Over the last few years, the mobility industry convinced itself that EV adoption was inevitable.
Billions of dollars poured into companies built around that assumption. Automakers rushed to electrify lineups. Investors chased growth projections that assumed consumers would naturally transition from gas-powered vehicles to EV ownership. Founders sold a story that the future was obviously and inevitably electric.
Then EV incentives disappeared, demand slowed and some of the industry’s biggest bets started collapsing under their own weight. None of that surprised me.
I founded Zevo, a peer-to-peer EV platform, in 2022. We have since raised nearly $15 million entirely from private capital, primarily high-net-worth individuals writing personal checks rather than institutional investment firms. That funding path was intentional. I did not believe mobility needed more hype. I believed it needed more discipline.
Building in this sector taught me that the EV adoption problem and the funding problem were connected. Both were driven by the same mistake of believing the narrative before proving the economics. Consumers were supposed to buy EVs because the future was electric. Founders were supposed to raise from funds because scale would follow.
