Graduating college is a major achievement for
anyone. But imagine that within a year of
graduating, you received $500,000 in funding for
an idea you came up with in class.
Seriously.
That's what happened to 30 year old Josh Aviv,
founder of SparkCharge.
And his idea is a simple one.
Professor came into class one day, said, you know,
if you want to solve a huge problem for the
world, solve the problem of infrastructure for
electric vehicles.
And he said if you're interested, you know,
meet with me after class. And I was the only
person to show up.
Josh and his economics professor had their
discussion in 2014 and eight years later, lack
of EV charging infrastructure is still
one of the biggest concerns among potential
EV buyers.
According to Autolists.com's annual
Electric Vehicle Survey, range anxiety and
lack of charging stations are among
consumers top worries.
If you wanted to really open the door to have
freedom with the electric vehicle, be able
to drive the electric vehicle virtually
anywhere, you needed a charging system that
could match that experience.
SparkCharge provides on-demand charging for
electric vehicles.
You can select the time, the place, choose your
vehicle, how much range you want, and with the
push of a button, it gets brought to you.
So the same way that you would order food from
Uber Eats or GrubHub, is the same way that you can
now have energy brought to your vehicle.
There's three numbers to look out for in Josh's
story: $4,500, the amount of prize money won
in his first pitch competition.
$500,000, the funding he received from his first
investor. And 1 million, the number of miles that
SparkCharge has delivered to its
customers. Here's how Josh Aviv took a college
idea and turned it into a $110 million company.
For CNBC Make it, I'm Zach Green.
This is Founder Effect.
Growing up in Dallas, Texas, Josh says that
business was always something in the back of
his mind, possibly stemming from his family
background.
My grandfather was an entrepreneur. He ran his
own shipping and logistics company, and at
the time I really didn't know what an entrepreneur
was, right, or what an entrepreneur did.
I didn't even think of him as an entrepreneur.
I just thought, you know, that's his job.
It wasn't really until I started my own business
that I realized that I'd grown up around an
entrepreneur practically in my early childhood.
Josh attended Syracuse
University in New York, where he majored in
economics.
When I arrived on Syracuse, I did not think
I was going to start a business.
So the class was environmental economics.
The professor was Professor Peter Wilcoxen,
and we started talking about the electric
vehicle market and the problems that we were
having with infrastructure now that
we are now starting to see magnified ten times
today, right?
From those conversations went and started SparkCharge.
To raise initial capital for his start-up, Josh
entered Syracuse University's Raymond von
Dran iPrize pitch competition in 2017,
where he won $4,500.
Josh says he was able to raise about $150,000 in
total from other competitions. That same
year, he officially incorporated his new
company.
We needed something that really got our value
proposition through kind of clear just from
hearing the name, right?
So "Spark", meaning electricity, but also
meaning quick, also meaning in a hurry.
"Charge", because that's what we do.
We charge vehicles.
But in order to charge vehicles, Josh would have
to come up with a device to do it.
That product would eventually become
“the Roadie".
When we think about the Roadie, it's comprised of
two parts, right? It's comprised of a charger
and a modular battery, right?
The charger handles the power, plugs into the
car, sends the energy in, and then the
batteries are the energy storage that sends the
energy into the charger that goes into the
vehicle. And so our system is modular, so you
can connect the modular battery blocks together,
kind of like Lego blocks to increase the amount of
range that goes into the vehicle.
We had some very early prototypes that were
super simple but nowhere near what we have now,
right? We really had to go start, build out our
engineering team.
To fund the development of the roadie, Josh found
Boston-based VC firm Point Judith Capital in
2018.
We were introduced the Point Judith Capital
after attending a clean tech conference in New
York City. I think the initial round was about
half a million dollars.
Josh was able to secure an additional $1 million
in funding in 2020 from Mark Cuban and Lori
Greiner when he appeared on a little show called
"Shark Tank".
Do we have a deal?
We got a deal.
We have a deal!
Let's charge this up!
I think some good advice that we've received from
Mark would just be manage your cash flow,
right? I think startups come and go, right, based
off of how well they're able to manage their cash
flow. I think another big one is make sure you
pick the right team, right? So make sure that
you invest in your team and invest in your
culture.
As his funding grew, Josh was able to grow his
business and improve the tech behind the Roadie.
Initial prototype was able to deliver 3 to 5
miles off its battery pack.
And now we have the Roadie V3 and the Roadie
V3 Hybrid. Those are now able to output up to 200
miles at a given time, 200 to 250 miles each.
The Roadie V3 can do about 15 miles every 60
seconds.
As of this year, Spark Charge has raised over
$30 million, which has helped raise the
company's value.
After our most recent funding, it's valued
somewhere around $110 million.
And while the company has not made its revenue
public, Josh says they're on track to bring
in $10 million this year.
The company's main source of income is
through their Currently app, where users can have
a charge delivered to them by putting in their
car's location and the amount of charge needed.
I remember the first time that we actually showed
up to deliver a charge from someone who found
the app, right, and downloaded it and called
for a charge and literally seeing the
light bulb on their face like that "aha" moment
of, "Oh wait, like this can actually be brought
to me." That was a really big "aha" moment
where I was like, "Wow, we're actually on to
something special here."
Currently subscribers pay between $5 and $30 a
month for the service and between $0.51 and
$0.69 per kilowatt hour.
That's about the same cost as filling up a 16
gallon tank once.
We save EV owners and our fleet partners a ton of
money, right? If you think about it, to tow an
electric vehicle, you need to bring a flatbed
tow truck, right?
You then need to tow the vehicle to a charging
station, jump the 12 volt, plug it in and then
sit and wait. With mobile charging, we're
actually able to remove 90% of that.
We can show up, jump the 12 volt, charge it at the
same time, and the vehicle can be on its way
back into service or along its journey.
SparkCharge offers Currently in 121 cities
like L.A., San Francisco and Dallas, Texas.
It's planning on expanding to San Diego,
Phoenix and New York City in the coming year.
Josh says they've already surpassed their
goal of providing 10,000 miles of range to their
customers.
I think we're on track this year to deliver over
a million miles of range to EV owners and to our
fleet partners. Our expansion plans are
really focused on where do electric vehicle
owners need range, where is the infrastructure
really not built up?
Earlier this year, SparkCharge also
partnered with Kia Motors to provide new Kia
EV buyers with two months of complimentary
Currently service in L.A., San Francisco and
San Jose, California.
A lot of the big players, it really enables them
to, A, sell more vehicles and offer a more
convenient charging experience that
traditional charging stations just can't
offer. The convenience, the accessibility, the
ease of use. It means now that they don't have
to worry about a lack of infrastructure.
They don't have to worry about trying to educate
the customer too much on, okay, well, you can
charge here, but you can't charge here, right?
It opens up the door to a seamless EV charging
network that their customers can tap into.
In addition to mobile charging, Spark Charge
sells the Roadie to companies with electric
fleets, saving them the cost of having to build
fixed charging stations at their facilities.
SparkCharge has also developed its own fixed
charging station, the Roadie V3 Hybrid, which
runs wirelessly.
So instead of taking 12 to 24 months to put a
single charging station fixed in the ground, we
can actually install the Roadie V3 Hybrid in under
an hour. And so that means that your
deployment time goes down, your cost goes down
and your infrastructure goes up.
And that means that you can now service more
vehicles in a more cost effective and a more
seamless way.
Under President Biden's Bipartisan Infrastructure
Law, the U.S. is providing states with
$1 billion over the next four years to build more
EV infrastructure, including charging
stations. Josh believes SparkCharge and mobile
charging will play a vital role in the
emerging EV marketplace.
As we see more infrastructure built
throughout the country, that's going to be
probably a 15, 20, 25 year roadmap.
The benefit of mobile charging that we have,
right, is that we can actually grow and scale
faster than those deployments of stationary
chargers. We can be up and running in a city in
under 14 days.
We can blanket that entire city with energy.
And so for us, we really don't see the
infrastructure growth as competition.
We believe that success is focused on the ease of
use of mobile charging.
And any time that you look at whether a
business has been successful or whether
it's been able to scale, as long as that business
can create a more accessible, more
sustainable, more seamless, more scalable
product, typically that is the option that is
chosen. And so for us, the more cities we enter,
the more partners we're able to work with, you
know, the more electric vehicles will be able to
grow in those markets.
And so that's something that we're extremely
excited about.