, and pivoted Canoo away from the plan of selling its electric van to everyday people. Instead, he started targeting the commercial EV space.

Aquila’s plans for Canoo have shifted in the years since he started running the company. He announced in late 2021 that he was moving the company’s headquarters from Los Angeles to Bentonville, Arkansas, the hometown of Walmart — which Canoo was courting as a blue-chip customer.

Walmart did eventually sign a deal with Canoo in 2022, but it was an extremely low-risk arrangement for the retailer, and the EV maker has yet to ship any meaningful volume of vehicles as part of the deal. The move to Bentonville never really happened, either. Meanwhile, Canoo turned its sights toward Oklahoma, where Aquila announced plans for a massive manufacturing facility that has yet to be built. The company is currently testing vehicles for the United States Postal Service, NASA and the Department of Defense, but is light on cash. Last week it reported having just $19.1 million as of June 30.

Canoo has steadily lost nearly all of its founding team over that time. Co-founder and former CEO Stefan Krause left the company in 2020. His replacement, fellow co-founder Ulrich Kranz, resigned in 2021 and spent a few years working on Apple’s secretive EV project. Another core co-founder, chief designer Richard Kim, left in 2023.