ChargeLab plans to be the “Android” for EV charging network, announced $15 million Series A financing.
ChargeLab, a Toronto-based startup company, has secured CAD 19.3 million ($15 million) in Series A financing, in line with its goal to become the operating system for EV chargers. King River Capital led the Series A financing with participation from ABB E-Mobility and its existing investors.
Megan Guy, Co-Founder & Partner at King River Capital, said: “King River believes that ChargeLab is positioned to become the dominant back-end software provider for the EV charging industry and deliver a reliable, high-quality experience for the entirety of the ecosystem. That’s why we were thrilled to lead this round.”
According to the company, it builds software that operates and optimizes electric vehicle charging equipment. Its software runs in the cloud, managing many electric vehicle chargers as an intelligent network. Its key capabilities include automated monitoring of EV chargers, managing prices and access rules, payment processing, and electrical load balancing.
PARTNERSHIP WITH ABB E-MOBILITY AND OTHER EV CHARGING NETWORKS
ABB E-Mobility, ABB’s electric charging business, will provide ChargeLab with opportunities, as it has already sold more than 460,000 electric vehicle chargers across more than 88 markets.
Zak Lefevre, founder and CEO of ChargeLab, said, “The reality is that ABB has a device with the capability to connect to the internet, but they haven’t built those back-end services for connecting it, managing it, doing billing and payments, scheduling and power management and all those things,”
“So, we are very much in that transition phase where everybody’s making their devices ready to connect to the cloud, but these big hardware companies haven’t necessarily thought through what all the second order consequences are and all the other systems that chargers are going to need to plug out to, whether it’s a parking management system or demand response system to the grid.” He told TechCrunch.
Said Malin Carlstrom, Head of Ventures at ABB EL Ventures, “We believe that Zak and his team are poised to create the Android of charging systems, and that ABB can be a strategic and financial partner, delivering significant benefits to both parties.”
The company stated that it partners with other leading EV charging manufacturers such as Phihong, United Chargers, Siemens, and Tritium.
Its core product is a cloud-based charging station management system (CSMS). It also provides apps for EV drivers, dashboards for fleet managers and site hosts, and open APIs for integration with third-party systems.
ChargeLab’s mission is to solve smart EV charging at scale, as more EVs are hitting the road.
