Accelerating an electric vehicle revolution

Hello there,

Thankfully, there’s a lot more to the future of electric vehicles than Tesla’s love-it-or-loathe-it Cybertruck.

One interesting growth area is small EVs designed for business use. Today’s startup is focused on serving that market, along with micro-mobility vehicles, which could be a big part of travel in the city of the near future.

Scroll down to read all about EVware.

Meanwhile, what’s my first task for today? Draft a press release for something PreSeed Now is announcing in January… 🤫

– Martin

EVware wants to accelerate a boom in lightweight electric vehicles

One fascinating aspect around the growth of the electric vehicle market in recent years has been the number of startups that have entered the space. 

This isn’t just a market for established automakers. But having to design and build much of their product from scratch can hold these startups back compared to the giants of the industry.

Enter EVware, which is working to provide hardware and software that lets EV manufacturers bring new vehicles to market faster, and make those vehicles more adaptable to different use cases.

“Our mission is to enable vehicle manufacturers to deliver the safe, intelligent, and connected vehicles of the future,” says co-founder and CEO Chris Tingley. 

“Our focus as a business is working with new mobility providers who are working on the explosion of new vehicle types and categories, who are all ultimately trying to address the decarbonisation of the mobility and transportation industry. 

“We want to help those companies deliver better products, bring them to market faster, and implement all the digital features that we provide, without the necessity for large teams and experience of all the complex digital and connectivity elements. 

“Our device brings those capabilities in as close to what we can provide to plug-and-play.”

In practice, this takes the form of interfaces such as touchscreens, and highly configurable cloud-based telematics for vehicle tracking and monitoring. 

EVware also allows manufacturers to easily integrate Google’s Android Automotive, the car-focused version of its mobile operating system. This allows support for Android apps, and perhaps more compellingly, custom touchscreen interfaces for different manufacturers and vehicles. 

“Our customers could sell the same vehicle to many different customers and deliver them with customised software and a customised UI for every single customer, depending on how they're using that type of vehicle,” explains Tingley.

Thinking big by going small

EVware is focused on serving the market for small EVs, which includes things like those little electric delivery vans you might have seen pootling around cities in recent times, serving demand for last-mile delivery. 

These small vans make better use of available capacity than sending a half-full traditional van out on a run, while not polluting the air in the process.

Tingley says EVware has already worked with manufacturers of pedal-assisted electric vehicles, used for last-mile delivery and collection. 

Beyond that, the growing market for micro-mobility vehicles like e-bikes and electric scooters is another target sector for EVware.

The story so far

Tingley’s background is in software engineering, which led to him co-founding a digital product agency called Conjure, 14 years ago.

A key market for the agency is the automotive industry, building software for connected car experiences. Tingley says they noticed a shift in customer base towards manufacturers of lightweight electric vehicles in recent years. 

Spotting an opportunity, Conjure spun EVware off as a separate venture in October last year, with Tingley at the helm.

He says they are about half way through initial product development, with an aim to bring the first product–the combination of interface, telematics, and operating system–to market in 2025 following large-scale trials in 2024.

“We've got what we call our development stack–all of our custom electronics sandwiched together into a stack of all the different components that we have–that allows us to test out the hardware part of the product. 

“And we've got various software elements as well, enough again to allow us to create meaningful testing of the platform,” Tingley says of the progress so far.

Over the next year, they’ll be miniaturising the hardware into the enclosure they’ve designed, finalising the software, and going through the testing and certification required before they can start selling it.

While EVware seems to be offering quite a lot of functionality for an initial product from an early-stage startup, Tingley believes they’re a crucial combination of features. 

“We think it's really important to provide the HMI [human machine interface, e.g., touchscreen], the connectivity, and the telematics as a combined set of features. We think that they all work together, and we think to make the best use of digital when it comes to a vehicle, all of those things need to be thought of together. 

“So for us, it makes sense to deliver them as a package.”

EVware is working to a roadmap that will see it offer additional products later.

Go deeper on EVware

Read more about their funding, investment plans, vision, competition, and challenges:

Investment:

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