⚡ How is the Plug & Charge Rollout going so far?

Happy Monday. This is Electric Avenue, the e-mobility newsletter that's more energizing than a double espresso ☕️. - Ciao from Italy 🇮🇹 

Here’s what we have for you today:

• EV startup funding news 📈

• Plug & Charge Rollout ⏩

• 3 Links 🔗

• Meme of the week 🤡

Let's get into it!

EV Startup Funding News 📈

It's Money Monday 🤑  - this month we've seen three acquisitions of EV Charging startups and more than $87.5M in funding. Here's who secured the bag 💰:

• dcbel secured a $55M Series B funding round for its r16, an integrated Bidirectional DC charger + home energy manager for V2G and V2H.

• Mavel secured Series A funding for its powertrain components used by automotive companies. Among the new investors is NIO Capital. For NIO‘s next-generation vehicle, Mavel will supply key components.

• Electric Era raised an $11.5M Series A for its PowerNode™, a modular fast charging station with a built-in battery to mitigate peak demand fees and avoid costly grid extensions.

• Treehouse secured $10M in funding for its installation as a service for home EV charging stations offering.

• Heliox was acquired by Siemens for its eBus and eTruck fast charging solutions (acquisition subject to customary regulatory approval).

• Charge Amps was acquired for €61M by Chinese NaaS Technology for its AC-charger technology.

• On-charge was acquired by Wirelane for its operations of public AC charging stations. Within the acquisition, Wirelane extended its Series B from 2021 (originally €18M) by another €11M.

To see all E-Mobility companies that raised money in the last months, check out our EV&Charging funding database.

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

Plug & Charge Rollout at CPOs ⏩

What are the least steps it can take to recharge your vehicle at a public charging station? - 2 Steps

1. Plug the cable into the car

   Vehicel is recharging 🪫 → 🔋

2. Plug out

As of today, most EV drivers need an authentication device (e.g. RFID card, App, Credit Card) to start a charging session at a public charge point. Eliminating the authentication device and creating this ideal customer journey is not possible with every car and at every charging station so far. However, there are solutions available to make EV drivers happy and offer this customer experience. Today we want to give you a short overview of recent updates.

Within last week's guest article (⚡Why MSPs must adapt to survive), Michael referenced two alternative approaches - Autocharge and Plug & Charge.

Autocharge, with its known security risks, is a CPO-centric, proprietary solution enabled within the CPO’s backend system. Prominent CPOs that offer Autocharge are Fastned, EnBW, EVgo, and Tesla (might look a bit different as Tesla controls the EV and charge point).

Plug&Charge on the other hand is based on the ISO15118 communication protocol between the electric vehicle and charger. It depends heavily on a well-functioning roaming network and Public Key Infrastructure (PKI). Prominent CPOs that offer Plug & Charge are Electrify America, Ionity, and bp pulse (Aral pulse in DE).

Hubject is a provider of an operational ecosystem with its PKl. The company has been a driving force in the Plug & Charge rollout within the last year. Meanwhile, they also hosted the ICNC, which took place last week where multiple companies announced their PnC support based on the Hubject ecosystem.

• EcoG, a charger operating system provider, announced a plug-and-play solution for chargers that are running the EcoG OS. Plug and Charge is enabled independently from the connected OCPP backend as EcoG established a direct connection with the Certificate Authority (CA), Hubject.

• Mer Germany (CPO) in cooperation with their OCPP-Backend provider Driivz enabled Plug and Charge at Alpitronic Hyperchargers within the Mer network.

• Greenflux, a backend provider for charging stations, published that the plug & charge integration and compatibility test on its software were concluded successfully.

• Finally, we want to reference a helpful overview of the ecosystem by Hubject about players that have officially enabled plug and charge or are in the onboarding process.

3 Links 🔗

• Happy birthday Tesla Supercharging Network 🥳 + more updates on Tesla 📉: Range anxiety never was much of a thing for Tesla drivers due to the excellent Tesla Supercharging network. Tesla celebrated the 10th anniversary of its charging network with a free charging day for Tesla and non-Tesla drivers. Happy birthday to the Supercharger Network, which serves as inspiration and benchmark for many CPOs and EV manufacturers on how to create best-in-class customer experiences. Speaking of, the refreshed Tesla Model 3 (Project Highland) was officially released this week and comes with improved efficiency (→ more range) and overall higher quality within the interior.

• Megawatt Charging Ecosystem 🚚: Ever wondered what’s happening with the electrification of trucks and which companies are involved? Himanshu Bhatt shared a good overview of the megawatt charging ecosystem.

• Hyundai gets serious: Korean auto maker Hyundai/Kia is set to launch its own version of a 350kW DC fast charger in its home market this year. This makes Hyundai one of the few automakers to internally develop a fast charger, the other ones being Tesla, Porsche(since deprecated) and Chinese car makers NIO, Xpeng and GAC-Aion.

Memes of the Week 🤡

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

Reader Review of the Week

Selected ⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️⚡️ Freakin´ awesome on ⚡Why MSPs must adapt to survive and wrote:

“Intriguing analysis! Many thoughts I have also been debating over the years. It will be exciting to see how it plays out."

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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.