The charge of an electric vehicle to the public can be the best time or the worst moments.
An EV guide can be charged and returned to the street in a smooth 20 minutes, but they may also encounter broken chargers, non -responding touch screens and blocked benches, which can make for a disappointing experience.
It can be a headache for everyday consumers. For fleet drivers or rideshare, a broken charger is lost money.
These disappointments prompted Ashwin Dias and JJ Raynor to abandon their jobs in Uber, where they led attempts to electrify rideshare drivers and start QuicklyAn application that shows fleet guides to the best chargers.
“By coming from a Uber background, we believe that there is a dynamic market where we can help make everything smoother, corresponding to a different demand with a different supply,” Raynor said. This may mean that prices sensitive will wait 30 minutes to open a cheaper charger, while guiding time -sensitive drivers in faster and more reliable but more expensive benches.
Presto recently set a $ 15 million seed round led by Union Square Ventures, the company told TechCrunch exclusively. The round also included investments from related businesses, Jetstream and Powerhouse Ventures.
The team starts with fleets, partly because they drive so many miles.
“Uber drivers, driving 40 hours a week, are the ones who have to be in an EV right if we need to electrify us quickly and have an impact,” said Dias, the chief executive of the start on TechCrunch.
The twin put pressure on Uber to address the issue in implementing the driver, but realized that he couldn’t really be solved by a company.
This is partly due to the proliferation of companies that install and perform EV charging benches.
“Charging is becoming more and more fragmented in the US,” Raynor said. Last year, almost 60% of all new DC Fast chargers in the US come from more than 40 different networks. “We went from three or four great players to people we have never heard,” he said.
Both sides of the equation feel the pain of this fragmentation.
The fleets will benefit from connecting directly to network charging software, but billing networks do not want to support an API for dozens or hundreds of customers. On the other hand, fleets do not want to be integrated with an increasing number of charging networks.
Presto’s software is something that both sides can connect. It provides fleets and charging networks to a partner to work together and access more customers – a classic platform game.
“With some senses, we consider ourselves as a stripe, as a mattress for charging,” Dias said.
The start offers its own application and API, with which companies can be integrated. It can also handle payments.
The combination gives Presto a series of data to supply the machine learning engine, telling drivers which chargers to use and where networks should direct their maintenance crews. For example, let’s say a network states that a charger is online, but a charging session that started through Presto fails. Presto can drive drivers away from this kiosk and report the problem in the network.
Car rental companies have the first adopted Presto platform, including Hertz, Avis and Zipcar, Dias said. Uber guides also use the application, which alerts them to networks that offer a reduced charge.
Other fleets such as delivery companies adopt the application, Dias said, even if they have chargers in their warehouses. “Sometimes chargers on Depot do not work or there are more vehicles than chargers,” he said.
Presto’s main goal is to lead the API integration, however, to encourage fleets to add the start -up recommendations to their own applications and controls. “I don’t think we want consumers to have another application to download,” Dias said.
Raynor said the company has been approached by large automakers, but is currently focusing on fleets. As someone who had his share of bad billing experiences, I hope it will change soon.
