A day after Prime Minister Naftali Bennett addressed the UN General Assembly for the first time, a British trucking company founded by Bennett’s brother made a dramatic announcement of a different sort.
Tevva, founded by Asher Bennett in London in 2013, said on Tuesday it launched its new electric truck, a 7.5-ton vehicle believed to be the first of its kind intended for production in the UK.
The new truck has a range of up to 160 miles (250 km.) in pure battery electric vehicle (BEV) form or up to 310 miles (500 km.) with its range extender technology (REX), the company said. The Tevva truck will address the British trucking industry’s immediate need to electrify, with the UK and Europe committed to a target of net-zero emissions by 2050 alongside a proposed ban on the sale of all polluting vehicles by 2035. Production of the Tevva truck is due to commence in July 2022, with pre-orders already being taken.
The truck’s lithium-ion battery is based on the technology that 52-year old Asher worked on as a submarine officer in the Israel Navy decades earlier, he said.
Tevva, whose name is Hebrew for “nature,” raised $12.5 million in February. “The passion in the market for EV freight truck technology is incredibly apparent,” Bennett said at the time. “Once we were able to break the range barrier for electric battery propulsion – which we did by utilizing the concepts I had learned as a submarine officer in the Israeli Navy – investors have continued to vote with their wallets.”
The global electric truck market is poised for rapid growth in the coming years, growing from $1.15 billion in 2020 to an expected $14.2 billion by 2027, Tevva said. The company, which has raised a total of $26m., is reportedly eyeing an IPO on the Nasdaq in the coming months.
If Tevva can make such an exit, Asher Bennett would be following in the footsteps of his more famous younger brother, who sold his cybersecurity company Cyota for $145m. in 2005. Before entering politics, Naftali Bennett also served as CEO of Soluto, a cloud computing service, which was sold in 2013 for more than $100m.
Asher could be looking at an even larger payout. The electric truck field is simmering now, and several other players in the field have gone public at multi-billion dollar valuations.
Naftali Bennett was born in Haifa in 1972 to American immigrants. The family moved to Montreal for two years when Naftali was four, and then to Teaneck, New Jersey, for another two years when he was eight. Naftali is three years younger than Asher. Another older brother, Daniel, works as an accountant for Zim Integrated Shipping Services in Israel.