California-based EV startup Lucid Motors has reached an agreement to become a publicly-traded company on the New York Stock Exchange through a merger with Churchill Capital Corp IV. The Lucid Motors merger deal went down with a special purpose acquisition company, aka SPAC, similar to any other startups operating in the automobile industry, including Arrival, Canoo, Fisker, and Lordstown Motors.
This massive deal has been explicitly arranged with Churchill Capital Corp IV is all set to leave the electric vehicle company with a crazy amount of cash to the tune of $4.4 billion. This agreement is now notably the biggest reached between a blank-check company and an electric vehicle startup. Currently, Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund mostly owns the EV startup. The country will continue on its path to be the largest shareholders even after the deal, with a transaction equity value of $11.75 billion.
Bloomberg first reported that Lucid Motors and Churchill were concocting deals preferable by Saudi Arabia, with investor Michael Klein spearheading the merger among various other deals for Saudi Arabia. The attention generated from just the sheer buzz of this deal drove up Churchill Capital IV Corp's stock prices from its opening price of $10 a share, more than 400% since the beginning of 2021.
The private investment cash coming in from Churchill's side will amount to roughly $4.4 billion in funding to Lucid Motors. The influxes in funding will give the EV startup the power needed to speed up and expand their plans. Lucid Motors will now be hard at work and are prepping to start shipping its first-ever luxury electric vehicle that is the 500-mile range Air sedan. This tech-forward luxury sedan will be as capable and useful as Tesla's most advanced Model S sedan. The luxury Air sedan will make its debut sometime later this year, with an SUV planned to follow in 2023.
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