Electric Vehicle charging startup Charge+Zone has raised funding of $3 Mn in a pre-series A round led by Venture Catalysts. The round saw participation from Mumbai Angels, Keiretsu Forum and Ramakrishnan Family Office.
Charge+zone was founded in 2018 by Kartikey Hariyani and Pavan Bakeri. The company claims its mobile application provides drivers of electric vehicles with a one-stop solution for issues such as the availability of charging points and pre-booking them.
Founded in 2016, Venture Catalysts invests $250K to $1 Mn in early stage startups that have the potential to create enduring value for over a long period of time.
Kartikey Hariyani, founder & CEO, Charge+Zone said, “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 1 Mn unmanned charging points in the next ten years in India.”
The sheer number of new EV makers sprouting everywhere in the country on a daily basis is encouraging to see. However, mass EV adoption is sometime away. There are reasons. One could be about the reliability or the general charging infrastructure (or the lack of it) in India. In a recent survey conducted by Castrol, conducted on customers, fleet owners as well as auto industry leaders, the factors that affect the very purchase of an EV have been revealed.
This survey last month and was conducted in December last year. One of the main talking points is that in the Indian market, customers are ready to purchase an electric vehicle as early as 2022. Those who buy cars in bulk (fleet owners), around 40 per cent of them, said that they will want a competitor to make the first move.