Building the Infrastructure for an Electric Future
We’re sitting on the precipice of a galactic change in the mobility space. We’ve grown accustomed to surveying daily gas prices, inhaling exhaust from traffic in our major cities and listening to the rev of engines from our internal combustion engine vehicles. The world has had enough. Europe has already made the shift and the US is about to endure serious growing pains.
While Chargepoint, Blink, EVGo, Volta and others have all made headlines over the last few years as they were early manufacturers and providers of electric vehicle charging infrastructure, Electric vehicle charging infrastructure is still in the first inning of its maturation. Electric Vehicle car ownership in the US is ~2% yet the major automakers like Ford and GM have announced EV only-production by 2035, Hertz just put in the largest order of electric vehicles ever with its 100,000 car order from Tesla and the US government is pushing hard on this transition from ICE to EV. President Joe Biden set a target for 50 Percent of New Car Sales to be EVs by 2030. We can also expects further voluntary targets for the sale of EVs, plug-in hybrids, and hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles from even more global manufacturers.
The question though remains, are YOU ready to go full electric? Most people are not for a few reasons, mainly cost and charging inadequacy. Unlike an internal combustion engine vehicle that fuels up at a gas station, electric vehicles will charge up in places where the driver has permitted access to a power source for a longer period of time. Similar to charging your phone, you will charge your car at home, at the office or at the grocery store on a regular basis. With that in mind, there is an entire new set of features that will come with the modernization of ‘fuel ups.’ Each of those use cases (office, home, apartment, retail) have unique needs. For example, how do you ensure 100% reliability of the chargers in an underground garage? How do you reserve a parking space that has a level 2 charger (that might require a few hours worth of charge) when there are only a few available? How do you charge for energy usage such that the property owner doesn’t bear the added cost of utility? These problems are different than the gas station model of high velocity volume transactions. With these new challenges, we at LPC needed a partner who was innovating around this and building for our use case.
Introducing Xeal Energy- A purpose built electric vehicle charging infrastructure and protocol company. Why do I say protocol? Because unlike the other charging companies, we believe Xeal is the gateway into the future of edge computing IoT without the reliance on a centralized network. So while we at LPC Ventures not only have found our electric vehicle charging infrastructure partner for our buildings, they might have unlocked an even bigger opportunity in bringing the API to bear that will allow other edge devices (smart washing machines, smart access control, smart visitor management, etc.) to connect and share information around transactions and permission, without having to speak to a central network. Why that’s incredibly important for electric vehicles is because you need 100% reliability when you’re attempting to charge a car whether you’re underground with no cell reception, in the desert or in the mountains and the wifi connection is spotty. A non-networked solution for a critical piece of infrastructure will lead to reliable outcomes, a better experience and a happy driver.
We’re incredibly excited to announce LPC Ventures’ investment in Xeal alongside a world-class set of investors in ArcTern, Moderne Ventures, Los Angeles Clean Incubator, Harrison Street, Hunt Companies and more.
Here is more about the investment from the Techcrunch announcement.