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In the first months of the Covid-19 pandemic, Jeffrey Prosserman decided to purchase an electric vehicle to get around the city. At the time he had a 2-year-old son, Max, and wasn’t comfortable bringing him on mass transit. But he still wanted a sustainable way of traveling.
An electric vehicle seemed like a sensible decision until it came to juicing up the car’s battery. Prosserman was living in Carroll Gardens at the time and didn’t have access to a private garage. So he would go on what he called “charging missions” several neighborhoods away, or even to New Jersey, to find chargers.
“It literally made no sense to have an EV back in 2020 in New York City. You could count the amount of charging [stations] on one hand,” said Prosserman. “Now there’s a little more, but it’s still very much a charging desert.”
Climate crisis protests at the time had inspired Prosserman to exit his role at Samsung as the director of innovation and enter Columbia University’s sustainability management masters program. He soon began exploring ways to make vehicle charging easier for city dwellers, and the idea for what would become Voltpost was born.
Prosserman co-founded the company with Joern Vicari, Voltpost’s chief product officer, whom he first collaborated with while at Samsung, and with Luke Mairo, Voltpost’s chief operating officer, who served as the president of the Columbia University Environmental Entrepreneurs student group in the masters program Prosserman attended.
Prosserman, who serves as chief executive, and Voltpost’s now 20 employees have spent the past three years focused on developing charging technology that repurposes infrastructure already connected to the power grid and that’s plentiful on sidewalks: lampposts.
Cities are historically tough places for drivers to embrace electric vehicles because many residents lack access to a private garage where they can have a charger installed. Building out chargers for the curbside or in parking lots is tricky because they have to tap into the power grid, which often means expensive projects to cut trenches into streets and sidewalks.
Voltpost works around the problem by tapping into power already coursing through lampposts. This means, Prosserman said, that Voltpost can install a charger in one to two hours at a reduced cost by avoiding construction or the lengthy permit process needed for power upgrades. The electricity used for charging is reported to the utility or to public and private organizations that are hosting a charging project.
The concept quickly drew investor interest, with a preseed round of fundraising in 2021 and a seed round that raised a combined $5 million, said Prosserman. Voltpost’s backers include Exelon, the largest utility in the U.S.; German energy giant RWE; and early-stage venture capital firms such as Hillside Ventures, Climate Capital and Twynam Funds Management.
The company’s post-funding valuation is $13.6 million as of May 2023, according to Pitchbook; Voltpost says its valuation is higher but would not share the number.
To date, Voltpost has tested its chargers in small pilot projects in New York City in 2022 and in Detroit in 2023. Just last month the company announced the commercial availability of its sleek, modular system that encases streetlights and retrofits them into at least two and up to four charging ports. Users can access the chargers through an app; they pay Voltpost a charging fee whose rate depends on the region’s utility.
A bonus to the design of Voltpost’s charging hub is that it can accommodate other services a private partner or municipality may want, such as adding wireless internet, traffic or air-quality sensors or even screens for ads, said Aditi Desai, Voltpost’s director of partnerships.
“I like to think of ourselves as more than just a charger but really a platform that we can license to cities and companies to provide them with data that’s relevant to them,” said Desai. “That’s us also being able to future-proof our product.”
The company is looking to generate revenue both through charging fees and contracts for private and public partnerships (for example, a building’s private parking lot or one for a municipal fleet). Prosserman said the startup is in talks with “several dozen” enterprise partners, including real estate developers, private parking lot owners, universities and others. But for the time being the company’s leadership says it’s focused on deploying as many chargers as possible, with plans to deploy in New York, Chicago and Detroit later this year.
“Really the mission is to decarbonize mobility by democratizing EV charging access,” said Desai, “and that means putting these chargers up where people need them most.”
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Caroline Spivack , 2024-05-15 21:19:09
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