EV charging for apartment buildings is finally here!
Accelerace have invested in Elby, a company that gives private apartment complexes the ability to install EV charging points directly into their facades.
Elby was founded with a desire to accelerate the green transition of personal transportation. Many might perceive electric vehicle charging infrastructure as solved. And it is indeed solved on highways with fast chargers and in garages with charging boxes. But what about cities? In cities, we have charging stations that take 8-12 months to install, cost millions, require extensive groundwork, grid modifications, are subject to procurement rules, owned by large energy companies, is inconvenient for the majority of users and put an incompatible strain on our shared electrical grid. 12% of global CO2 emissions come from personal transportation, so we urgently need a solution that can be quickly rolled out. Not only to meet the growing demand (e.g. 80% of cars sold in Denmark in December were electric) but also to enable city residents to actually switch to electric vehicles.
The vision of Elby is crafted by Lars Køhler, who identified urban personal transportation as a critical bottleneck in the green transition.
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There is no doubt, that with our need to change to an electrical fleet, and with the increase in EVs, we need many more charging points. However, building this infrastructure in the cities is extremely challenging. Elby has reinvented public charging to overcome these challenges.” – Peter Marculans, Venture Partner.
Their solution places cities and EV users at the centre. Elby have developed a charger embedded directly into the walls of ordinary apartment buildings, with a cable channel discreetly milled into the pavement, safely guiding the cable across the sidewalk without obstructing pedestrians. This allows them to install a charging point 10 times faster and 5 times cheaper than existing charging station solutions. Because the charger is installed in city walls, the solution is driven by people – and Elby therefore share the charger’s earnings with residents who own the building. Finally, connecting the charger to the building’s electrical grid is also better for our shared grid as it utilises existing capacity instead of adding new load. In this way, for the first time ever, they’re giving EV owners of the cities access to home charging and even providing non-car owners a strong financial incentive to support the green transition.
As part of the round is also a strong team of angel investors, and Elby will use the investment to validate their playbook for citywide deployment. This includes installing numerous chargers in apartment buildings and maturing elements of their supply chain, product offerings, and partnerships. Most importantly, they want to prove that residents—EV owners and non-car-owners alike—will embrace the solution. Once the playbook version 1.0 is established, they are ready to scale rapidly.
“For us, there is no doubt that the timing is perfect. The number of sold EVs are increasing all the time, and we need to extend our infrastructure.” – Peter Marculans, Venture Partner.