India’s Exponent Energy may have found the secret to 15 min rapid EV charging – TechCrunch

Bangalore-based Exponent Power may need give you a solution to ship 15-minute speedy charging for electrical autos. The startup, which simply raised a $13 million Sequence A, depends on a mixture of its proprietary battery pack and charging infrastructure to realize such a feat.

Exponent Power’s enterprise mannequin is geared in direction of OEMs constructing industrial EVs for fleet functions. Ideally, the corporate works with the OEM to combine its battery pack, or e^pack, that may then be charged rapidly by way of Exponent’s community of chargers, or e^pumps. Earlier this month, Exponent introduced its first partnership with Altigreen, an Indian electrical cargo automobile producer, launching the Exponent-enabled Altigreen neEV HD, a three-wheeler that each corporations say will be totally charged, from 0% to 100%, in quarter-hour.

The rub is that the battery pack solely fees that rapidly when it’s being charged on Exponent’s charging infrastructure — if the e^pack is being charged at a regular charging station, it’ll take about 60 minutes, in line with the corporate. Likewise, the e^pumps don’t ship the identical speedy cost to all EVs, so the 2 should be scaled side-by-side. That is how Exponent hopes to monetize its vitality choices. It would earn income from each the sale of the battery pack to OEMs and the charging on a recurring foundation, in line with Arun Vinayak, Exponent’s co-founder and CEO.

For comparability, Exponent’s enterprise mannequin is a considerably related mannequin to Gogoro, the Taiwanese firm that works with OEMs to combine its swappable batteries into their electrical two-wheelers whereas concurrently constructing out swapping stations across the nation.

Except for the monetization logic of together with the battery pack and charging infrastructure as a package deal deal, Vinayak says it simply is smart to take action from a know-how perspective.

“15-min speedy charging is a two-sided drawback,” mentioned Vinayak. “It’s not simply the battery but in addition the charger. The e^pump delivers 600A of present to the e^pack (15x trade commonplace) whereas managing particular person cell traits together with thermals to make sure security, lengthy battery life and efficiency consistency even at 50 levels Celsius. Since our know-how is current on each side, we’re in a position to handle the circulation of vitality much more effectively, safely and quickly.”

Constructing out such a community would require funds, which is the place Exponent’s Sequence A is available in. The spherical, which was led by Lightspeed with participation from YourNest VC, 3one4 Capital and AdvantEdge VC, can be used to scale up the e^pump community to 100 location factors in every metropolis Exponent expands into, beginning with Bengaluru and finally making its solution to New Delhi, in line with Vinayak. The corporate additionally goals to deploy 2,000 Exponent-enabled autos as a part of its partnership with Altigreen.

Vinayak mentioned the e^pack is scalable throughout a number of type elements, and Exponent Power is at the moment within the engineering section for partnerships in different segments, particularly three-wheeled passenger autos and four-wheeled cargo autos.

“Our major focus is industrial autos and our major buyer is anybody operating a fleet, from a single automobile proprietor to an aggregator of 1000s of autos,” Vinayak instructed TechCrunch by way of e mail. “In India, industrial autos have the very best per automobile vitality use-age. (Constitutes 10% of autos, however consumes 70% of our on-road vitality). This represents a extremely concentrated marketplace for an vitality firm like us because the section is already satisfied of switching to electrical as EVs drive higher than their diesel counterparts. Nevertheless, the bottleneck for adoption is vitality, as gradual charging (3 to six hours) impacts operations. Subsequently clients are compelled to go for giant batteries with quick life thereby making proudly owning the automobile costly.”