Graduating college is a
major achievement for anyone. But imagine that
within a year of graduating, you received
$500,000 in funding for an idea you came up with
in class. Seriously. That's what happened to
30 year old Josh Aviv, founder of SparkCharge. And his idea is a simple
one. Professor came into class
one day, said, you know, if you want to solve a
huge problem for the world, solve the problem
of infrastructure for electric vehicles. And he said if you're
interested, you know, meet with me after
class. And I was the only person to show up. Josh and his economics
professor had their discussion in 2014 and
eight years later, lack of EV charging
infrastructure is still one of the biggest
concerns among potential EV buyers. According to
Autolists.com's annual Electric Vehicle
Survey, range anxiety and lack of charging
stations are among consumers top worries. If you wanted to really
open the door to have freedom with the
electric vehicle, be able to drive the electric
vehicle virtually anywhere, you needed a
charging system that could match that
experience. SparkCharge provides
on-demand charging for electric vehicles. You can select the time,
the place, choose your vehicle, how much range
you want, and with the push of a button, it
gets brought to you. So the same way that you
would order food from Uber Eats or GrubHub, is
the same way that you can now have energy brought
to your vehicle. There's three numbers to
look out for in Josh's story: $4,500, the
amount of prize money won in his first pitch
competition. $500,000, the funding he
received from his first investor. And 1 million,
the number of miles that SparkCharge has
delivered to its customers. Here's how
Josh Aviv took a college idea and turned it into
a $110 million company. For CNBC Make it, I'm
Zach Green. This is Founder Effect. Growing up in Dallas,
Texas, Josh says that business was always
something in the back of his mind, possibly
stemming from his family background. My grandfather was an
entrepreneur. He ran his own shipping and
logistics company, and at the time I really didn't
know what an entrepreneur was, right, or what an
entrepreneur did. I didn't even think of
him as an entrepreneur. I just thought, you
know, that's his job. It wasn't really until I
started my own business that I realized that I'd
grown up around an entrepreneur practically
in my early childhood. Josh attended Syracuse University in New York,
where he majored in economics. When I arrived on
Syracuse, I did not think I was going to start a
business. So the class was
environmental economics. The professor was
Professor Peter Wilcoxen, and we started talking
about the electric vehicle market and the
problems that we were having with
infrastructure now that we are now starting to
see magnified ten times today, right? From those conversations
went and started SparkCharge. To raise initial capital
for his start-up, Josh entered Syracuse
University's Raymond von Dran iPrize pitch
competition in 2017, where he won $4,500. Josh says he was able to
raise about $150,000 in total from other
competitions. That same year, he officially
incorporated his new company. We needed something that
really got our value proposition through kind
of clear just from hearing the name, right? So "Spark", meaning
electricity, but also meaning quick, also
meaning in a hurry. "Charge", because that's
what we do. We charge vehicles. But in order to charge
vehicles, Josh would have to come up with a device
to do it. That product would
eventually become “the Roadie". When we think about the
Roadie, it's comprised of two parts, right? It's
comprised of a charger and a modular battery,
right? The charger handles the
power, plugs into the car, sends the energy
in, and then the batteries are the energy
storage that sends the energy into the charger
that goes into the vehicle. And so our
system is modular, so you can connect the modular
battery blocks together, kind of like Lego blocks
to increase the amount of range that goes into the
vehicle. We had some very early
prototypes that were super simple but nowhere
near what we have now, right? We really had to
go start, build out our engineering team. To fund the development
of the roadie, Josh found Boston-based VC firm
Point Judith Capital in 2018. We were introduced the
Point Judith Capital after attending a clean
tech conference in New York City. I think the
initial round was about half a million dollars. Josh was able to secure
an additional $1 million in funding in 2020 from
Mark Cuban and Lori Greiner when he appeared
on a little show called "Shark Tank". Do we have a deal? We got a deal. We have a deal! Let's charge this up! I think some good advice
that we've received from Mark would just be
manage your cash flow, right? I think startups
come and go, right, based off of how well they're
able to manage their cash flow. I think another
big one is make sure you pick the right team,
right? So make sure that you invest in your team
and invest in your culture. As his funding grew, Josh
was able to grow his business and improve the
tech behind the Roadie. Initial prototype was
able to deliver 3 to 5 miles off its battery
pack. And now we have the
Roadie V3 and the Roadie V3 Hybrid. Those are now
able to output up to 200 miles at a given time,
200 to 250 miles each. The Roadie V3 can do
about 15 miles every 60 seconds. As of this year, Spark
Charge has raised over $30 million, which has
helped raise the company's value. After our most recent
funding, it's valued somewhere around $110
million. And while the company has
not made its revenue public, Josh says
they're on track to bring in $10 million this
year. The company's main
source of income is through their Currently
app, where users can have a charge delivered to
them by putting in their car's location and the
amount of charge needed. I remember the first time
that we actually showed up to deliver a charge
from someone who found the app, right, and
downloaded it and called for a charge and
literally seeing the light bulb on their face
like that "aha" moment of, "Oh wait, like this
can actually be brought to me." That was a
really big "aha" moment where I was like, "Wow,
we're actually on to something special here." Currently subscribers pay
between $5 and $30 a month for the service
and between $0.51 and $0.69 per kilowatt hour. That's about the same
cost as filling up a 16 gallon tank once. We save EV owners and our
fleet partners a ton of money, right? If you
think about it, to tow an electric vehicle, you
need to bring a flatbed tow truck, right? You then need to tow the
vehicle to a charging station, jump the 12
volt, plug it in and then sit and wait. With
mobile charging, we're actually able to remove
90% of that. We can show up, jump the
12 volt, charge it at the same time, and the
vehicle can be on its way back into service or
along its journey. SparkCharge offers
Currently in 121 cities like L.A., San Francisco
and Dallas, Texas. It's planning on
expanding to San Diego, Phoenix and New York
City in the coming year. Josh says they've
already surpassed their goal of providing 10,000
miles of range to their customers. I think we're on track
this year to deliver over a million miles of range
to EV owners and to our fleet partners. Our
expansion plans are really focused on where
do electric vehicle owners need range, where
is the infrastructure really not built up? Earlier this year,
SparkCharge also partnered with Kia
Motors to provide new Kia EV buyers with two
months of complimentary Currently service in
L.A., San Francisco and San Jose, California. A lot of the big players,
it really enables them to, A, sell more
vehicles and offer a more convenient charging
experience that traditional charging
stations just can't offer. The convenience,
the accessibility, the ease of use. It means
now that they don't have to worry about a lack of
infrastructure. They don't have to worry
about trying to educate the customer too much
on, okay, well, you can charge here, but you
can't charge here, right? It opens up the door to
a seamless EV charging network that their
customers can tap into. In addition to mobile
charging, Spark Charge sells the Roadie to
companies with electric fleets, saving them the
cost of having to build fixed charging stations
at their facilities. SparkCharge has also
developed its own fixed charging station, the
Roadie V3 Hybrid, which runs wirelessly. So instead of taking 12
to 24 months to put a single charging station
fixed in the ground, we can actually install the
Roadie V3 Hybrid in under an hour. And so that
means that your deployment time goes
down, your cost goes down and your infrastructure
goes up. And that means that you
can now service more vehicles in a more cost
effective and a more seamless way. Under President Biden's
Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the U.S. is
providing states with $1 billion over the next
four years to build more EV infrastructure,
including charging stations. Josh believes
SparkCharge and mobile charging will play a
vital role in the emerging EV marketplace. As we see more
infrastructure built throughout the country,
that's going to be probably a 15, 20, 25
year roadmap. The benefit of mobile
charging that we have, right, is that we can
actually grow and scale faster than those
deployments of stationary chargers. We can be up
and running in a city in under 14 days. We can blanket that
entire city with energy. And so for us, we really
don't see the infrastructure growth as
competition. We believe that success
is focused on the ease of use of mobile charging. And any time that you
look at whether a business has been
successful or whether it's been able to scale,
as long as that business can create a more
accessible, more sustainable, more
seamless, more scalable product, typically that
is the option that is chosen. And so for us,
the more cities we enter, the more partners we're
able to work with, you know, the more electric
vehicles will be able to grow in those markets. And so that's something
that we're extremely excited about.
