On Wednesday, Swedish electric car company Uniti launched an equity crowdfunding campaign on FundedByMe to raise €500,000 as it prepares to build its first production-ready prototype vehicle. The company is currently developing a lightweight electric city car that combines both holistic sustainability and a futuristic user experience.

Uniti revealed:

“We are leading the most deliberate reinvention of the automobile in modern times; abandoning the mechanical limitations of the combustion engine era and redefining the light city car and its core technologies. Our lightweight, electric city car (low regulatory category) is designed for sustainable and efficient city mobility, but is distinctly high-tech. This is a market niche with imminent mainstream potential. In the attached documentation you will find an in-depth explanation of the technologies we have developed in-house that fill the gaps in the interaction and interface technology of modern cars, while providing a roadmap to mass-scale production.”

The company stated it began as an open innovation research project at Lund University where its team studied the underlying logic of modern mobility, the core problems that need to be solved, and the emerging technologies that should form the basis of the next generation of automotive. Founder and CEO Lewis Horne, noted:

“Our findings show that city streets don’t need to be dominated by heavy combustion engine vehicles, or even oversized electric vehicles, as they typically only carry an average of 1.2 people for short distances at low speeds.”

Horne also explained why he and his team decided to use the crowdfunding method for their project:

“We decided on crowdfunding as it’s the funding method that complies closest with who Uniti is as a company – open and innovative.”

FundedByMe co-founder and CEO Daniel Daboczy added:

“Uniti is pushing for change in an industry where things have been done in a certain way forever, which strongly appeals to the FundedByMe mindset of changing the status quo and allowing everyone to become a shareholder.”

The company also shared that the production-ready prototype is currently scheduled for 2017. The campaign is set to close on November and so far has secured over 70% of its funding goal.