Happy Tuesday. This is Electric Avenue. We’re the e-Mobility newsletter that gives you that morning rush and raises your Dopamin levels for the rest of the day - like a cold plunge 🛀

Here’s what we have for you today:

• EV Startup Funding News 📈

• E-Mobility Startup Interview: FLEXeCharge 🚀

• 3 Links 🔗

• Meme of the week 🤡

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Let's dive in!

EV Startup Funding News 📈

Guess what day it is? It's our monthly Money Monday 🤑  - Finally, this month we saw some more EV startups getting funded (guess there were some hectic Christmas shopping and preparations to get those deals closed in 2023 🙃). Here's who secured the bag 💰 and which startups you should keep an eye on 👀:

• Monta secured €80m in funding (Series B) for its cloud-based charge point management platform.

• Deftpower raised additional funding to build out its Whitelabel e-mobility service provider (eMSP) platform.

• Electra, a French operator of fast charging stations, raised €304m to expand its European network aiming for 2.200 sites with 15k chargepoints until 2030 (aggregating to €600m of total funding in 3 years).

• FLEXeCharge closed its seed funding round to develop an energy management platform to monitor charging and perform dynamic load management.

• EZE Network, a Munich-based startup building public AC charging stations, raised a large Series A round of >100m EUR. (Link) The company largely invests in charging station assets and partners with municipalities and other partners for site acquisition. The company primarily relies on the Sicharge CC AC22kW by Siemens.

• Wallbox chargers, a Spanish charger manufacturer, received a minority investment from US-based Generac. Generac will take a seat on Wallbox’s board and begin distributing Wallbox chargers via its existing distribution channels. Generac mainly provides backup power solutions via gas generators as well as solar and batteries.

Do you know any E-mobility companies that raised recently? -> Send us a link to [email protected]!

E-Mobility Startup Interview:

FLEXeCharge 🚀

🥳 Today, we are delighted to feature our 1st E-Mobility Startup Profile. What to expect? 🎯 

• Hand-selected startups in the e-mobility and EV charging industry ⚡️

• 1st hand insights and their story 🤓

• Cool products and tech 💡 

FLEXeCharge a Copenhagen-based startup recently closed its seed funding round. The co-founders are readers of Electric Avenue. We sat down with the team and asked them to break down their journey, from initial university research to a completely vendor-neutral load management. 🙂 

Hello! Who are you and what business did you start?

We offer load and energy management solutions to charge point operators (CPOs) and charging solutions providers (CSPs), which enable them to optimise their charging site operations to achieve costs reductions and generate new revenues. 

When did you get started and where are you based?

2019 Founding team: Dr. Robert Brehm, Jan Köster. Later, Max Brandt joined as product manager, before becoming a co-founder and taking on the role of CEO. Today, our company is headquartered in Copenhagen and we have an office in Lippstadt.  

What's your backstory and how did you develop the idea?

The concept of providing load management solutions was inspired by the research conducted by our CTO and co-founder, Dr. Robert Brehm. In his former role as a Professor at the University of Southern Denmark (SDU), he spearheaded numerous research projects focused on integrating electric vehicle (EV) charging with the grid.

With the founding of FLEXeCHARGE, our goal was to identify the most suitable customer segment within the EV charging ecosystem for the technology we had developed.

After several iterations, we discovered our product-market fit: to offer a vendor-independent load and energy management platform. This platform assists charge point operators and charging solution providers in integrating their charging stations with the grid and other energy assets.  

The core of our product is the FLEXeCHARGE Platform, where all relevant charging and energy data are aggregated and made accessible to our customers through our user interface. This enables our customers to have full access and control over the load and energy management across all their charging sites from a single dashboard. To connect the charging stations, we offer two options: either remotely through our cloud-based load management service or on-premise via our Gateway Connect. 

Can you break down your business model for us? What makes it work?

The access to our platform is offered as a SaaS-model. Beyond this recurrent revenue stream, we also generate revenues from reselling Gateway Connect devices as well as service and support fees. 

What customer segment are you focussing on? What traction have you achieved so far?

We have two target audiences: 1. charge point operators (CPOs), like utility, fleet or oil & gas operators and 2. charging solutions providers (CSPs). We address those 2 audiences in all Western European markets.

We have signed deals with several CPOs (ex: Team Energie, viggo energy) and CSPs (ex: NWG Charging, Floading, etc.) 

The Value Proposition depends on the target audience. 

• For CPOs: “We empower CPOs to enhance their profitability and scale efficiently by minimizing grid costs, optimizing energy, tapping into flexibility markets, and offering innovative EV driver services, all supported by insightful data and expert guidance for strategic growth.” 

• For CSPs: “Our platform offers CSPs a seamless integration and management experience with rapid site commissioning, expert-driven load and energy management, vendor independence, and additional upsell opportunities like market participation for example.” 

What sets us apart: 

• Possibility to run both local load management (thanks to our gateway connect device) and cloud load management 

• Our open and vendor-agnostic platform provides ONE load management solution for all sites from simple and cost-effective to advanced and highly integrated. All monitored in ONE service cockpit.  

• Finally, our sharp focus on delivering only load management and energy management solutions enables us to be the specialist provider for charge point operators.

Since launch, what growth channels have been most effective for you?

Primarily direct sales, by approaching (on Linkedin, by email, or at trade shows) potential customers.

Warm introductions by our investors and advisors have also worked well. Now we see an increased interaction with other e-mobility players like charging station manufacturers, CPMS providers, Battery, and flexibility providers where we complement each other to serve CPOs. 

Congrats on the recent funding! Tell us a bit about the deal flow and what you will want to achieve with the fresh capital.

With Greencode Ventures, Link Capital, and Vireo Ventures, we have secured the perfect seed investor consortium of leading VCs in energy transition and mobility. These partners offer support not only with capital but also with their expertise and industry contacts. We are already forming exciting synergies with other portfolio companies, such as Viggo Energy (a portfolio company of Link Capital), which has recently become a customer of ours. 

With the capital we received, we are now in the process of doubling our team, and we aim to triple our existing customer base in 2024. Looking ahead, we are already receiving significant interest from impact VCs eager to support us on our journey to becoming the leading provider of load and energy management for charge point operators 

What are some strong opinions you have about leadership, and how do you actually put those into practice in your company?

We believe in scaling our approach of maintaining a very flat organization where decisions are made where they matter most. This approach requires a great deal of trust in our employees, who in turn need to be comfortable with assuming significant responsibility for their tasks. Transitioning from a remote-only setup, we are now moving towards a hybrid model with offices in Denmark and Germany. We aim to preserve our culture of high flexibility regarding employees' preferences for working from home or in the office. 

Where do you see untapped opportunities in the market? What business do you wish someone else would build that would make your job easier?

As e-mobility scales, players in destination and en-route charging will soon realize that achieving profitability is impossible without an advanced Energy Management System (EMS). 

The combination of an immature industry and the need for increasingly complex integrations will underscore the importance of remaining vendor-independent. Ultimately, they will need a single solution, rather than multiple disparate ones, to keep service costs under control. This trend is gradually being accelerated by the growing complexity and scale of the industry. 

We believe that our time is about to come, likely very soon.

Do you know any E-mobility startups that we should feature on Electric Avenue? -> Contact us at [email protected]!

3 Links 🔗

• YOU get a NACS!🔌: Ford CEO Jim Farley posted on X (fka Twitter) this week that Ford would provide NACS adapters FREE OF CHARGE to current owners of Ford F150 Lightning and Mach-E vehicles with native CCS chargeports. Customers will be able to claim one free adapter per VIN. More details to follow. (Link)

• VW finally works with VW🤝: We’ve made jokes about this as far back as December 2022 (Link): The fact that Volkswagen’s ID4 EV has been unable to use Plug&Charge at the Volkswagen-owned Electrify America (EA) network for the past 3 years is quite embarrassing. Now the company finally announced that Model Year 2023 ID4 vehicles will be enabled for Plug&Charge at EA (Link).

• Open Sauce 🍝: We’ve written quite a bit about the increasing importance of Free & Open Source Software (FOSS) in E-mobility:

  • ⚡ Why Open Source Charger Management Software is here to stay!

  • ⚡ Why charging sucks - and what to do about it 😲

  Now, the US Joint Office of Energy and Transportation (JOET) and the Linux Foundation Energy (LFE) have partnered to promote the Open Source project EVerest - an embedded OS for EV charging stations. Check out their recent joint webinar to learn more about the benefits of FOSS and the JOET’s priorities regarding Open Source code implementations of protocols required for US NEVI funding:

Most-clicked link last week: was the link to Electrify America’s 2023 Wrapped Email (Link)

Meme of the Week 🤡

🤣🤣🤣

That's a wrap for this week! Let us know how you feel and leave some feedback (We read every single one of these 🙂 ):

Reader Review of the Week

Selected ⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️ Freakin´ awesome on⚡Getting technical - Electrify America’s 2023 Wrapped 👨‍💻and wrote:

“Another banger from Electric Avenue"

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DISCLAIMER: None of this is financial or tax advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. The Electric Avenue team may hold investments in or may otherwise be affiliated with the companies discussed.