Bangalore-based Exponent Vitality might need provide you with a approach to ship 15-minute fast charging for electrical autos. The startup, which simply raised a $13 million Sequence A, depends on a mix of its proprietary battery pack and charging infrastructure to attain such a feat.
Exponent Vitality’s enterprise mannequin is geared in direction of OEMs constructing industrial EVs for fleet functions. Ideally, the corporate works with the OEM to combine its battery pack, or e^pack, that may then be charged rapidly by way of Exponent’s community of chargers, or e^pumps. Earlier this month, Exponent introduced its first partnership with Altigreen, an Indian electrical cargo automobile producer, launching the Exponent-enabled Altigreen neEV HD, a three-wheeler that each firms say may be totally charged, from 0% to 100%, in quarter-hour.
The rub is that the battery pack solely expenses that rapidly when it’s being charged on Exponent’s charging infrastructure — if the e^pack is being charged at a typical charging station, it’ll take about 60 minutes, in line with the corporate. Likewise, the e^pumps don’t ship the identical fast cost to all EVs, so the 2 have to be scaled side-by-side. That is how Exponent hopes to monetize its vitality choices. It is going to earn income from each the sale of the battery pack to OEMs and the charging on a recurring foundation, in line with Arun Vinayak, Exponent’s co-founder and CEO.
For comparability, Exponent’s enterprise mannequin is a considerably related mannequin to Gogoro, the Taiwanese firm that works with OEMs to combine its swappable batteries into their electrical two-wheelers whereas concurrently constructing out swapping stations across the nation.
Other than the monetization logic of together with the battery pack and charging infrastructure as a bundle deal, Vinayak says it simply is sensible to take action from a expertise perspective.
“15-min fast charging is a two-sided downside,” mentioned Vinayak. “It’s not simply the battery but in addition the charger. The e^pump delivers 600A of present to the e^pack (15x business commonplace) whereas managing particular person cell traits together with thermals to make sure security, lengthy battery life and efficiency consistency even at 50 levels Celsius. Since our expertise is current on each side, we’re capable of handle the movement of vitality much more effectively, safely and quickly.”
Constructing out such a community would require funds, which is the place Exponent’s Sequence A is available in. The spherical, which was led by Lightspeed with participation from YourNest VC, 3one4 Capital and AdvantEdge VC, will likely be used to scale up the e^pump community to 100 location factors in every metropolis Exponent expands into, beginning with Bengaluru and ultimately making its approach to New Delhi, in line with Vinayak. The corporate additionally goals to deploy 2,000 Exponent-enabled autos as a part of its partnership with Altigreen.
Vinayak mentioned the e^pack is scalable throughout a number of kind elements, and Exponent Vitality is at present within the engineering part for partnerships in different segments, particularly three-wheeled passenger autos and four-wheeled cargo autos.
“Our major focus is industrial autos and our major buyer is anybody working a fleet, from a single automobile proprietor to an aggregator of 1000s of autos,” Vinayak advised DailyTech by way of e mail. “In India, industrial autos have the best per automobile vitality use-age. (Constitutes 10% of autos, however consumes 70% of our on-road vitality). This represents a extremely concentrated marketplace for an vitality firm like us because the phase is already satisfied of switching to electrical as EVs drive higher than their diesel counterparts. Nonetheless, the bottleneck for adoption is vitality, as sluggish charging (3 to six hours) impacts operations. Subsequently clients are pressured to go for massive batteries with brief life thereby making proudly owning the automobile costly.”