As electric vehicles become ubiquitous, the opportunities to charge them are going to become equally in-demand. Indeed, companies are raising billions to buy up and develop real estate to make charging easy and convenient.
Europe's HeyCharge, a Munich, Germany-based startup, has developed an easy way to open up even more real estate for EV charging -- they're going underground.
The business has developed a new kind of billing and power management software for underground EV charging that doesn't require an internet connection.
They're selling their tech to utilities, property managers and real estate developers to deploy electric vehicle charging and power management services that won't break the bank, will allow for monetary charging of the charges, and won't overload electric systems.
That kind of functionality attracted some high profile tech investors and the investment arm of automaker, BMW, BMW i Ventures. Other folks funding the company include Statkraft Ventures, First Momentum Ventures, and Vireo Ventures as well as some heavy-hitting angels.
The company's premise is that since 46% of Europe's population and over half of Germans live in apartment buildings, they're going to need charging infrastructure in their homes to be able to easily and conveniently juice up.
"In the not-too-distant future, when limited availability of gas powered vehicles force this adoption, this population would bear a disproportionate time and economic burden of having to seek out public charging infrastructure to keep their cars powered," the company wrote in a blog post.
Other charging tech companies are trying to brig charging stations quite literally underground by embedding charging infrastructure in roadways.
These are companies like Trojan Energy and Urban Electric, two businesses developing charging stations that are either flush with roadways or retractable to recede into the ground.
Bringing more charging options to more places is a huge, huge business. The Australian electric vehicle charging company Tritium will soon have a public offering on US markets that will value the company at $1.2 billion. Last November, the European charging company Ionity raised the equivalent of $803 million from investors for its own charging network plans.
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