It’s Electrifying! How Orange Charger is Bringing Electric Vehicle Charging to Renters’ Doorsteps

By Matt McElhattan and Jimmy Teng

Increased adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) — something we at Munich Re Ventures consider to be an important component of the climate solution — has taken center stage in strategy and policy for automotive OEMs, governments, utilities, and energy companies the world over:

• By 2030, EVs are expected to comprise the majority of new car sales in the United States.
• The EU has set a target of complete electrification by 2035.
• Volkswagen, Stellantis, GM, and Ford (cumulatively representing nearly half of global automotive sales), have pledged to spend the majority of their R&D and CapEx budgets on EVs.

Taken all together, one can conclude that emission free vehicles have become an important step in the future of personal transportation and mobility.

The grid and downstream infrastructure needed to deliver EV charging, however, will require significant capital investment. Critically, “charging at home” represents 80% of the EV charging that currently takes place. Multi-family homes — apartments, condos, and townhomes, together accounting for 31.4% of all US housing — therefore present a unique opportunity to serve an historically overlooked segment of the EV consumer base.

While EV owners who rent their homes struggle with lack of access to charging infrastructure, building owners are not necessarily inclined to install and maintain expensive equipment. They also might have to upgrade their electrical service to handle the increased energy load demanded by EVs, heat pumps, and other shifts towards electrification. Building owners might have (at best) installed a few shared chargers for entire buildings, resulting in limited access, tenant frustration, and dampened enthusiasm for the purchase of EVs overall.

Our investment in Orange Charger is rooted in a belief that a simple and reliable solution with a low power option and high uptime is the best way to solve a complex, multi-stakeholder problem — building owners need a capital light and profitable way to provide as many EV chargers to tenants as possible, without exceeding the electrical capacity of their buildings.

Through our conversations with building owners, EV charging companies, and frustrated tenants, it became clear that no one had yet figured out how to install chargers with the right financial incentives for building owners, while also being practical for building residents. As building owners install charging infrastructure as an incentive to attract and retain tenants, offering only a few high-power Level 2 and 3 chargers simply doesn’t make sense for the multi-family market.

Instead, we believe that improved accessibility via ubiquity is a better approach to EV charging for multi-family homes — no one likes sharing a charger or playing a game of “musical cars” for parking every night. However, ubiquity and redundancy have often come at the expense of cost, making it largely infeasible for building owners up to this point.

Upon encountering Orange Charger, we were excited that the team had built a solution so obvious, yet so elegant: an initial product offering affordable, interoperable low power (Level 1 and 2) charging networks that have been robustly engineered to last a decade and work in any environment — including sub-basement garages with poor cellphone reception or WiFi connectivity. Thanks to its affordable hardware and relatively small power requirement, Orange Charger enables multi-family buildings to deploy a large number of charging ports, use electricity sales to recuperate capital costs faster, and improve the tenant EV charging experience overall.

As tenants park their vehicles at home for long periods of time, they can charge their car like they do their phone — ie. for extended periods of time, such as overnight. Fast charging certainly has its place in the EV charging ecosystem. However, given that time is more of a luxury while at home (not to mention that most drivers go less than 40 miles a day, regardless), the “phone charging” model that Level 1 charging provides can be a capital light approach to deploying EV home charging. All EVs do not need to fill up “immediately” with fast charging as if they were a gasoline vehicle.

The company already has customers piloting its next suite of products — software tools that enable building energy management to monitor demand, grid resilience, and allow for charging EVs at night with clean energy generated during the day. These capabilities will only grow in importance as the increasing electrical load in buildings from electrification of other building equipment starts to strain grid infrastructure. Orange Charger’s approach mitigates the risk to the grid and avoids expensive service upgrades to building owners.

The founders, Nicholas Johnson (CEO) and Neil Joseph (COO), draw upon their EV experience at Tesla to better execute their vision to enable multi-family tenants to fully embrace an EV future. They are supported by a team of knowledgeable leaders, including Volker Schönefeld (ex-CTO of Limbic), and Cinzia Pinamonti (previously sales at Latch).

For these reasons and more, we are excited to lead the seed round for Orange Charger and be joined by friends at Climactic, Lincoln Properties, Crow Holdings, Spacecadet, and existing investor, Baukunst.

Fundamentally, we believe that residential charging will continue to be a crucial part of EV ownership, and that Orange Charger will be the company to bring a frictionless and accessible EV charging experience to a new (and sizable) cohort of customers.

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Munich Re Ventures (MRV) is the venture capital arm of Munich Re Group, one of the world’s leading providers of reinsurance, primary insurance, and insurance-related risk solutions. With more than $1 billion in assets under management, Munich Re Ventures invests in the most innovative start-ups transforming the future of risk and risk transfer. MRV’s experienced investors are financially-driven while focused on the strategic interests of Munich Re and the broader insurance industry. MRV works closely with Munich Re Group businesses across the globe to fund and partner with the best emerging companies developing new technologies and business models — and risks — for tomorrow’s world.