Nectar

Accelerating EV adoption by addressing challenges with charging infrastructure

The idea

I started this journey by talking to a lot of friends in the real estate market. EV adoption is rising, and most people don’t live in single-family homes, but charging infrastructure in apartment buildings and condos was not keeping up. First, parking is incredibly expensive to build in new developments, and adding EV charging only makes it worse. Second, most existing parking is underground, and retrofitting garages is also expensive. There are additional challenges underground with internet access, the electrical system, layout, and permitting. 

Initial idea -- mobile batteries in parking lots: I saw that autonomous robots were progressing quickly up the usability ladder. What if instead of wiring multiple stalls to charge EVs, you could have a robot -- basically a battery on wheels -- that could roll around underground garages and recharge people’s EVs? Most people in urban areas don’t actually drive that much, so they don’t need a full charge every night. They just need a top-up. 

We landed an LOI (letter of Intent) for a mobile charging solution from one of the largest real estate asset managers and jumped right into building. Product development proved challenging, and we later found that it was both bad market timing and not a sufficiently high-priority problem (More in the “Challenges” section).

First pivot - batteries for commercial fleets: We started talking to people in sectors where EV adoption was happening rapidly. One area that stood out was last-mile delivery. There was a real push from customers, regulators, and investors for companies to start delivering in a “net zero” way and electrify fleets. Another sector was the rental car space. That’s a business with high turnover, where vehicles come in and out quickly, and they don’t have time to wait for charging. How do you add more chargers without upgrading the whole facility? That’s where we thought a mobile charging system could help. You could move charging units around based on demand and use them to backfill peak usage.

So we pivoted toward commercial fleet use cases, and traction picked up right away. Everyone we talked to said they needed a solution like this. Something wild we learned is that when delivery companies started adopting electric vehicles to hit ESG targets or comply with regulations, they began buying diesel generators to charge those EVs. Literally charging “net zero” vehicles with diesel! Why? Because they didn’t have enough chargers, or they ordered too many vehicles and couldn’t charge them all fast enough. Sometimes someone would return a vehicle at night and it would need to be charged by 8 a.m. for the next route, and their infrastructure just couldn’t keep up. Diesel generators were the easiest way to stay on schedule.

We focused on California, Massachusetts, and New York, where policy and customer demand were driving EV adoption. Most of the fleet operators we spoke with were smaller players, often subcontractors or regional delivery services operating on thin margins. While big brands like FedEx were interested, we didn’t prioritize our resources on pursuing them because of the long sales cycle.

It was exciting to be landing LOIs! But we made the mistake of chasing early revenue without first building a product that truly worked. Now that we were designing for full charges and not quick top-ups, the battery systems had to be weatherproof and reliable, and we didn’t anticipate how challenging that was. 

Second pivot - EV fleet management: We did one last pivot into software. We kept hearing about companies electrifying their fleets but managing them poorly (e.g. buying too many EVs that they could not use). There was no platform that helped operators plan out their EV rollout. We wanted to build a system where you could input data on your existing fleet: the types of vehicles, their routes, the preferences of the customers on those routes, the weight of the cargo, and how much electricity you had access to at your depot, and then figure out  where the lowest-hanging fruit is -- for example - which vehicles should I electrify first?

Maybe it’s the ones with the shortest routes. Or the ones that carry the lightest loads. Then you could layer in more nuance. Things like temperature (since cold weather affects range), elevation (because hills impact battery performance) and degradation (since a three-year-old battery doesn’t perform the same as a new one). We started looking at how we could layer these factors into route planning.

This last idea, a software platform for fleet transition planning, was probably the best one we had. But by the time we landed on it, we didn’t have the energy to keep grinding. We could have tried to raise more, and maybe we could have pulled it off, but we didn’t have the conviction yet. So we shut down.

Competitors / Substitutes

Robots for parking charging: Kiwi Charge, EV Safe Charge

Last mile EV charging: Moxion was one of the leading competitors in offering large, mobile battery units - they were especially successful with film sets and construction sites. Their pitch targeted companies like Amazon and Netflix, who have on-location film shoots that traditionally rely on massive diesel generators to power kitchens, lighting, and equipment. These setups created problems with noise, smell, and emissions, and Moxion aimed to solve that with silent, emissions-free battery power. 

They raised around $100 million and were seen as a leader in the space. Toward the end of their run, they also tried expanding into the last-mile delivery segment, which was seeing similar electrification pressures. We heard that Moxion struggled with product quality -- the product reportedly didn’t perform well enough in real-world settings, and Moxion eventually went bankrupt. It’s unclear if they gained meaningful traction in the last-mile space before folding.

There were also other companies in the portable battery space using older technologies, but many of them have now failed too. A lot of people saw the opportunity but underestimated how hard it was to execute.

If I were to guess who might win this category long-term, I’d say it's likely to be either Tesla or companies that currently dominate the diesel generator market. These incumbents already have the customer base and understand the operational needs of construction, logistics, and industrial customers. For them, adding batteries to their product line and figuring out the electronics is a slow, manageable evolution, not a risky leap. The winning solution doesn’t need to be pretty or packed with smart software. It just needs to be reliable, low-cost, and functional — a basic system with a cheap battery and minimal complexity that gets the job done.

EV fleet management software: This space was more crowded, with several players gaining traction. Competitors like Flipturn, Geotab, Guided Energy (a French startup backed by Sequoia) were seeing some success. While more companies had spotted the opportunity (especially in Europe and increasingly in the U.S.) there still seemed to be room for each to carve out their own niche.

Amount raised

$500,000 pre-seed

Duration

March 2022 to Feb 2024

Team size

5 at peak

What went well

Customer Discovery and Business Development

We did a great job talking to customers. I have a product background so my approach is to understand the problem deeply, end-to-end. I didn’t try to push anything onto the customer. I had conversations that didn’t just stop at “charging is tough” but about when exactly does it become a problem? Why are certain parts hard? It’s about educating yourself enough on the customer’s industry so you could speak their language in a compelling way even as an outsider. You want to show that you’ve done the work to understand, but also stay humble enough to ask lots of questions. That approach really helped us land conversations and get early traction with people who were the visionary type willing to take a risk on something new.

Just as important is knowing where not to spend your time. Some people might show interest but you have to develop a gut feeling (or maybe more of an analytical sense) for whether they are truly going to move forward. 

Intellectual honesty

I was also pretty intellectually honest with our team and our investors. I didn’t shy away from hard conversations, even when things were messy. I think that actually played a big role in me landing my next role at Aire Labs. One of the angel investors in that company had also invested in us, and when we talked afterward, he said that while he didn’t agree with every decision I made, my transparency and the way I handled tough calls stood out to him.

Challenges and what you'd do differently

Team expertise

My co-founder had a background in robotics, but we couldn't find anyone that had the necessary electrical engineering skills to help us stack the problem and see around corners. We brought in electrical engineering contractors, but they weren’t really incentivized to find novel solutions. So we started cobbling a prototype of the robots for mobile charging ourselves.

Technical challenges

To build a working model for parking lot charging, we used all off-the-shelf parts: EcoFlow camping batteries, a standard EV charger, and a jerry-rigged setup to charge and discharge them like real EVs. We strung the batteries together and got it working, but it was brute force. We even bought this warehouse-style flatbed forklift to haul the batteries around and encased the batteries in metal so it didn’t look sketchy. One charge took about an hour, and each battery could top up maybe three or four cars. But driving the battery around and operating the system was too inefficient — it was like trying to build an Airbnb where someone has to call and manually book each stay. And what do you do while the batteries are charging? If we had more electrical engineering experience we might have gone straight to fast charging and getting top-ups in 15 minutes instead of one hour, which would’ve made the model more realistic. 

Even basic infrastructure was a problem — underground garages don’t have Wi-Fi. We joked we could’ve started a whole second business just solving that. Other product enablement issues like getting data on the state of charge and managing bookings added more friction.

In hindsight, while the robotic element was part of the long-term vision, it was not necessary for the MVP. We just needed to prove we could charge EVs reliably. Early on, it could’ve been as simple as pulling around a trolley with batteries. 

When we pivoted to serving last-mile delivery fleets, we underestimated how hard the product build would be. Our earlier prototype for parking lots worked indoors with off-the-shelf parts. With outdoor commercial fleets, we needed to provide a full charge and deal with weatherproofing a larger battery system. There was much more demand and people were willing to pay, we just couldn’t build the product. That being said, the competitors who were gaining traction were not building elegant tech either, customers just wanted something that worked. 

Noise vs. Signal

When we got an LOI for the parking lot solution, we immediately started building, rather than saying “let’s go out and get ten more, twenty more, see if there’s a pattern.” One LOI doesn’t make a market. This particular problem wasn’t a top five problem for customers -- no one was getting promoted or fired based on whether it got solved. Even the customer who signed the LOI was more of a visionary. He liked our team and wanted to be the person who spotted the next thing, but his company wasn’t really prioritizing this solution. It also wasn’t the right market yet: rent was super high, EV adoption was growing but still low in absolute numbers, and most EV buyers were still homeowners, not renters who needed underground parking.

Business / fundraising strategy

When we made our pivot to last-mile delivery, I think if we had collected a larger number of LOIs, we could have raised money from investors and had enough money to build a product that actually solved the problem. Instead, we burnt the shorter runway by jumping into building after getting one LOI, and only solved the problem in a half-baked way.

Notes above shared by Nectar co-founder and CEO Ari Lesniak. Ari now leads Growth at Aire Labs, where he is building tools to bring the power of modern AI and Machine Learning to accelerate core project development tasks in climate technologies.