How Sonny Vu, CEO Of Arevo Raised $60M To Build The Future Of Digital Composite Manufacturing!

Sonny Vu is the Chief Executive Officer at Arevo.

Arevo, based in Silicon Valley, California, develops technology to enable the direct digital additive manufacturing of ultra-strong, lightweight composite parts for end-use applications in high volume.

Arevo provides designers and manufacturers with unprecedented freedom to unlock the unparalleled strength and weight of composite materials for a wide range of consumer and industrial products and has seen early success manufacturing CFRTP composite parts for OEM customers. With an initial focus on Aerospace, Defense, Consumer Electronics, Transportation, and Consumer Goods, Arevo is poised to optimize additive manufacturing services to OEM’s worldwide.

Before Arevo, Sonny was President and CTO (Connected Devices) at Fossil Group (NASDAQ: FOSL) which acquired Misfit, a wearable tech company he founded, for $260M.

He previously founded Elemental Machines (remote process monitoring/analytics), AgaMatrix (biosensors for diabetes), and FireSpout (natural language processing). Sonny is a founder of Alabaster with investments in 30+ deep tech startups. Previously, he worked at Microsoft Research in NLP under Kai-Fu Lee, pursued a Linguistics PhD at MIT under Noam Chomsky, and studied math at UIUC.

In an exclusive interview with AsiaTechDaily, Sonny says:

It’s not too hard to stay motivated when you get to work on one of the potentially most transformative technologies of our time (meaning)—getting to learn about materials science, robotics, and design software (learning). And best of all, having a chance to work with some of most fun and interesting people I know (fellowship) – people I’d want to hang out with even if I wasn’t working with them.

• Get rid of distractions in order to feed your curiosity though learning new things or something more deeply, and don’t stop
• Do small things with great love; there’s plenty of time to get to the big things later
• Focus on friendships early and build on them throughout your life since you can’t make old friends later in life
• Be quick to forgive since you’ve probably screwed up much more than you think and it’s a lot of work to hold grudges

Read on to know more about Sonny Vu and his journey.

Please tell me about your personal background, and What motivated you to get started with your company?

Sonny Vu: I’ve been an entrepreneur all my life though since selling Misfit, I’ve mostly been investing out of our family office (Alabaster) into deep tech startups with a view towards climate change reversal technology. Biotech/food, new materials, semiconductors, etc. When we came across Arevo, it was one of the most interesting companies we had ever seen so when the opportunity to join came up. It was a natural choice to go back into an operator role.

What is your current main product, and can you share any previous product pivot story to the current product?

Sonny Vu: Our main product is a manufacturing solution for producing complex, large size carbon fibre composite parts at scale. Customers tell us what they need to lightweight, and we make the parts for them on our production hardware (a robotic 3d-printing system). The Superstrata, a custom 3d printed carbon fibre bike, is our first direct to consumer product and is intended to show what our systems are capable of producing at scale.

How much money have you raised in total so far? When was the recent funding round? 

Sonny Vu: We have raised over $60M. The latest round, our Series B was $26m led by Defy and GGVC. Previous backing by Khosla Ventures and various strategic investors.

What were the internal decision processes in determining when to begin fund-raising, and what were the logistics for this? And how many investors have you met so far, and how did you meet these investors and which channels worked best for you?

Sonny Vu: Well, it was pretty simple – we were almost out of money when I arrived, so there wasn’t much deciding that was needed. We had to close around quickly. That said, we did want to make sure that we got financial investors on board who could appreciate our business and properly value it. It wasn’t easy because of the difficult season, and a lot of investors weren’t investing in new companies, especially deep tech ones, choosing instead to focus on supporting their existing portfolio companies.

Many of these so-called innovation funds weren’t serious about innovation and were surprisingly focused on traditional financial metrics and the short term; that didn’t make sense to us. However, there were a few visionary investors out there like Defy and GGVC who understood where we were headed, could see beyond the immediate and were excited about our vision to transform a variety of industries in the coming decades with our technology and business model.

What are the biggest challenges and obstacles that you have faced in the process of fund-raising? If you had to start over, what would you do differently? 

Sonny Vu: It had been a while since I had been in an operator role having focused on being an investor for the last five years, so it took a few attempts to get into the zone and arrive at a narrative that made sense. Once we figured it out (build a large scale print farm to provide composite manufacturing as a service for lightweight + using B2C as a precursor to B2B as the business model), everything came together fairly quickly.

What are your milestones for the next round? And what are your goals for the future?

Sonny Vu: We are hoping we won’t have to raise the next round. The Superstrata B2C campaign has far exceeded our expectations (the original goal was $3M in pre-orders for the year. 

We had not expected to get to $3M within 13 days of launching) and the interest in using our printers is at such a level that we expect to break even next year. The goal is to execute on several of these vertical demonstrations over the next couple years and show the complexity, physical size, quality, and speed of what we can print in continuous carbon fibre composite.

How have you attracted users and with what strategy have you grown your company from the start to now?

Sonny Vu: We make sure to spend enough time on the fundamentals: understand the market, the customers, and our brand values. Once those are nailed down, it’s more straightforward to craft marketing messages that resonate with our target audience. Moreover, each of our local teams is given the freedom to adapt our strategy; however, they see the fit for their own market.

Which has been the best marketing software tool for the growth of your startup and why? 

Sonny Vu: We are platform agnostic when it comes to marketing software tools. We will use whichever platforms that allow us to reach and engage our audience better. But we love KaKaoTalk and Naver.

What do most startups get wrong about marketing in general?

Sonny Vu: Most startups focus on tactics rather than strategy. Everyone wants to do a certain facet of marketing such as viral marketing, but they don’t spend enough time on the basics such as market research, audience insights, and branding. Different companies have different goals; the important thing is to craft compelling messages to the right audience so that you can motivate them to take the desired action that makes sense to your quantitative and qualitative goals.

How do you plan to expand globally?

Sonny Vu: We have been global from the beginning since we want to go where our customers are and where the best talent that we can access is. While the majority of our team members are in Vietnam and California, we have employees in nine other locations (including Korea). Our teams, investor base, customer base (consumer and industrial) are all globally distributed.

What are the most common mistakes companies make with global expansion?

Sonny Vu: Not giving local teams the authority and support they need to succeed and trying to control everything from the perspective of another cultural / office.

How do you handle this COVID-19 outbreak situation for your company’s survival in the future?

Sonny Vu: We follow a number of best practices for our team members in the US (social distancing, contact tracing, shifts when on location, etc.). Since there really isn’t much COVID in Vietnam (currently, fewer than 50 active cases and fewer than 40 deaths since the beginning of the pandemic), we’re pretty much operating at full speed / as (near) normal. For the other locations, people are mostly working from home, and there hasn’t been too much slowdown.

What are the most common mistakes founders make when they start a company? 

Sonny Vu: It is Over-optimizing on the things that don’t matter as much as you think (e.g., valuations) and under-optimizing on things that do (use of focus, getting market feedback).

• You are overvaluing time over money
• You are overvaluing money over time
• You are trusting experts too much
• Not focusing on sales early enough and for long enough

What’s the best advice you’ve ever received? And What advice do you have for someone who is interested in doing similar things like yours or in a similar direction?

Sonny Vu: Think for yourself.

What are the top-three books or movies (TV series) that changed your life and why?

Sonny Vu:

• The Bible (book) – learned about the importance of doing things with love.
• The Mission (movie) – learned about balancing of truth vs mercy.
• An Introduction to the Theory of Numbers (book – Niven, Zuckerman, Montgomery) – learned how to add

How do you keep yourself motivated every day?

Sonny Vu: It’s not too hard to stay motivated when you get to work on one of the potentially most transformative technologies of our time (meaning)—getting to learn about materials science, robotics, and design software (learning). And best of all, having a chance to work with some of most fun and interesting people I know (fellowship) – people I’d want to hang out with even if I wasn’t working with them.

What are the top- three life lessons that you want your (future) sons and daughters to know?

Sonny Vu: Sorry, I have four.

• Get rid of distractions in order to feed your curiosity though learning new things or something more deeply, and don’t stop
• Do small things with great love; there’s plenty of time to get to the big things later
• Focus on friendships early and build on them throughout your life since you can’t make old friends later in life
• Be quick to forgive since you’ve probably screwed up much more than you think and it’s a lot of work to hold grudges

What would you like to be remembered for?

Sonny Vu: I don’t want to be remembered. No names on buildings, books, scholarships, or theorems, etc. please.

You can follow Sonny Vu here.

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