Guided Energy helps EV fleet managers optimize battery charging

Imagine you work for a car rental agency or package delivery company and you’re in charge of a fleet of vehicles. If you are switching to EV vehicles, managing your vehicles becomes more complicated due to long charging times and limited charging point availability.

Guided Energy, a French startup that raised $5.2 million from Sequoia Capital and Dynamo Ventures in late 2023, is building a software tool that will help EV fleet operators in terms of charge management and dispatch. The company collects data from vehicles, public and private charging points and uses machine learning to tell you when and where to charge your vehicles.

“The beauty of the EV ecosystem is that it is all online. This means, we connect directly to both the EV and the charging point. Where customers already have telematics or supervision platforms, we can integrate them into our platform using APIs, giving them a single, real-time, integrated view of their EV operations,” said Co-Founder and CEO Anant Kapoor told me.

Anant Kapoor previously led product teams working on fleet management software to track and cut emissions. The company’s CTO, Eric Daoud, has a PhD in Machine Learning from Inaria.

Image Credit: directed energy

Some of Guided Energy’s customers include Sixt and Edison Lee. Customers usually have in-house charging points. But they often exceed the limit – all the charging stations are already full and there is not enough space to add another one.

“Some resort to public charging while others even charge to employees’ homes, but struggle to integrate these external solutions into their daily operational, reporting or finance workflows,” Kapur said.

The crux of the issue is that charging prices for EV vehicles vary considerably. For example, charging at home is usually cheap but quite slow. Charging on the highway is usually much more expensive than other options.

In addition to pricing, software tools like Guided Energy also need to take into account the time it takes to put enough energy into the battery. Therefore the distance between the charging point and the location where the vehicle needs to be is also an important factor.

The startup believes it could offer direct and indirect savings of up to $10,000 per electric vehicle when you take into account both charging prices and operating costs — even without sending one to a remote area of ​​a big city. Can be expensive. As a result, Guided Energy charges a subscription fee per vehicle, which amounts to “€30-40 per vehicle per month”.

Guided Energy already tracks more than 1,000 vehicles on its platform. This number should double in the next few months as the company has already signed contracts with additional customers.

Image Credit: directed energy