StartEngine Retail Investors See 137,000% Return After Atlis Motors (AMV) IPO

StartEngine’s earliest investors just saw a massive payday.

Atlis Motors is an electric vehicle company that IPO’d today. Unlike most IPOs, this one had something rather unique about it: It was mostly funded by retail investors. Atlis Motors raised one of its first rounds on StartEngine at a price of just $.29. Atlis Motors stock IPO’d today and ended the day at a price of $82.12, and has hit a price of as high as $200/share in after hours. However, there was also a 2 for 1 stock split after their second round on StartEngine, meaning their effective share price is $.145.

This means whoever sold at $200 per share saw a return of over 137,000%. For reference, the minimum investment amount for that round was $203. That $203 is now worth $278,000. There were 1881 investors in their first round, with an average investment size of $568 for a total investment amount of $1,070,000. That means, on average, everyone that invested now made $778,000 on the investment. The original 1.07 million is now worth over $1 billion.

While there have been a number of success stories, they haven’t been that great. Knightscope IPO’d then shot up 2–300% from most of their raise prices before dropping significantly. There are a few big exits from SeedInvest and Wefunder that I am aware as well, but they were either incredibly small rounds, accredited only, or similarly “meh” in nature. Meaning that either retail couldn’t invest in one way or another, or just nobody actually made any money.

This seems to be the “big win” many people might have been waiting for. Atlis went on to raise several more rounds on both StartEngine, as well as through their own website, further honing in on the gains for retail investors. Their most recent round before IPO was at $27.50 so even that round of investors are currently sitting on gains approaching 1000% as the stock nears $200.

It will be an interesting one to see over time, but it’s definitely nice to see such a big win for the industry.