Imagine you work at a car rental agency or a parcel delivery company and are responsible for a fleet of vehicles. If you switch to EVs, managing your vehicles becomes more complicated due to long charging times and limited available charging points.
Guided Energya French startup that raised $5.2 million from Sequoia Capital and Dynamo Ventures in late 2023, is building a software tool that helps EV fleet operators manage and dispatch charges. The company collects data from vehicles, public and private charging points and uses machine learning to tell you when and where you should charge your vehicles.
“The beauty of the EV ecosystem is that it’s all online. This means we connect both EVs and charging points directly. Where customers already have telematics or surveillance platforms in place, we can integrate with them using APIs on our platform, giving them a single, real-time, unified view of their EV operations,” co-founder and CEO Anant Kapoor told me .
Anant Kapoor previously led product teams working on fleet management software to monitor and reduce emissions. Eric Daoud, the company’s CTO, is a PhD in machine learning from Inria.
Image Credits: Guided Energy
Some of Guided Energy’s clients include Sixt and Addison Lee. Generally, customers have internal charging points. But they often exceed the limit – all the charging stations are already occupied and there is not enough space to add another one.
“Some resort to public billing, while others even bill to employees’ homes, but struggle to integrate these external solutions into their day-to-day operational, reporting or financial workflows,” Kapoor said.
The crux of the matter is that the charging price varies significantly for electric vehicles. For example, charging at home is usually cheap but quite slow. Charging on the motorway is usually much more expensive than other options.
In addition to pricing, a software tool like Guided Energy must take into account the time it will take to put enough power into the battery. Therefore, the distance between the charging point and the location where the vehicle needs to be is also an important factor.
The startup believes it can deliver direct and indirect savings of up to $10,000 per electric vehicle, factoring in both charging prices and operating costs — sending someone to a remote area in a big city can also be expensive. As a result, Guided Energy charges a subscription per vehicle, which is in the line of “€30-40 per vehicle per month”.
Guided Energy already tracks more than 1,000 vehicles on its platform. This number will double in the coming months as the company has already signed contracts with additional customers.
Image Credits: Guided Energy
