Electric vehicle company Nxu bolsters East Valley presence with new HQ lease
After looking for a new office for a little over a year, Valley-based Nxu Inc. will move into a new space later this year.
Nxu (Nasdaq: NXU), which rebranded from Atlis Motor Vehicles earlier this year, secured a 21,000-square-foot lease at 63 S. Rockford Drive in Tempe. The office will be considered the electric vehicle and related component maker’s headquarters, but Nxu will keep its existing manufacturing facility in Mesa, giving the company a total footprint of about 63,000 square feet.
“We’ve been trying to focus on how do we expand manufacturing [and] the engineering, development and operations team. At the facility we’re at today, we’re limited on the number of people that can be here,” Nxu’s CEO and founder Mark Hanchett told the Business Journal. “As we grow, we need more space but we also needed a space that was much more fitting with the team members and the types of roles we’re hiring for.”
Moving Nxu’s product development, engineering, marketing, sales and other personnel to the new office frees up space in the existing building, which could more than double its manufacturing capacity.
Hanchett said the company has 140 employees currently and expects about 75% of the team to work out of the Tempe office, which has space for more than 150 workers. Nxu worked with Rick Collins, principal at Ross Brown Partners Inc. to find its new space.
The company was founded in 2016 and has previously raised more than $35 million, primarily from individual retail investors during several crowdfunding campaigns, according to previous reporting.
Hanchett previously said the decision to rebrand from Atlis to Nxu reflects the company’s mission to develop technology, batteries and infrastructure to support electric vehicles, in addition to manufacturing its XT electric trucks, which had been its prime focus for several years. As the company continues to grow, it shifted focus to the energy side of the company, including developing battery cells and packs.
“We’re manufacturing cells in our plant here in Mesa, and we’re continuing to try and scale that. [We have] a big focus on the infrastructure side of the vehicle mobility market,” he said. “The truck is still in the plans. … You have to do all of it if you’re going to be successful.
The Phoenix metro has positioned itself as a growing hub for the production of EVs and other alt-fuel vehicles, with the Lucid Motors Inc. factory in Casa Grande and the Nikola Corp. manufacturing facility in Coolidge, along with Nikola’s plans to build a hydrogen fuel production hub in Buckeye. Multiple other companies in this space have also set up shop in the Valley.
“If we’re going to facilitate the growth that the [electric vehicle] industry predicts, we have to build out the energy side of that infrastructure,” Hanchett said. “Where we’re focused currently is on manufacturing cells, putting those in packs and we’re delivering those to both energy storage as well as mobility customers. You’ll see the first deliveries of those to the first customers in the second half of this year.”
Nxu closed trading Wednesday at 56.99 cents a share, up nearly 6%. Track the stock here.