Superlight, the UK-based startup building a purpose-designed electric medium-duty box truck for middle-mile logistics, has raised $21M in an oversubscribed Series A round, bringing total funding to roughly $33M.
Engine Ventures, a deep-tech VC with MIT roots, and 2150, a climate-and-industry fund, co-led the round. Superlight was founded in 2016 and is headquartered in Yateley, England, with an office in Seattle.
What Superlight makes: The OV-1 is a 7.5-tonne-class electric box truck built from scratch rather than adapted from a diesel chassis. Superlight uses a spaceframe construction, which is lighter than the traditional ladder frame, along with an all-digital powertrain and aerospace design principles. The team includes people from backgrounds at Bentley, DENSO and Porsche.
The company says it holds more than 70 proprietary inventions and has logged over 500,000 kilometers of pilot mileage with unnamed major UK e-commerce and ground-handling operators. Key specs including range, payload, battery size and unit price have not been disclosed publicly.
The numbers: Superlight says the OV-1 delivers the following versus the 7.5-tonne diesel class:
Cargo capacity: +50% (company claim)
Energy consumption: ~50% less (company claim)
Net saving: 73% lower energy cost per pallet-km (company claim)
What the money buys: The Series A will fund the UK manufacturing buildout, initial UK and EU customer orders, and the “federalization” process required to homologate the OV-1 for US road use and customer testing. The company estimates the global middle-mile market at roughly $138 billion in 2026.
Why middle-mile, why now: Middle-mile routes, which move freight between DCs to sortation hubs, have historically relied on diesel trucks build on general commercial platforms. Superlight argues that no vehicle has been purpose-built for this lane. Its thesis is that a clean-sheet EV can deliver efficiencies that retrofits cannot, and that fixed, predictable routes with return-to-depot charging make middle-mile the EV use case that works today.
“By harnessing the inherent advantages of electric propulsion and software-centric manufacturing, we’re flipping the economics of commercial EVs, unlocking massive cost savings that also happen to provide significant environmental benefits,” co-founder and CEO Siddiqi said.
What's next: Superlight still needs to complete UK homologation, fulfill its first production orders, and secure US federal certification. That puts US availability in 2027 at the earliest.
Einride, the closest public comparison, listed on Nasdaq at a $1.35B valuation after earlier IPO discussions had valued it near $5B. PepsiCo and Gatik have also deployed driverless L4 trucks on fixed routes across Texas, Arizona, and Arkansas in what Gatik describes as the largest commercial autonomous freight deployment to date.
