Grounded raises $5M to make van upfitting chassis-agnostic

Why it matters

Grounded is testing whether a startup can own the software, power and interior layer of commercial vehicles without tying its product roadmap to one automaker's EV plans. Its 50,000-square-foot factory gives Shapiro room to test modular customization against established commercial upfitters.

Sam Shapiro has raised a $5 million seed round for Grounded, the Detroit vehicle startup he founded in 2022, and is expanding beyond the electric vans that defined its first four years.

The round, reported Tuesday by TechCrunch, includes returning investors Also Capital and The 81 Collection, alongside Animal Capital, the Michigan Outdoor Innovation Fund and a group of SpaceX alumni. Grounded has now raised about $8.5 million in publicly reported funding. Its $3.5 million pre-seed round in October 2024 was co-led by Also Capital and The 81 Collection, with participation from Side Door Ventures, SpaceX Starlink executive Tony Lyscio and Walker & Company founder Tristan Walker. Grounded has not disclosed its valuation or identified a lead investor for the new round.

Grounded has also opened a 50,000-square-foot manufacturing facility in Detroit, its largest facility to date. Grounded says production will begin in August 2026 and capacity will increase in 2027. The factory replaces a 13,000-square-foot operation where Shapiro's team built modular camper and commercial vehicles on electric Ford and General Motors chassis.

The larger building matters because Grounded is attempting a broader and operationally harder version of the company Shapiro originally pitched. Grounded plans to install its interiors, power systems and software in electric, hybrid and combustion-powered vehicles, including Ford Transit and Mercedes-Benz Sprinter vans. That reduces Grounded's dependence on any single automaker while adding more chassis, powertrains and component combinations for its manufacturing team to support.

A software engineer starts building vans

Shapiro came to vehicle manufacturing by way of software. Before Grounded, he worked as a senior software engineer at SpaceX, writing embedded software for Starlink hardware, according to a profile published by MichAuto. He previously held product and engineering roles at advertising technology company TripleLift and built interactive projects for clients including Google, YouTube and electric automaker NIO.

Grounded grew from a less technical experiment. During the pandemic, Shapiro converted an aging Chevrolet Express into a camper, lived in it for roughly six months and drove across the United States. Grounded's account of its founding says the mechanical problems, generator noise and exhaust convinced him that a quieter, customizable electric camper could be a better product.

Grounded began with a small team working from a Detroit parking lot, followed by a heated tent supplied by Ford. Grounded later moved into Newlab at Michigan Central and then into its own manufacturing space. Grounded's modular interior system allowed the same basic components to be rearranged for bedrooms, kitchens, storage and work areas instead of fabricating each vehicle as an entirely separate project.

Grounded calls that system Modulo. In its 2024 financing announcement, Grounded said it could configure the components for recreational vehicles, mobile medical and dental units, delivery vans, pet-grooming vehicles, mobile offices and food transport. Grounded also claimed Modulo reduced upfit times by 90%, though that figure has not been independently audited.

That approach gave Shapiro a route into commercial vehicles. Small businesses and institutions began asking Grounded to build mobile medical clinics, offices, food-service vehicles and command centers. Those buyers cared about the workspace inside the van, its power supply and its connected controls. The badge on the grille was secondary until the supply of suitable electric vans became a constraint.

Grounded outlived its original chassis plan

Grounded initially used Ford's E-Transit and added GM's BrightDrop electric van in 2023. GM discontinued BrightDrop in 2025, while Ford dropped plans for a next-generation electric Transit. Those decisions removed two of the platforms around which Grounded had developed its early product line.

Shapiro responded by redefining what Grounded sells. In a company blog post, he described the chassis as an underlying platform rather than the product itself: "The application layer on top of the vehicle is our product."

That layer includes the interior design, materials, batteries, solar equipment, connectivity and Grounded+ software used to monitor and control vehicle systems. Shapiro also described a separate manufacturing system in a factory-tour post, saying Grounded built software to manage work operations, inventory and bills of materials, along with the electrical and embedded software installed in each vehicle.

The chassis-agnostic strategy preserves that work when an automaker changes direction. It also lets Grounded sell to fleet operators that lack charging infrastructure or cannot accept the range and payload compromises of an electric van. Grounded can continue offering electric builds where they fit while using combustion or hybrid platforms for customers whose routes, equipment or locations make electrification impractical. Shapiro has also discussed using electric and hybrid platforms from medium-duty vehicle startup Harbinger.

That is a pragmatic turn for a company whose website still emphasizes electric specialty vehicles. Shapiro started Grounded to move campers and mobile workplaces away from gasoline. Four years later, Grounded now needs to meet fleet buyers where their depots and budgets are.

The commercial bet gets a larger factory

Grounded says its customers include Colgate, Nokia, Wayne Health and Healthy Mothers, Healthy Babies Coalition of Hawaii. TechCrunch reported that Grounded is seeing demand from food and beverage operators, public safety agencies and veterinary services. Each category requires different equipment, storage, plumbing, power and compliance work, which is where a repeatable modular system could shorten the path from an order to a finished vehicle.

Grounded's 2024 year-in-review said Grounded built 10 customized G2 vehicles for customers that year. Grounded also said its G2 electric RV cost about $200,000, while TechCrunch reported double-digit vehicle sales and roughly $3 million in revenue in 2024. Those figures were self-reported, and Grounded has not published comparable current revenue, customer-count or production data. Grounded has not disclosed pricing for its commercial builds.

The seed round gives Shapiro capital to prove that customization can become a manufacturing system rather than a collection of labor-intensive projects. Commercial upfitters already serve fleet customers at scale, and supporting several chassis will place more demands on engineering, procurement and quality control.

Grounded will compete for that work with established upfitters such as Adrian Steel, Ranger Design, Knapheide and Holman Fleet. Those companies have long outfitted commercial vans and trucks for fleet customers. Grounded's case rests on whether its reusable components and connected software can reduce design and assembly work enough to offset the complexity of supporting several chassis and powertrain types.

Shapiro's decision to stay in Detroit gives the plan a credible manufacturing base. Detroit and the Michigan Central campus offered access to automotive suppliers, engineers and production talent that Grounded could not easily assemble elsewhere. The new factory arrives after the electric-van market forced Grounded to separate its core technology from the vehicles underneath it.

Grounded began with Shapiro trying to build a better camper for himself. The $5 million round backs a wider proposition: the same modular architecture can turn the vans customers can actually buy into connected places to work.