Richard Kim, a prominent co-founder of electric vehicle company Canoo and one of its most senior and long-standing employees, has left the company, Fortune has learned.
Kim, who is known for leading exterior design of BMW's i3 and i8 electric cars, was the person behind Canoo’s sleek, futuristic vehicle design that has secured awards and helped propel the electric vehicle to its initial notoriety and spark excitement and fan pages among retail investors. Reporting directly to CEO Tony Aquila, Kim was one of its highest-ranking employees and was an important figure at Canoo as one of three remaining co-founders still with the company since it was launched in 2017.
Kim and a Canoo spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment, but a person familiar with the matter told Fortune that Kim had resigned at the beginning of April, and his LinkedIn profile shows he has left the company this month.
In addition to Kim, Steven Monson, director of the applied concepts group, has also recently parted ways with the company. He did not respond to Fortune’s request for comment.
Canoo, the once-buzzy electric vehicle maker that went public via SPAC in 2020, has struggled under the supply chain backlogs and tight market conditions pressuring vehicle makers across the industry—along with a slew of its own issues, spanning from a steady stream of executive turnover, production issues, an SEC investigation related to its SPAC merger (Canoo recently said it was finalizing a settlement), and late payments to many of its suppliers that have plagued the company in recent months. Deals with Walmart and NASA have helped keep the company afloat.
After saying it had started production with its manufacturing partner Roush in the fall, Canoo has said it is now trying to build out its own proprietary manufacturing facilities in Oklahoma, though it acknowledged in its recently-released annual report that it has “significant milestones to achieve” before it can produce additional vehicles and says that “there can be no assurance that we will be able to establish each of our planned production facilities within the planned timelines, or at all.” CEO Tony Aquila said on the last earnings call that the company expects to achieve a 20,000-vehicle run rate by end of this year.
Meanwhile, Canoo reported a near half-billion-dollar net loss in 2022 (approximately $488 million), and the price of its shares has sunk below $1 for an extended period of time, meaning that Nasdaq may delist the company from the exchange if the stock does not improve before the end of September. The exchange alerted the company of this in a written notice at the end of March, Canoo disclosed in SEC filings.
While some former and current employees have told Fortune previously that CEO Aquila is difficult to work with, and most of Canoo’s co-founders have since departed since he began taking control of the company in 2020, Kim was someone who has historically stood by Aquila and celebrated his leadership. In an interview with Fortune last August, Kim said Aquila had “tons of ideas'' and said “we had a great dynamic from day one.”
Fortune had asked at the time whether Kim was concerned that many of his co-founders had left the company—and his answer seems somewhat prescient now.
“The same people who start a company—eventually they do have to hand off the baton to someone else when they feel like the time is right,” he said. “That’s pretty normal.”
Correction, April 6, 2023: This story has been corrected to reflect that Canoo expects to achieve a 20,000-vehicle run rate by end of this year.
