Orange Charger thinks a $750 outlet will solve EV charging for apartment dwellers | TechCrunch

Nicholas Johnson founded a company because he lost a bet.

Johnson was having dinner with some investors in Lit, the street congestion management company he co-founded. As the dinner conversation progressed, it settled on EV charging and the best way to bring it into multi-family housing.

Apartment dwellers who own EVs are often left with two less-than-ideal options: public charger Or plugging your vehicles into a regular 120-volt outlet, which adds about 3 to 5 miles of range per hour. Johnson was not interested in the problem, so one of the people present at the dinner made him a proposal.

“One of our investors bet me driving to and from work, which was about 48 miles away at the time, not charging my EV at more than a Level 1 outlet for six months,” Johnson told TechCrunch. Will do.” “He said, ‘If you don’t need to plug in to a DC fast charger except on weekend road trips, I win the bet and you have to build a prototype for me.’ He won the bet and I built a prototype for him.

That prototype will become the basis of a new startup, orange charger, where Johnson is now CEO. The company, which sells 240-volt smart outlets among other products to homeowners, has raised an oversubscribed seed round of $6.5 million, Orange Charger exclusively told TechCrunch. The round was led by Munich Re Ventures and Climactic, with participation from Baukunst, Crowe Holdings, Lincoln Property Ventures and Space Cadet Ventures.

Charging has long been the intractable problem of electric vehicles, and few EV drivers are as familiar with it as apartment dwellers, many of whom are not guaranteed a place to charge at night. Today, most EV charging is done at home, but most multi-family residences do not have chargers or even outlets at every parking space. If EVs are to gain mass adoption in the US, the 40 million people living in multi-family housing will need a more convenient way to juice up.

Lots of startups have emerged to solve the problem, and most of them focus on selling and installing enough charging equipment to serve one percent of tenants. Still, this can be an expensive proposition, often costing a few thousand dollars per stall. Unless there are enough tenants with EVs, landlords are hesitant to install them. “When you’re dealing with like 100 or 200 parking spots in a multifamily, you really don’t want to lay 200 cables across a parking lot, especially when maybe 10 to 20 are being used the first day,” Johnson said. ” But at the same time, tenants may be hesitant to purchase an EV without a convenient location to charge.

Orange Charger believes it’s a better solution, and it’s betting homeowners will love it. Instead of installing a bunch of Level 2 chargers that provide enough electrons for several days of daily driving, Orange Charger is offering 240-volt outlets that are packed with smarts. EV owners can plug in the portable Level 2 charger that often comes with their vehicle and activate the outlet using an app.

The Orange charger’s Level 2 outlets supply less power than a commercial unit, but still enough to add about 150 miles of range overnight. Lower power consumption means electricians can run thinner gauge wire, which Johnson said costs about a third less. “That savings per foot really adds up quickly.”

The outlet design has been tested to withstand being plugged in and out at least 10,000 times. “We didn’t want everyone to have the experience of plugging a plug into an outlet on an airplane or hotel and having it immediately break.” Johnson said.

The Orange Charger sells a Level 2-capable outlet for $750, not including installation, which Johnson called the company’s “core product.” It also offers a Level 1-capable outlet for $600 and a full-freight Level 2 charger for $2,000.

Inside each of Orange Charger’s products is a circuit board that acts as a node on its mesh network, which can run over Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, and each outlet will still be on if the connection to the Internet is lost. Can work, sending any session data to the cloud when connectivity is restored. “Imagine I can’t charge for five hours because someone cut the wrong cable on our street,” Johnson said. “We wanted to build something that was strong.” He said, so far, the company has been able to start charging sessions in more than 99% of all attempts.