Electronic vehicles are increasing in popularity with the number of electronic vehicles expected to increase by 170 million by 2030. This impressive growth will be supported by EV Connect’s tech-agnostic and cloud-based platform for managing electronic vehicle (EV) charging stations. As the industry grows, having a centralized cloud infrastructure that can resolve issues in seconds instead of days is critical. EV Connect has more than 6,000 connectors under contract and is rapidly growing.
LA TechWatch chatted with Jordan Ramer to discuss the need for centralized infrastructure for EV charging, the future growth of the industry and the company’s latest round of funding, which brings its total funding to over $25M across eight funding rounds.
Who were your investors and how much did you raise?
EV Connect raised $12M in this Series B round. The round was led by Mitsui & Co., Ltd. and Ecosystem Integrity Fund.
The Series B funding round brought the total capital raised by EV Connect to over $25 million. Previously announced investors in EV Connect include 37 Ventures, Street Edge Capital, Motus Ventures, Tech Coast Angels, Pasadena Angels, Keiretsu Capital, and Sustainable America.
Tell us about the product or service EV Connect offers.
EV Connect is the home of EV Cloud, the most innovative, robust, and feature-rich cloud-based software platform for managing electric vehicle (EV) charging stations, their interaction with utilities, and the driver experience. EV Connect offers a centralized infrastructure for a future in which everyone from EV drivers to utilities can maximize the benefits and opportunities presented by the rapid electrification of transportation. This powerful, cloud-based management platform connects drivers to charge stations, site owners to their ports, utilities to demand data, and service providers to their networks.
The EV Connect platform is cloud-based and scales from a single-port charge station up to many thousands of ports across hundreds of sites, and allows for EV Connect customers have the freedom to choose their charging hardware, which means that they are able to scale their EV charging businesses on their own terms.
What inspired you to start EV Connect?
As a 9-year-old company in a 7-year-old industry, EV Connect has seen the early days of the electric vehicle. Most EVs operated in tightly controlled factory settings. A single company would deploy forklifts and other industrial vehicles in closed systems, like factories. These industrial EV networks had centralized control of the entire ecosystem: from drivers, to charge stations, vehicles, and electric supply. These closed-loop EV networks still exist, but the broad availability of a diverse marketplace of EVs, charge stations, network operators, site owners, and utilities today make up a massive and growing, heterogeneous marketplace of EV technology
EV Connect realized that site owners, parking lot managers, fleet operators, and utilities must have a way to manage the complex and heterogeneous infrastructure required to satisfy the demands of EV drivers.
One important reason for starting EV Connect was the repeated phone calls at 2 am calls from Europe at a previous company. Something would be wrong with a charge station 5,000 miles away. The customer would call (during their working hours), and we would have to send them to the misbehaving charge station with a USB stick to download diagnostic data. That person then had to take the data back to the office, package it into a ZIP file, and email that file to us. Two or three days later we’d be able to send a recommended fix that someone had to manually implement at the charge station.
There was absolutely no way that the EV market would go anywhere at all under this model. This pain was the origin of the idea behind EV Connect.
Today we help our customers monitor, manage, and maintain thousands of charge stations from a single, browser-based control panel.
How is EV Connect different?
The EV Connect platform is cloud-based and scales from a single-connector charge station up to many thousands of connectors across hundreds of sites.
EV Connect customers have the freedom to choose their charging hardware, which means that they are able to scale their EV charging businesses on their own terms.
In just a few years we have grown to just over 6,000 connectors under contract across hundreds of site owners, and dozens of networks, and our platform is ready for many thousands more ports, site owners, and sites.
EV Connect provides a hardware-agnostic, cross-platform environment through which customers can manage thousands of charging connectors from a wide variety of EV charge station vendors.
The EV Connect platform is the ideal operating system for EV charging because our Certification Program ensures that chargers from all major EV charging providers are compatible with our system.
What market is EV Connect targeting and how big is it?
We are at the hockey stick of the growth curve. The number of electric vehicles (EVs) will increase dramatically between now and 2030, from 3 million in 2017 to more than 170 million in 2030. The energy required to fuel this growing number of EVs is staggering.
There is a demand for charging stations with the global commercial EV charging services market expected to reach $2.9 Billion by 2023. The EV charging market is moving towards specialization and building cloud software is increasingly difficult for hardware companies.
EV OEMs and energy providers want to both ‘own the customer’ AND provide a seamless EV charging experience for their drivers.
EV Connect is enabling a more secure EV charging experience by removing the need to expose charge station users to the vulnerability of credit card readers at charge stations. This greatly reduces the risk of credit card skimming and related fraud that is so prevalent at traditional gas pumps and anywhere else credit cards are swiped.
EV Connect is enabling a more secure EV charging experience by removing the need to expose charge station users to the vulnerability of credit card readers at charge stations. This greatly reduces the risk of credit card skimming and related fraud that is so prevalent at traditional gas pumps and anywhere else credit cards are swiped.
What’s your business model?
Simply put: EV Connect provides its customers access to the EV Connect platform, which allows them to manage everything from a single EV charging site to networks of hundreds of site operators with many thousands of sites and connectors under management.
We remove the operational overhead of managing EV charging, which allows our customers to focus on building business models out of their investments in providing electricity as a fuel.
EV Connect customers pay for access to the platform on a per-connector basis. EV Connect customers also have the option of choosing from a number of premium features which make managing EV charging and fleets even simpler and more profitable
EV Connect customers get an advanced and secure way to scale their EV charge station businesses without the burden of internal software development efforts or maintaining a complex cloud-based system.
What are some of the tax incentives and rebates to use a platform like EV Connect?
EV Connect is approved for use with many utility-driven EV charging programs.
What was the funding process like?
As the company and market have matured, the funding process has become easier. It is by no means easy to raise money, but EV charging has become a very visible industry. EV Connect’s leadership position relative to competitors has made it a sought-after partner for both financial and strategic investors.
What are the biggest challenges that you faced while raising capital?
The biggest challenge during the funding round was to ensure that key strategic investors in our space understood the market position we now occupy as a result of the progress we have made.
What factors about your business led your investors to write the check?
EV Connect investors have always understood that the small growing pains of the EV charging ecosystem today will grow up to be unmanageable monsters in a world with mass penetration of EVs. These investors also understand that too many of the companies in EV charging today are fiercely competing to ‘own a market’ which can only flourish if it allows EV charging to be a hassle-free experience for everyone involved in the transaction.
What are the milestones you plan to achieve in the next six months?
Our key milestones revolve around scaling our sales and marketing efforts across the strategic verticals for the company.
What advice can you offer companies in Los Angeles that do not have a fresh injection of capital in the bank?
Don’t give up! Fundraising requires patience in order to find the best investor match for the company’s strategy, stage, and market position.
Don’t give up! Fundraising requires patience in order to find the best investor match for the company’s strategy, stage, and market position.
Where do you see the company going now over the near term?
EV Connect is focused on scaling its business in the United States and continuing to find partner networks for its EV Cloud platform.
What is your favorite LA bar, when you need to kick back and relax?
I love Madre Mezcaleria in Palms. It’s a small Oaxacan restaurant with a 5 stool mezcal bar. The mezcal selection is great and drinks are served with fried grasshoppers.
