What can an EV startup accomplish with $1.5M dollars?
This is the story of how Pulse Energy started and the pivots we did to get where we are today.
Disclaimer: This is not an insight piece about the EV market, instead it’s an insight into Pulse Energy’s journey. I have used the traditional startup cycle graph to represent the different stages we went through in our startup journey.
The beginnings (Initial Enthusiasm)
Pulse Energy started with a mission to solve for EV charging issues that personal electric vehicle users like you and I will have when we purchase an electric vehicle. I used to lease a Tesla Model 3 while working in Boston and I found the experience of EV charging at a Telsa charger to be like MAGIC. I wanted to bring that experience to India and replicate that across all personal electric vehicles not just four wheeler personal EVs.
I partnered with Devang Mistry who at that time had developed a full stack solution at a solar company. It was perfect pairing. He had a knack for excellent UX design and brilliant coding, I knew what problems we needed to solve.
Below is a picture of our first ever brainstorming session at my apartment, we used the window since we never had a whiteboard :)
The personal EV user journey (Reality Sets In)
I sent out a total of 150 emails to VCs, spoke to 12 analysts, even got rejected after an IC meeting [Startups usually don’t get rejected at IC - investor committee meetings, but we did :) ]. Our month over month growth was stagnant and none of the charge point operators wanted to partner with us.
The pivot (Experimenting and Pivoting)
The key problem we faced at that time was that none of our users looked up public charging stations daily. They were using it only once a week or once a month when they go on long drives or across cities. We immediately knew that we cannot make a business with that segment, or at least when the personal 4W EV segment is so low in number in the market.
However, what was surprising is that there was 10Cr worth of EV charging infrastructure already deployed in India, and it was a shock to me that someone would deploy such volumes while personal EV sales were near zero. So I packed my bag and flew to Bangalore and sat in about 4 to 5 charging hubs for entire weeks on end.
I interviewed every driver that visited the charging station - Who are they driving for? What vehicle do they drive? Who asked them to come to this station? etc.
This is when I realized that the commercial EV segment is the one consuming energy from public EV chargers. I immediately started going through my network to get in touch with a commercial fleet operator. That’s where I met Akshay Singhal from Log9.
The Pivot: Akshay loved our value proposition (charger interoperability and aggregation) and he was looking for someone to help solve it. We shook hands, I called Devang and asked him to drop everything he was doing. We pivoted to building our stack ground up for fleet operators.
Success and Funding (Product Starts Working)
As soon as we launched the product, we hit the streets and started selling our product. Everyone was looking for a single solution for charging. Every CPO claimed that they are going to bring everyone into one app, but none of them did. We were the only ones that had a working product with live traffic. Moreover, we actually increased utilization of the charging partners that came over to our platform. The energy transactions on our network were accelerating at a break neck speed. We showed them to Peak XV, and shared our journey. They loved us and we got our first believer.
What can $1.5M help us build? (Scaling + Future)
We have the potential to change how the traditional EV charging ecosystem works today, not just in India but the world too. Here are two macro level objectives Pulse Energy wants to solve over the next one year (without giving away too many details).
Whenever someone decides to buy an EV in India, they should not hesitate about charging (be it public charging or at home charging). We will help solve for this.
Whenever a charge point operator decides to setup a charger, they should not think twice about charger utilization or if they will get their money back. We will help solve for this.
If you are a personal EV owner and/or a Pulse Energy app user, then please feel free to click on the button below to share with us the charging problems you face on a daily basis. We will start working on them.