EV Charging Startups Electrify The Built World VC Market

Demand for plugin electric vehicles has skyrocketed since the pandemic, with annual global sales volume for EVs seeing more than 6x growth since 2019, representing a compounded annual growth rate of 44.6% – going from 2.2M units in 2019 to an anticipated 13.9M units in 2023 (Telsa expected to account for 13% of the 2023 market).

The ostensible decade of digital pull-forward we experienced during the 10 months of economic lockdowns in 2020 coupled with the existential threat of mortality catalyzed a revitalized sustainable focus toward a healthier more sustainable planet. Elon Musk and his Telsa empire, an empire that nearly defaulted in 2019, proved to the world that the technology and secular demand required to efficiently scale (attain the economies of that scale) a global EV enterprise had finally become viable.

Despite the exploding global demand for electric vehicles, the critical infrastructure required to support this EV boom remains in its infancy, and tenacious entrepreneurs are rushing to fill this capital-infused economic gap – the International Energy Association (IEA) projects we’ll have 350 million EVs on the road by 2030, and only 1.7 million public charging stations (most of which are slow-charging stations, which aren't going to cut it in the years ahead).

Since the beginning of July, the built world venture market has seen 8 global investments into early-stage EV charging systems, for an aggregate of $104.9M in VC inflows. These deals were diverse in the stage of development and country of origin, with July’s EV charging investments spanning from Pre-Seed to Series B across 6 different nations (Germany, Switzerland, Ireland, the US, the UK, and the Netherlands), respectively.

Next-generations of electric vehicle charging stations are riding the climate tech tidal wave, we've seen in the past 3 years, and have been increasingly addressing the core issue of clean energy sourcing & distribution. This niche also has the benefit of the latest infrastructure-focused incentives/grants in the US and public mandates globally targeting net-zero emissions.