Charging your electric vehicle in public places can be the best or worst.
The EV driver can charge and get back to the road in a smooth 20-minute period, but you can also encounter broken chargers, non-responsive touchscreens and blocked food stalls.
It can be a headache for everyday consumers. For fleets or boarding share drivers, broken chargers will lose money.
These complaints prompt Ashwin Diaz and JJ Rayner to urge Uber to quit their jobs, where they impress the vehicle of the ride-share driver and launch Presto, an app that directs fleet drivers to the best chargers. He led the effort.
“Between from the Uber background, we think there is a dynamic market that helps make everything smoother by matching diverse demand with diverse supply,” says Raynor. That might mean that price-sensitive drivers will tweak them so they wait 30 minutes for the cheaper charger to open, while directing faster, more reliable but more expensive food stalls. yeah.
Presto recently garnered a $15 million seed round led by Union Square Ventures. The round also included investments from joint ventures, jet streams and powerhouse ventures.
The team starts with the fleet as they drive miles.
“Uber drivers who drive 40 hours a week are things that need to be appropriate for EVs if they need to be electrified quickly and impacted,” Dias, CEO of the startup, told TechCrunch.
The duo lobbyed Uber to address the driver app issue, but realized that one company really couldn’t solve it.
That’s because of the surge in companies setting up and running Eving’s charging stalls.
“In the US, charging is becoming more and more fragmented,” Rayner said. Last year, almost 60% of all new DC fast chargers in the US came from over 40 different networks. “We went to someone I’ve never heard of from three or four major players,” she said.
Both sides of the equation feel the pain of this fragmentation.
The fleet will benefit from direct connections by charging the network’s software, but charging networks don’t want to support APIs for dozens or hundreds of customers. Conversely, the fleet does not need to integrate with more and more charging networks.
Presto’s software allows both parties to connect. It provides fleet and charging networks to one partner to work together and access with more customers. This is a classic platform play.
“In a way, we consider ourselves stripes, we think of it as a transaction layer for charging,” Diaz said.
Startups offer their own apps and APIs that companies can integrate with. You can also process payments.
This combination allows Presto to provide a variety of data, bolster the machine learning recommendation engine, telling drivers which chargers to use and where the network will direct the maintenance crew. For example, the network reports that the charger is online, but charging sessions initiated through Presto fail. Presto can move the driver away from its stall and report the issue to the network.
Car rental companies are adopting Presto’s platform early, including Hertz, Avis and Zipcar, Dias said. Uber drivers also use the app, which alerts the network that offers discounted charging.
Other fleets, such as delivery companies, have adopted apps, even if the depot has a charger, Dias said. “There may be times when the depot’s charger doesn’t work or there may be more vehicles than the charger,” he said.
However, Presto’s main goal is to promote API integration. This is to encourage fleets to add startup recommendations within their own apps and dashboards. “I don’t think you want consumers to download another app,” Dias said.
Raynor said the company was approached by major automakers, but for now it focuses on the fleet. As someone who shares a bad charging experience, I hope it changes soon.
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