Australian EV fleet management start-up announces $US10 million funding round to push into US

Australian electric fleet managing software company Evenergi has announced the first close in a $US10 million funding round through US investor Aligned Climate Capital.

It is a huge step into the US market for the Australian-based company, which has already worked with companies around Australia and through the European market since it’s launch in 2016.

“We have a software platform that helps to plan, optimise, and manage the transition to zero emission fleets,” Daniel Hilson, Founder and CEO of Evenergi told TheDriven.

“It was pretty clear to us that the US was the biggest addressable market – it’s about 50% of all complex fleet vehicles … so we knew that if we wanted to really get scale we needed to roll out there.”

The $US10 million will focus on the growth of Evenergi in North America, specifically growing the team, software research and development and marketing. The bulk of the team will remain located in Australia.

Aligned Climate Capital CEO Peter Davidson has former experience as executive Director of the Loan Programs Office at the US Department of Energy where he oversaw over US $30 billion portfolio of green energy and advanced vehicle loans.

“With billions of dollars flowing from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act to states and cities to decarbonise heavy transportation, clean fleet optimisation is an important piece of the puzzle,” he said.

“Evenergi is well-positioned to be a market leader in fleet decarbonisation thanks to its one-stop shop for planning and managing fleets, international track record, and hardware agnostic solution.”

Evenergi works with transit companies, governments, utility companies and logistic operators to best plan their transition to electric vehicles.

The software does this by creating a ‘digital twin’ of the network of vehicles, including the topography, routes and any other information requires.

“We can give them a very accurate indication of on the day that they really need the power – their worst day – what’s going to happen – will it work?” Hilson told TheDriven.

“We did the mapping of the whole New South Wales Government network – 8,000 vehicles – to give them comfort that when they did their budget, there’s a very accurate predictive model that tells them ‘yeah, this will work’.”

The software – called BetterFleet – has supported the decarbonisation of over 60,000 vehicles worldwide in more than 200 fleets, including major fleets in New York, Seattle, Detroit, Honolulu, Sydney, Melbourne and London.

Once the planning stage has been done, the software and digital twin also works to ensure the fleet runs smoothly throughout day to day management.

“That digital twin is really what sets us apart and attracted this capital,” Hilson told TheDriven.

“End to end integration of planning and management, no one ever managed to build that, so that’s really our special sauce.”

Hilson says that there’s plenty of things Australia can learn from international markets like the US and UK as we decarbonise more of our transport, suggesting that planning and avoiding ‘big glamour projects’ is key.

“The key thing is in those markets is they’ve already had a lot of failures. They’ve gone through the cycle,” he said.

“There’s a real temptation in early days to do some big glamour projects, which, it’s great in some ways, but it can also be quite risky. And if you do a bad one, all the naysayers point to it.”