news

한어Русский языкEnglishFrançaisIndonesianSanskrit日本語DeutschPortuguêsΕλληνικάespañolItalianoSuomalainenLatina

By Li Anqi

Editor: Li Qin

36Kr learned that Pando Electric, an American electric vehicle charging company, completed a pre-seed round of financing of over one million US dollars in June, led by UpHonestCapital, an early-stage investment institution in Silicon Valley. This round of financing will mainly be used for technology research and development and market expansion.

At the end of last year, Pando completed a $600,000 angel round of financing led by Liquid Metal Capital. The company plans to launch a seed round of financing in the second half of this year to accelerate the expansion of the closed-loop charging service for building electric vehicles.

Pando was founded in 2023 and focuses on the field of building electric vehicle charging in the United States. It is committed to providing stable, efficient, and large-scale deployable electric vehicle charging solutions for apartment homes, offices, and other commercial buildings. CEO Aaron Li previously served as a product development executive in Apple's SPG team and NIO; Executive CTO Eric Sidle is the former CTO of ChargePoint, a veteran electric vehicle charging company in the United States. Other team members come from technology companies such as Google and Evercharge.

In 2023, the penetration rate of electric vehicles in the United States will be only 9%. Pando CEO Aaron believes that as the price of electric vehicles decreases and consumers are more willing to buy them, the penetration rate of electric vehicles will grow rapidly in the next few years. Recently, the price of Tesla Model 3 after subsidies has been less than $30,000. The difficulty of charging, especially charging in buildings, has become the biggest bottleneck affecting users' choice of electric vehicles.

According to Pando's research, more than 80% of electric vehicle charging in the United States is completed at home. People are unwilling to spend a lot of time queuing up at public fast charging piles, but are willing to pay for the convenient home charging experience. However, the lack of charging facilities in most buildings is a huge pain point.

Most apartment buildings were not designed and built with the large-scale popularization of trams in mind, resulting in a huge gap in power infrastructure. Upgrading the power distribution of apartment buildings is also a huge investment. "Generally, expanding the power capacity of an apartment building requires hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars and a cycle of 1-3 years," Aaron said.

Aaron told 36Kr that the vast majority of home charging solutions on the market still use the technical ideas of public charging stations. There are few charging piles, inflexible deployment, and high maintenance costs. They cannot fundamentally solve the huge contradiction between the deployment needs of building charging and the infrastructure gap.

Pando is targeting this user pain point and industry gap. Pando can provide a complete solution: simple hardware, intelligent software, and closed-loop services. "We want to build the Apple of the electric vehicle charging industry," Aaron added.

Pando's self-developed 10kW smart electric vehicle charging socket eliminates the need for easily damaged charging gun cables, greatly reducing hardware and maintenance costs. The compact product form factor allows for large-scale deployment in apartment parking lots with limited space.

At the software level, Pando has developed an adaptive load management system that can manage the power usage of buildings in a unified, real-time and stable manner. Without increasing power distribution, the overall charging capacity is increased by more than 10 times. Currently, Pando has applied for a patent for this solution system.

In addition, Pando also noticed that building charging involves many issues such as design and installation, operation and maintenance, regulations and subsidies, etc. For this reason, Pando has built a closed-loop service ecosystem Pando ONE, and maintains good strategic partnerships with local labor unions, universities, governments, funds, real estate agencies, etc. in the United States to ensure the smooth implementation of the project.

For example, Pando completed the largest apartment building trolley charging project in San Mateo County, deploying 90 devices in a single project. Since the beginning of the year, Pando has received orders for thousands of devices in the US market.

Aaron estimates that about a quarter of the U.S. population lives in apartment buildings; the market is expected to reach $30 billion in the next 5-8 years. Pando's plan is to expand rapidly through a light asset model, make profits through a software service model, and occupy 10% of the market share in four years.