Enera, a startup using AI to automate EV driver customer support, has raised $2m (£1.49m) in pre-seed funding.
The company was founded to address the issue of inconsistent quality in charging stations for electric vehicles.
Though EVs have started to outsell petrol vehicles, the company reports that 29% of charging sessions still fail.
Looking to solve this, Enera provides charge point operators with AI support agents in the voice and text bots that can provide 24 hour driver support.
It also offers a control room dashboard that takes data from driver support calls, hardware logs and backend signals to show why and where charging stations are failing.
“EV charging is the sharpest example of a much bigger problem: the world increasingly runs on distributed, connected hardware, but when something goes wrong the person standing in front of it isn’t an engineer,” said Enera co-founder and chief executive Nicholas Marquardt.
“Operators can’t see where their experience is breaking down, and users carry the cost. We are building the AI recovery layer for that entire category of infrastructure, starting where the pain is sharpest and the market is growing fastest.”
The round was led by Lakehouse Ventures, marking the group’s first investment outside of the US.
“AI customer support has been one of the most well-funded categories of the last two years, but almost all of that capital has gone into asset-light industries,” said John Neamonitis, founder and GP, Lakehouse Ventures.
“Enera is one of the first teams we have seen credibly take this technology into asset-heavy infrastructure, where the stakes are higher and the integrations are harder.
“We are excited to back Nicholas, Arnaldo, and the team as they prove it out in EV charging and open up a much larger opportunity from there.”
Other participants in the round included Divergent Capital from the US and Masia from Spain as well as a number of angels.
