As Poslovni Dnevnik/VL/Tanja Ivancic writes, the expert jury nominated Croatian inventor Mate Rimac for businessman of the year this year, and even more is expected in the future from the young leader of the Rimac Group, who managed to create yet another Croatian unicorn through persistent work and dogged determination against everything thrown at him.
For now, Rimac can certainly boast of having produced an incredible hypercar – recently declared the fastest electric car in the entire world, which also holds the record for the fastest acceleration of any car. Namely, the Nevera reached an impressive speed of 412 km/h, which makes it the fastest electric production car on the face of Earth, while the record for acceleration was 8.582 seconds per quarter mile, which was set back in 2021.
The Nevera electric car is otherwise Rimac’s premium product that has since entered into small-scale production. Back in June this year, the company revealed the release of the first Nevera on the roads, which was fitted with 000 plates and wasn’t for sale, and then, they said, deliveries to clients from around the world began.
They also emphasised from the Rimac Group that the production of the Nevera required five years of development and testing, equal to an incomprehensible 1.6 million hours of deep research.
Along with the production of the stunning Nevera at the Jankomir plant in Zagreb, what marked this year for Croatian inventor Mate Rimac was the investment round that he closed back in March and the start of the construction of the Rimac campus in Sveta Nedelja. In June, Mate Rimac reported that the Rimac Group had successfully collected 3.78 billion kuna or 500 million euros in investment round D, which brought the market value of the Rimac Group company to over 2 billion euros in total.
The key new investors were SoftBank Vision Fund 2 and Goldman Sachs Asset Management, with participation from existing shareholders of the Rimac Group, including Porsche and Investindustrial. All of the investors now have a share in the Rimac Group, while Mate Rimac himself, the company’s founder and executive director of the company, still owns the largest share of all.
“It’s a total of more funds than we’ve ever previously raised, so it’s really a huge thing for us,” Rimac emphasised at the time, noting that they had five times more interested investors than they planned in terms of the raising of the money in this round, and as for the IPO, that is, public share offerings, they are thinking about it in a longer-term framework when the company becomes more predictable, so somewhere in the range of three to five years, according to Rimac.
This new investment is being used to continue the company’s growth, increase production capacity and allow for additional employment. The capital raised will primarily be used for the further development of Rimac Technology in the field of large series production for global car manufacturers.
It should be known that Rimac Group is, namely, a holding company and consists of two companies; Bugatti Rimac, in which the Rimac Group has a majority share of 55 percent, while the other 45 percent is owned by Porsche, and Rimac Technology, which is 100 percent owned by the Rimac Group.
The company Rimac Technology is known as a technological partner of numerous global automotive manufacturers who choose it for the development and production of their high-performance battery systems, electric powertrains, electronic systems and user interface components. Mate Rimac then pointed out that the company has ambitious growth plans for the next two years, in addition to the issue of employees and the opening of new offices. They’re present in four locations in Zagreb, and they also have offices in Split and Osijek, as well as elsewhere in Europe – in Germany, France and England.
The construction of the upcoming Rimac Campus in Sveta Nedelja is currently delayed, but considering the situation on the market, the deadlines set for it previously remain acceptable, and the plant should be ready in the next few months, with the administrative building and other facilities likely to be ready over the next year or so.
”It’s a big investment and will be the largest industrial building in all of Croatia, spanning 100,000 square metres, and I believe that everything is progressing according to plan, and we’re already planning the construction of Campus 2,” Rimac reported back in June.
The Rimac Group employs a total of more than 1,500 people, with 500 of them working at Bugatti Rimac, 150 of them in France, while 1,000 people are employed at Rimac Technology. That’s what the official figures from June of this year read. In the first half of this year, they employed 300 people, and by the end of the year they planned to employ another 700. As Mate Rimac wrote in a recent post on social media, they currently have a total of 2,000 employees.
Croatian inventor Mate Rimac otherwise started his business literally from his garage and back in 2009 he founded Rimac Automobili, continuing at this pace, doubling the number of employees, attracting strong investments, and breaking records and production despite the difficulties he faced. It’s safe to say that the future should not be a problem for the talented and innovative Croatian inventor Mate Rimac.
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