Ignite Startups: How ChargeMate Is Fixing EV Charging Reliability with AI with Brad Crist | Ep275

**Brad Crist** (0:00)
I think there's a lot to automate the enterprise. Like beyond these kind of vertical wedges support, we're now seeing opportunities to get into automating sales, installation, commissioning, as well as some of the operations and maintenance. So I think like looking at broader functions and capabilities that can be automated, where AI moves next beyond like call centers and customer support being the low-hanging fruit. And I think in our industry, seeing AI as this sort of like integration layer, operating layer, that can help bridge gaps between disparate systems. And what does that look like now when you're interacting with lots of different assets?
That's pretty interesting to us.

**Brian Bell** (0:57)
Hey, everyone, welcome back to the Ignite Podcast. Today, we're thrilled to have Brad Christ on the mic. He is the co-founder and CEO of ChargeMate, an AI platform tackling one of the biggest bottlenecks in EV adoption, unreliable charging infrastructure and broken driver experiences. Prior to ChargeMate, Brad spent over a decade in climate tech and helped scale EV charging networks at Volta, from hundreds to thousands of stations globally. Thanks for coming on, Brad.

**Brad Crist** (1:19)
Thanks for having me, Brian. Great to be here.

**Brian Bell** (1:21)
Yeah, it's good to see you again. Would love to get your origin story. What's your background for the audience?

**Brad Crist** (1:26)
Absolutely.
So as you introduced us, we spent a lot of time working in the energy industry. I started my career at Accenture with utility clients before moving into EVs and EV charging at startups like Faraday Future, Volta, and Spring Free EV. And I was a patient early adopter and early reservation holder of a Rivian, which I was excited then when it finally came out to take my partnered friends on road trips, thinking I would impress them with this luxury electric car. And it seemed like every time we visited a public charger, there was some hang up. I was downloading a new mobile app to start a charge on a foreign network. We were troubleshooting a slow charger, reporting damage, or wound up in the middle of nowhere. And I had been charging electric cars for quite a while, but maybe too patient to some of the challenges that exist for the mainstream driver. And that road trip really exposed the challenges for us. So we focused on solving for the discrepancy between uptime, charging assets look like they're online, and then the actual experience drivers have is very different, and more than 20% of attempts fail. So that's what we're after fixing.

**Brian Bell** (2:33)
That's crazy. I mean, one out of five attempts fail. And I love this visceral story of your brand new shiny Rivian, you know, and like you're driving around, and it's an R1S, you know, the SUV.

**Brad Crist** (2:45)
That's right.

**Brian Bell** (2:45)
So it's a luxury SUV, right? It's like a $100,000 car, and you pull up to some charging station, you know, you're down to 20%, 30%.
You know, like, I got to charge. And one out of five times, that's not going to work. And everybody, I think anybody listening who has a non-Tesla, anything, an EV that doesn't start with a letter T, has experienced this problem. And even me, like, I had my first EV was an Audi. I had that little A3, and I experienced this problem so much. And I was so happy to finally get a Tesla. You don't have that problem, but what percentage of EVs out there are non-Teslas now?

**Brad Crist** (3:18)
Great question. Tesla has about 40, 50% of the market. Yeah, so half. Shrinking, yeah.
And we've actually seen the Tesla experience is starting to get worse as they open to non-Tesla vehicles. There's also something interesting happening where they're franchising Tesla for third parties. So we're really curious what that means from a quality perspective. You've got a lot of other smaller hosts using Tesla equipment with a lot of other non-Tesla vehicles.

**Brian Bell** (3:44)
I'm guessing if you're a Tesla owner and you pull up and I see a bunch of Rivians parked in all the spots, I'd be pretty, pretty mad.

**Brad Crist** (3:50)
Yeah, there's a little bit of a, this is ours, like loyalty to the brand. And so there's some locations that are open to non- like multiple vehicles, others that are Tesla only, which adds a little bit of wrinkle on like, well, where can I visit?

**Brian Bell** (4:05)
Yeah. And so what is it about how ChargeMate works? So we get the problem, right? One out of five charging experiences fail initially. So that's a hair on fire problem, right? For both the ED owner, but also the various charging infrastructure providers. And then you have the story of like having to download an app. Every time you stop to charge like a new app, a new like credit card and like, oh, like Chase now wants to make sure it's actually my credit card and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So maybe you could talk through like how ChargeMate is solving that. And yeah, some of the facts and figures behind that.