POD Point, a UK-based tech company that produces electric vehicle charging solutions, has recently launched an equity crowdfunding campaign/bond through Crowdcube to raise £1.5 million. The initiative(s) comes nearly a year since the company’s debut on Seedrs.
POD Point has designed and manufactured electric vehicle (EV) charge points that are able to be used in the home and for public use. The charge points are connected to the startup’s cloud-based management system, which enables recurring revenue from the network.
The company shared:
“We believe electric vehicle charging is a ‘top up’ model. You ‘top up’ your electric car’s battery whenever you park for an hour or more. With our ‘top up’ model your EV is full of electricity and ready to go whenever you need it. We think this is a great improvement for drivers as they no longer have to divert from their route to power their vehicles. Imagine if your petrol car was full of petrol every time you got in it – how often would you need to visit a petrol station? Not very often!
“This drives our mission to put an electric vehicle charge point everywhere you park for an hour or more. It is a big goal, and although we’re already well on our way, we still need to install thousands and thousands more POD Points across the UK!”
Explaining its progress, POD Point noted:
“On the back of the rapidly growing electric vehicle industry we’ve already shipped over 20,000 charge points, supplied over 10 million miles of electric vehicle motoring and have a public network of hundreds of charging bays.
“We are scaling at a prestigious rate, going from £1.9m to £4.5m to £6.5m turnover in the last couple of years. We’ve even posted a net profit for the past two! Our rapid growth has earned us a spot in this year’s Sunday Times Tech Track 100 list of the fastest growing tech companies in the UK.
“We supply our charge points to customers of many major vehicle brands including Tesla Motors and lease companies such as Lex Autolease. Our destination POD Points can be found in key public locations like Sainsbury’s supermarkets and Southern Rail train stations. We also count major brands among our workplace customers that include O2 Telefonica.
“In 2014 we raised £1.5m in a record-breaking crowdfund which we believe was (at the time) the second largest private company equity fund raise the UK had ever seen. We went on to develop two new charging solutions; the first was the next generation of our public charging network, POD Point Open Charge. We acted on customer feedback and built a new range of charge points that are ultra reliable and simple to use via an intuitve app. We’ve already rolled out lots of Open Charge POD Points across the UK and had fantastic feedback from drivers so far.
“The second thing we developed and launched was our Corporate charging solution; it utilizes the same hardware as Open Charge but also includes a back office management system. This allows hosts to centrally manage their charging estate and track data like CO2 savings and electricity usage.”
In regards to where the Crowdcube funds are going towards, the company added:
“We’re aiming to raise £1.5m through this equity crowdfunding round. Of that, £1m is going straight into building up our sales and marketing function – essentially to allow us to scale up quicker, and win the key accounts and relationships we need to roll out more of our charge points.”
The remainder of the money will go towards:
£250k to build POD Point Array, which is a new product specifically aimed at customers who are rapidly scaling their charge point estate and need an intelligent system capable of locally managing it.- £250k to continue iterating the company’s already awesome charge point management system. This is the system that runs the entire POD Point Network. POD Point stated it has an amazing pipeline of improvements to implement which will act as key selling points, helping it to expand our customer base, as well as improving usability for customers.
Since its launch, the Crowdcube initiative has raised over £550,000. It is set to close at the beginning of December.
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