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This founder built the RV he wanted for ski trips. It led to a $20 million business

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This founder built the RV he wanted for ski trips. It led to a $20 million business

Jim Ritchie started AEONrv, a Nevada-based company that sells a high-tech hybrid RV, because he wanted to create a new kind of vehicle for himself to use. The result is an RV with a modern, all-electric cabin mounted on the chassis of a gas-burning Ford Transit van.

The company’s growth has been strong enough to land it at No. 66 on the Inc. 5000 list this year, with a three-year growth rate of 4,231 percent. And it has managed to pull off this growth while the overall RV industry has declined from a Covid-era high.

Ritchie, a software engineer, says pondering his own outdoor adventures jump-started the creation of the company. “I’m a big skier, and I was thinking maybe I’ll retire sometime soon, and it’d be cool to have a vehicle to take to go skiing and biking and things I like to do,” he says. “I was looking around at vans. Van life was big, and I didn’t really like what was going on there. They seemed hard to insulate.”

All told, he says, the traditional RV industry “seemed pretty old-school” to him. 

Ritchie designed the vehicle for fun, and to help make it a reality, teamed up with a friend, Lars Severin , who became the company’s CTO (Severin retired earlier this year). What began as a weekend project grew into a business. By the end of 2021, they had published a website and started taking deposits for the vehicles. ” They bootstrapped the company to get it off the ground, and then raised under $2 million of outside capital from investors in 2023 and 2024.


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