ChargeLab, a Toronto-based startup that builds software to operate and optimize electric vehicle charging equipment for fleets and commercial customers, has raised a $15 million Series A round. The round was led by King River Capital and includes participation from a spinoff of a technology company that focuses on electric mobility and building charging stations.
Zak Lefevre, founder and CEO of ChargeLab, said that the two companies will launch a bundled hardware and software solution for fleets, multifamily buildings and other commercial EV charging use cases. While the partnership with ABB will give ChargeLab the resources it needs to build out and scale its enterprise software, Lefevre noted that the company needs a better out-of-the-box software.
The reality is that there is a device with the ability to connect to the internet, but they haven't built the back-end services for connecting it, managing it, doing billing and payments, scheduling and power management and all those things.
The core product of ChargeLab is its cloud-based charging station management system, which provides apps for EV drivers, dashboard for fleet managers and open APIs for third-party system integration. The hardware-agnostic software, which runs on the edge and in the cloud, also includes capabilities like automated monitoring of chargers, management of pricing and access rules, payment processing and electrical load balancing, according to the company.
The startup's latest funding round will help it go from its seed stage-level solution of connecting chargers and controlling them in the cloud to more advanced milestones.
Is that going to be compliant? Is it going to be able to scale across hundreds of thousands of devices? Are we going to be able to bundle with them?
The American Institute of CPAs has developed a voluntary compliance standard for managing customer data.
The co-founder and chief technology officer of ChargeLab, Ehsan Mokhtari, said that ChargeLab's software is embedded onto the chargers to ensure that they are secure and efficient.
That ties into the security side of things. Mokhtari said that ChargeLab is very active and in front of the EV chargers that will be a target of cyberattacks. We want to build products and take them to market with our partners.
ChargeLab works with many EV charging manufacturers. The startup's tech is white labeled by charging networks. ChargeLab's software is currently inside thousands of devices in North America, but has yet to reach the 10,000 mark. The EV charging industry is growing so fast that the market opportunity is massive.
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