A secretive new Seattle-area startup called Juicer Energy is aiming to turn residential properties into public EV charging stations.
Juicer’s leaders have decades of experience founding billion-dollar startups and leading teams at tech giants.
GeekWire spotted a new SEC filing posted this week that revealed a new investment round for the company, which incorporated this past August.
The company’s website details a “charge anywhere” experience powered by EV chargers that are installed at apartments and houses. Juicer says it can “enable onsite EV charging 10X cheaper than existing solutions” and help residential real estate owners generate incremental revenue.
Juicer CEO Nick Huzar previously founded and led used goods marketplace OfferUp. Huzar launched OfferUp in 2011 and stepped down as CEO in 2021.
Huzar declined to comment when contacted by GeekWire on Wednesday.
The company’s chairman is Jon Gelsey, the former CEO of Auth0 and Xnor.ai. Gelsey left Auth0 in 2017; the Seattle-area identity authentication startup was acquired by Okta for $6.5 billion in 2022. He left Xnor.ai, a machine learning startup out of Seattle, after its acquisition to Apple in 2020.
Amit Mital, a longtime Microsoft leader and former CTO of Symantec, is Juicer’s chief operating officer. Mital launched a Seattle startup studio called Kernel Labs in 2015 and was most recently at the White House as a special assistant to the president and a senior director at the National Security Council.
Juicer CTO Goutham Sukumar was CEO of email security startup NitroDesk, which was acquired by Symantec in 2014. He replaced Mital as Kernel Labs’ CEO in 2021, and departed a year later.
Juicer has an app that lets EV owners find a place to charge. They are instructed to scan a QR code on the outside of a Juicer energy box, which can offer Level 1, 2, and 3 charging.
“Electric vehicle charging today is broken,” the company says in its app description. “It’s expensive to install, hard to find a place to charge, and often not available when you do finally find a charging station. Our vision is to enable electric vehicle owners to charge anywhere by building the most available, accessible, and affordable EV charging network on the planet.”
The lack of sufficient charging infrastructure is seen as a roadblock to electric vehicle adoption. Many EV owners can’t afford to install charging stations at their homes or live in apartment buildings that may not have access to chargers.
“As EV penetration accelerates, rapid charging station infrastructure issues have emerged as a tangible problem.,” Goldman Sachs said in a May report. “Several automakers have said that concerns about driving range and charging infrastructure are increasing. These issues may lead consumers to have second thoughts about buying an EV.”
Home charging is the most common way of charging electric cars, according to the International Energy Association.
“The availability of home charging varies substantially between regions and is linked to differences in urban, suburban and rural populations, as well as income bracket,” IEA wrote in a recent report. “In dense cities, where most people live in multi-unit dwellings, access to home charging is more limited and EV owners rely more heavily on public charging.”
The EV share of the total U.S. vehicle market was 7.6% in 2023, up from 5.9% a year earlier. Growth in the EV market cooled in 2023 but sales this year are promising for some brands.
Earlier this year the Biden administration announced $46.5 million for 30 projects to boost EV charging. The administration has called for a national network of 500,000 chargers by 2030.
The SEC filing indicates that Juicer has raised at least $5 million in initial investment.
Other EV charging startups in the Seattle region include Electric Era, which installs fast-charging stations in retail parking lots, and Autev, which is developing robots that autonomously charge EVs.
https://ift.tt/SzKNZ0W July 10, 2024 at 04:20PM GeekWire
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