Fisker Gets Ready for its Wall Street Debut, Picks Up Manhattan Beach HQ
Rachel Uranga is dot.LA's Managing Editor, News. She is a former Mexico-based market correspondent at Reuters and has worked for several Southern California news outlets, including the Los Angeles Business Journal and the Los Angeles Daily News. She has covered everything from IPOs to immigration. Uranga is a graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism and California State University Northridge. A Los Angeles native, she lives with her husband, son and their felines.
Electric car company Fisker is getting ready for its Wall Street debut, adding C-level executives and snapping up a slick 73,000 square-foot headquarters in Manhattan Beach that it's calling "Inception."
The leased headquarters will house the now Torrance-based company's design and engineering team as it ramps up to deliver the "Ocean SUV" by the fall of 2022. The company said it will double its size, bringing on about 100 employees over the coming months, most of whom will work out of the new headquarters.
The move comes after Spartan Energy Acquisition Corporation announced this summer a deal that valued Fisker at $2.9 billion at the time. The New York Stock Exchange-traded corporation will hold a meeting Oct. 28 to vote on the deal. If approved, Fisker will be traded under the ticker "FSR."
Under the deal — expected to close by the end of the fourth quarter — Fisker will get more than $1 billion in gross proceeds to jumpstart production of Fisker Ocean, the vision of founder Henrik Fisker, CEO and chairman of the eponymously named startup.
Last month the company announced it would establish a new technology center in San Francisco called "source code" where it would provide support for design and engineering software. And earlier this week it appointed longtime Ernst & Young auditor John Finnucan as its chief operating officer.
The Fisker Ocean, which premiered at the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this year, starts at $37,499 and is being billed as the most sustainable vehicle, replete with a vegan interior and recycled carpet. Reservations for the either purchase or lease start at $250.
Special purpose acquisition companies, known as a SPACs, enabled electric-vehicle startup Nikola Corp to go public this summer and have become a quick route to Wall Street for many companies.
Aston Martin designer Fisker's previous venture, Fisker Automotive, fell into bankruptcy in 2013 and was bought by a Chinese group that rebranded it Karma. That company recently secured $100 million from investors and it hopes to go public as well.
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Rachel Uranga is dot.LA's Managing Editor, News. She is a former Mexico-based market correspondent at Reuters and has worked for several Southern California news outlets, including the Los Angeles Business Journal and the Los Angeles Daily News. She has covered everything from IPOs to immigration. Uranga is a graduate of the Columbia School of Journalism and California State University Northridge. A Los Angeles native, she lives with her husband, son and their felines.
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