Charge+Zone noted that its plans to scale and work towards building one million unmanned charging points in India
Charge+Zone, an electric vehicle (EV) charging startup, has rasied $3 million in pre-series A round of funding. The round was led by Venture Catalysts and saw participation from institutions including Keiretsu Forum, Mumbai Angels and Ramakrishnan Family Office.
“The investment by Venture Catalysts and Mumbai Angels, as well as other family offices, represents the biggest vote of confidence at this growth-stage of our journey. We shall leverage the capital infusion to scale our operations towards early 2021 deployment plans and to keep us motivated as we work towards building one million unmanned charging points in the next ten years in India,” noted Kartikey Hariyani, founder & CEO, Charge+Zone.
The startup was founded by Kartikey Hariyani and Pavan Bakeri in 2018. It is into providing services including info on availability of charging points and pre-booking them using a mobile app. Charge+Zone, as it informed, caters to more than 500 cars on a daily basis and has a network of more than 100 charging points across seven cities.
With the present and projected level of EV penetration in the country, a report by Avendus Capital projects that EVs in India could represent an Rs 500 billion opportunity by 2025. The current Covid-19 environment, as per the report, is expected to accelerate the rate of adoption of EVs in the medium term as customers look for environment friendly and cost-effective personal mobility solutions, and also because online commerce is fast becoming the norm, with a focus on delivery of everything.
Two and three-wheelers will lead the electrification movement in India in the medium term. Avendus Capital expect nine per cent penetration by FY25 in the two-wheeler segment.
“With the right macro environment, the number can further go up to 16 per cent. It is expected that this segment will grow to be Rs 120 billion by FY25. E-rick has also emerged as a large market in India in a very short time frame. A large part of this market is still unorganized and based on Lead Acid batteries. However, this market is expected to rapidly shift to Li-ion and by FY25, 40 per cent of the e-Rick market is expected to be Li-ion based,” read the report.
