XYZ Technology Corp. announced it received a license to deploy its SuLo charging stations across the University of Pittsburgh's campus. The license agreement now nearly doubles the Pittsburgh-based company's footprint across the city, going from 30 stations across its partnering businesses and organizations to 57 following the installation of 27 stations throughout Pitt's campus.
"We're really excited about that," XYZ Technology Co-founder Jiaman Xu said. "We are able to scale, we have enough power station supply to meet the demand, and our ultimate goal is to deploy 500 power stations in Pittsburgh."
For now, Xu said the deployment strategy will focus on neighborhoods like the North Side, Oakland, South Side, Squirrel Hill and downtown, though other parts of the city could see these stations as well over the coming months.
A recent graduate of Pitt, Xu founded SuLo in March 2020 and has since expanded its footprint around the city and now has 31 partnering organizations or businesses in total. SuLo has also emerged into the markets of Boston, Dallas, Houston and Cupertino, California. Xu is one of three co-founders and said the company currently has a total of eight team members.
"People are buying our vision, and we are really happy about it," Xu said.
Each charging station, which Xu said looks similar to a toaster, comes equipped with up to eight rentable fast-charging portable chargers. Xu said the chargers can take a phone from a nearly depleted battery to one that is at 100% capacity in about 35 to 40 minutes. These chargers can be reserved on the SuLo app where users can also see the closest station to them via an interactive map.
Pricing for the hand-sized rentable chargers, which come included with the three most common charging cables needed for portable devices, starts at $1.50 an hour with a cap of $9 for the first day of rental. That cap then incurs an additional $6 for the following day before reaching the final cap of an additional $21 after the third day of rental. At that point, SuLo considers the charger as being purchased by the user who then can keep the product and recharge it with a regular USB charging cable.
Xu said the company is currently open for funding opportunities between $250,000 to $750,000 in convertible notes as it continues its expansion quests.
"We are actually growing faster than expected," Xu said. "We would love to develop Pittsburgh into the smart city via innovative technology, and we would like to gather more young entrepreneurs because we have great schools here; Pitt, Carnegie Mellon University, Chatham University, Duquesne University. That's our goal here."
