EVwire brief: Carvana holds a warrant to buy shares in Slate Auto, the Jeff Bezos-backed EV startup, as per documents TechCrunch obtained from Delaware's division of corporations.
What Carvana itself has confirmed is narrower. In a March SEC filing, the online used-car retailer disclosed a warrant, granted in June 2025, to buy shares of an unnamed "private consumer products company" in which Guggenheim Partners CEO Mark Walter holds a substantial ownership interest.
Carvana did not name the company, and neither Carvana nor Slate confirmed the connection. The warrant's aggregate value was $1.5 million at the end of 2025, and it vests in tranches through 2029 against jointly determined performance goals.
The thread tying the two together is Walter, who sits on both sides of the table. His investment vehicle, TWG Global, led Slate's $650 million Series C in April, making him one of the startup's largest shareholders.
The Slate pickup truck is bare-bones, but that’s the point
He also holds a stake in Carvana. TechCrunch, citing the filings, puts it at 8% of the company's Class B common stock and 1% of overall voting power, behind only CEO Ernie Garcia III and his father, Ernie Garcia II.
So the same backer is on both ends, and a warrant quietly appears between the two companies he's invested in. The dots are easy to connect. They're just not officially connected yet, so we'd take the Slate identification as TechCrunch's well-reasoned read rather than confirmed fact.
On Slate's side, the numbers are firmer. The company has raised roughly $1.4 billion since 2022 and plans to announce final pricing and open $300 non-refundable preorders on June 24, ahead of first deliveries late this year. Slate has said its truck will start in the mid-$20,000s and has logged over 160,000 reservations.
The Slate can be configured in several ways, like this cool fastback setup
Slate also says on its website that it "won't have traditional dealerships," selling directly to customers instead, the same playbook as Tesla and Rivian. What it hasn't detailed is how it will handle the physical side of buying and taking delivery of a car.
That gap is where a Carvana tie-up would make sense. The retailer has reportedly been buying Stellantis dealerships and exploring new-car sales, per the Wall Street Journal, and CEO Garcia III told analysts to "stay tuned" when asked about it on a recent earnings call. Selling Slates through Carvana's physical footprint could hand the startup a delivery network it doesn't have to build.
Context:
Direct-to-customer is the easy part to announce and the hard part to run. Tesla and Rivian both spent years and a lot of money standing up stores, service, and delivery hubs, and a startup launching a sub-$30,000 truck has thin margins to spend on any of that.
Slate's bare-bones electric truck is expected to start deliveries this year
Carvana, for its part, already operates reconditioning sites and a nationwide logistics network. That's real physical infrastructure a direct-sales EV maker would otherwise have to build from scratch, which is what makes the reported new-car ambitions and a Slate warrant an interesting pair.
One caveat worth keeping front of mind: this is a warrant, the option to buy shares, not a stake Carvana is confirmed to have exercised. How many shares it covers isn't known, and Carvana hasn't said the unnamed issuer is Slate at all. It's a strong circumstantial case, not a closed one.
Source: TechCrunch, The Wall Street Journal, and Carvana’s SEC filing
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