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⚡No connectivity, no problem - How Heycharge is solving underground apartment charging - E-Mobility Startup Interview

+ Volvo gets Plug & Charge and more..

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Happy Tuesday. Welcome to Electric Avenue, where we give you serious analysis and cheeky EV memes all in one package. It’s a weird combo that actually turns out to be delicious. Call us the peanut-butter-filled pretzel bites of e-mobility newsletters!

Don’t knock it until you try it!

Here’s what we have for you today:

  • The EV Product Community Experiment - why you should join! 🧑‍🔬

  • E-Mobility Startup Interview: No connectivity, no problem - How Heycharge is solving underground apartment charging ⚡

  • 3 Links 🔗

  • Meme of the week 🤡

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Let's dive in!

The EV Product Community Experiment - and why you should join!🧑‍🔬

Hey friends, Janek and Julius here. Thanks to everyone that already filled out the application over the last two weeks - we’ll get back to you soon!

To everyone else:

As some of you know we’ve been working in e-mobility and EV charging since 2016/2018 respectively. And for the majority of that time we’ve held roles in Product Management.

During all those years we’ve gotten enourmous value from exchanges with other folks in similar roles within our small, but fast-growing industry. We’ve also gotten feedback from folks in our readership that get similar value from the topics we cover in our newsletter and our personal takes.

So we’ve been thinking about doing a little experiment: A community for our readers to engage with us, exchange ideas and build connections amongst each other.

To start, we want to keep this community small, focused and invite-only. Our initial focus will be on folks that work in the industry - either as Product Managers, or as founders of startups that are regularly involved in Product Strategy decisions at their companies.

If that sounds like you, get in touch and apply here to join:

We’re looking forward to connect with y’all!

Cheers,

Janek & Julius

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E-Mobility Startup Interview:

Heycharge 🇩🇪🥨🚀

🥳 Today, we are delighted to feature our 3rd E-Mobility Startup Interview (after Flexecharge and Electra). What to expect? 🎯 

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

  • 1st hand insights and their story 🤓

  • Cool products and tech 💡 

Heycharge is a Munich-based startup that recently signed a major deal with MEAG, one of the world's largest asset management companies. A lot of the team, including co-founders Chris and Robert, are readers of Electric Avenue. We sat down with the team and asked them to break down their journey, from the initial opportunity discovery to developing their innovative technology for charging in low- and no-connectivity environments 🙂 

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

Founded in March 2020 (quite a challenging time to start a business!), our founding team includes:

Chris Carde: Formerly with Mercedes-Benz R&D Silicon Valley, Google Munich, and E.ON Deutschland. My most formative years were at Google, where I learned the power of a strong innovation culture and effective collaboration in large organizations.

Dr. Robert Lasowski: Brings a wealth of experience from NTT Data, BMW, SIXT, and ERGO Mobility, specializing in EV charging infrastructure, vehicle infotainment, telematics, usage-based insurance, and car sharing.

Heycharge Founders Chris and Robert

With HeyCharge, operators serving multi-user environments such as apartments and offices can reduce costs by up to 40% and scale their infrastructure twice as fast as our technology reduces the labor hours and skill level required of that labor to install and commission EV charging. At the same time, if that charging is being installed in an underground or other low-coverage environment, our technology enables those chargers to function seamlessly regardless of mobile network coverage!

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

We began with a mission: to provide EV charging for every apartment building in Germany. This was a bold move since early EV adopters rarely lived in apartments. But we envisioned EVs becoming mainstream, and apartment dwellers needing charging solutions.

Our first attempt, using off-the-shelf chargers and public standards like OCPP, didn’t work well. We realized most of our target market had underground parking, where traditional always-connected chargers failed due to poor mobile network coverage. Users couldn't start charging because messages couldn’t pass through the cloud.

This led to HeyCharge 1.0 and our patent-pending SecureCharge technology. SecureCharge replaces the traditional IoT architecture where each charger and each user both need independent internet connections. Instead, SecureCharge leverages user-brought connectivity where the user’s mobile device, running our app, makes the “last-mile” connection to the charger via Bluetooth. This provides seamless user experiences while handling software updates, configurations, telemetry, and reports in the background.

HeyCharge SecureCharge Technology

We then discovered another benefit: cost savings. Our solution reduced operating and capital expenses by up to 40% for multi-user sites, thanks to simpler setups, fewer labor hours, and no need for telco equipment.

Take us through the process of building and launching the first version of your product.

We started off building the bare basics – a true MVP – of a charger + user and tariff management system for EV drivers in multi-family (apartment) buildings. It was an MVP in every sense of the word. The “tariff” system was a text field with a single price to be charged to every user, at every charger, at any time. But even this basic implementation managed to prove a point to us, our customers, and the world: it was truly possible to manage EV chargers and sell electricity even with those chargers offline and disconnected.

As we signed more and larger customers, we naturally outgrew the MVP and have been busy adding features ever since. We’re now a substantial CPO for apartment buildings, offices, and more across Germany - with 100+ sites in our pipeline and new leads every day!

Realizing we didn't want to become large-scale EVSE manufacturers, we also created the SecureCharge Module. This small, integrable unit includes radios, hardware security, and our software, allowing easy integration into any EVSE design and supporting third-party chargers.

Since then, we’ve expanded our offerings to include wireless load management, additional EVSE support through integrations and retrofit adapters, and compatibility with DC fast chargers.

But the REAL level-up in our product was realizing that we shouldn’t just be the CPO – we should supply this technology to other CPOs! And so today we’ve both platformized our own app + management backend – of course powered by our SecureCharge technology – as a SaaS product used by 6 CPOs globally (and growing!). We also built the mobile app piece of our platform into an SDK so that anybody – pure-play CPOs as well as others like hospitality operators, fleet operators, etc. – could build our no-internet, works-anywhere technology into their own apps!

Heycharge SecureCharge Gateway for retrofitting DC chargers

Can you break down the keys to this business model for us? What makes it work? And what do outsiders typically not understand about your business model?

We started as a Charge Point Operator serving buildings with underground parking in Germany. But we’re also a technology supplier to Charge Point Operators globally. In effect, we’ve become a lighthouse customer on our own platform. So, we have to discuss each of these separately:

CPO Business in Germany - our core differentiators are of course the fact that our product works in underground parking in a way that no competitor in Germany can touch, and the fact that we can deliver it at a lower price than anybody else. These are both technology-led advantages and provide a fantastic moat for our business here. That said, our team has a laser-focus on extending the value proposition beyond the core tech, and so we’ve built an offer that’s super-attractive to our core customer segment of real estate asset managers in that it’s extendable charger-by-charger without major reconstruction, and we found a commercial model to split the economic burden between the building operator and tenants in a way that makes everyone happy. We charge the building operators a one-time charge to install our energy metering and distribution infrastructure, at which point we gain an exclusive license to install and operate chargers in the building for the term of the contract. We then offer a rental (Hardware-as-a-Service) + Software-as-a-Service model to the tenants in the building, who pay a combination of a small activation charge plus a monthly fixed fee, plus the cost of energy they’ve consumed. By splitting the burden between the property owner (who pays to enable their building for convenient, easily-extended charging infrastructure, which keeps their property competitive) and the end-users (who pay a small charge just covering the incremental cost of their charger), we find a sweet spot where each stakeholder feels that they’re getting a fair deal.

Our Technology Platform business focuses on enabling Charge Point Operators globally with our unique technology either in a ready-to-use form (we call it the “turnkey platform”) or in an SDK form where our customers can really build their own brand and service around our technology in a white label capacity. We have utilities, EV service providers, DC fast charger manufactures, and even property management companies signed up to offer our products and tech through their respective businesses.

We’re bullish about our future as the early signals from customers – and from the performance of our technology and platform – are strong:

The number one question we get when we submit an offer for a customer site is “how are you so cheap?” Or our favorite: “you need to raise your prices so that people believe that you’re real!”

Our churn to date is, literally, zero. We’ve never lost a customer. That speaks volumes for the user experience and reliability of our product.

Our first pilot site went live in the city of Freising, Germany over two years ago, and we’ve never received a support call. It turns out that if you make a system simpler, it truly becomes more reliable!

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

We’re still small enough that we rely on a blend of tradeshows, word-of-mouth, and outbound outreach. The really gratifying thing is that, compared to even a year ago, we’ve seen a flood of inbound leads who seek us out as a solution to the connectivity problem. This is really validating for us, as just a few short years ago, we spent a lot of time trying to convince both investors and customers that the problem was real!

What platforms/tools are absolutely crucial for running your business? What business do you wish someone else would build that would make your job easier?

That’s a tough one, though there is a cop-out easy answer, which is Google Workspace. I can’t imagine getting 10% of what we achieve done if we had to version documents and email attachments.

I will take this moment to complain about FinOps tools in the German market (where our main operating company is domiciled) – I have yet to find one where it feels like the UX isn’t fighting you and you get a reasonable overview on what’s happening in your company. I’ve seen many startups try (and fail) to crack this nut, but the first one to finally tear down the walled garden for FinOps tools in Germany will make out like a bandit (take my money!!).

Tell us a bit about the upcoming funding round and what you want to achieve with the fresh capital.

We’re presently raising a pre-Series-A round in Q3 2024. We have an epic pipeline and are surrounded by opportunities and demand for our technology, so we’ll use these funds to deliver to customers and grow our KPIs while staying scrappy and preparing for our Series A in early 2025.

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

I had the amazing fortune and opportunity to really learn how to build a bottom-up culture of grassroots innovation and individual enablement from my 7 years at Google. We borrow elements of Google’s culture, generally trying to reinforce principles of:

Transparency and Open Discussion - we hold a biweekly all-hands where the Founders and other leaders provide as much visibility from all corners of the company, and we encourage anybody to stand up and ask hard questions.

Information sharing and collaboration - the amount of time you can spend seeking out information in a large, old-school corporate culture is astounding. If you can encourage your team to organize, share, and update information as a matter of habit and in real-time, as things change, you make your whole organization more efficient by removing that overhead.

Hiring good people. A hire’s ability to learn new things and enthusiasm for taking on new tasks is, over the long run, infinitely more valuable than the skills they bring on day 1. Also, the impact your early hires have on your company’s culture is hard to overstate. You’ll be pressured to hire folks who you feel aren’t a good fit. Ignore your gut at your own peril!

Where can we go to learn more?

If you’re curious about our technology, the company, and our proposition as a supplier of technology to CPOs globally, please visit heycharge.com.

If you own, manage or live/work in a building with underground parking in Germany and would like HeyCharge to come to your building, visit our German site focusing on our operator business at heycharge.de!

  • Starbucks collaborates with Mercedes-Benz ☕️: As part of the collaboration, Mercedes-Benz North America and MN8 Energy will install 400 kW fast charging stations at 100 Starbucks locations along the I-5 corridor on the US West Coast. Starbuck's press release highlights two interesting facts. The locations will be equipped exclusively with Alpitronic’s Hypercharger 400. Mercedes’ first location in the US was equipped with Chargepoint chargers. Second, the chargers will be equipped with NACS cables. We assume that the sites will feature CCS-1 cables as well, even though the announcement only calls out NACS.

  • Volvo gets Plug & Charge 🔌 : Volvo's EX90 is their first vehicle to receive Plug & Charge functionality. The company is following many other OEMs in leveraging Hubject's V2G Root Certificate to communicate with charging stations based on the ISO15118-2 standard. The press release didn't mention if the functionality is exclusive to Volvo's MSP services, which have been operated with Digital Charging Solutions since October last year. Hubject's PnC ecosystem overview also shows Volvo’s subsidiary Polestar with its MSP partner Plugsurfing in the onboarding pipeline. (See our Glossary for MSP and other EV terms explained)

  • Real-Time Renewable Energy Data for EV Charging ⚡️: LichtBlick, decarbon1ze and Granular Energy have teamed up to launch a pilot project that will show EV drivers exactly which renewable energy sources are powering their charging sessions. Currently, certificates of origin (the common way to prove that energy comes from green sources) are managed on an annual basis. However, only parallelization of generation and consumption in the physical electricity system (15-minute intervals in the electricity market) will ensure that charging sessions are powered by green energy. Thus, the pilot aims to show how to bring transparency and trust into the system, which is particularly relevant for companies to account for emissions under the GHG Protocol.

Most-clicked link last week: Was our original post on the IONNA charging joint venture, in relation to the recent investment of Toyota (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⚡Toyota joins IONNA, Battery prices in Free fall, British Petroleum for US EV's and wrote:

“meme game always on point”

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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.

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