ElectroTempo, an Arlington company that uses analytics to project electric vehicle use and demand for charging stations, has raised $4 million in a seed round to expand its team, refine its software and move into slightly larger space.
The round, announced Wednesday, was led by Buoyant Ventures, a Chicago investment firm focused on startups combating climate change, with participation from Zebox, a French accelerator and incubator for logistics startups whose U.S. headquarters is in Crystal City. The new funding comes amid a surge in electric vehicle (EV) sales across the U.S., aided in part by tax breaks offered to consumers through last year's Inflation Reduction Act and at a time when federal and state governments are setting ambitious goals for EV adoption.
ElectroTempo, founded in 2020, assembles such data as EV sales, EV users' driving habits and even wait times at charging stations to model and project EV use over a given day, week, month or year. Clients, which could be utilities, building owners and companies with car or truck fleets, use this data to determine how many charging stations to build and in what areas or solve for issues such as long charging lines. It's betting, for example, that trucking companies moving toward EV adoption could use such data to help drivers plan their routes around charging availability and wait times.
The company was co-founded by CEO Ann Xu and COO Patrick Finch, who met during their time working at the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy. At ARPA-E, the duo worked on developing energy-saving and pollution-reducing strategies for the transportation sector. It was there they realized how little data was available around EV infrastructure despite widespread evidence that the electrification of U.S. transportation sector was crucial to reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
ElectroTempo's prospects for growth received a big boost last year when President Joe Biden signed into law the Inflation Reduction Act, committing billions of dollars to develop batteries used in EVs and build out a charging infrastructure while also offering tax rebates of up to $7,500 to consumers who purchase electric vehicles. The rebate kicked in at the start of this year and runs through 2032. In the second quarter, nearly 300,000 EVs were sold in the U.S., an all-time high for a single quarter and up 49% from the second quarter of 2022, according to data from Cox Automotive.
The Biden administration wants EVs to account for half of all new car sales by 2023, and at least seven states have adopted the so-called Advanced Clean Truck Act that will eventually cap sales of fossil-fuel burning vehicles. In California, for example, 77% of medium-duty trucks sold in the state will need to be electric by 2035.
“Someone who was thinking about buying electric trucks, maybe three to four years from now is now considering doing it today because some of these incentives have short time horizons,” said Finch. “The policies like the Advanced Clean Truck Act will kick in and you're going to start getting fined if you don't get into compliance around those time horizons.”
ElectroTempo intends to use the funds to expand its sales and product development staff as it looks to make its data available to more potential clients. Finch said the company booked between $500,000 and $600,000 in revenue last year. He declined to provide figures for 2023 but said that sales are running well ahead of last year's pace.
ElectroTempo is also moving its roughly 10-person team into an Industrious co-working space in Arlington's Ballston neighborhood next week. The company has been housed at Zebox's incubator space in Crystal City.