The Airbnb of EV charging - ChargePoint hits 28k global points
ChargePoint, which refers to itself as the world’s largest electric vehicle (EV) charging network, recently announced that it has more than 28k charge points around the world. CEO Pasquale Romano believes his company is like Airbnb, stating: "Airbnb is the largest hotel chain in the world, and they don't own a hotel. We're the largest electric vehicle charging network in the world, and we don't own a charging station.” The company, which recently raised $50m, makes money by helping businesses set up charging stations in their own car parks and then makes those chargers publicly available. The customer, who has access to the ChargePoint app which shows the locations of charging stations, pays ChargePoint to use the station, and that money is then paid back to the charging-station owner. The idea is that as far as the customer is concerned, ChargePoint is one big network, whereas in reality each site is owned by a different company.

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Some say that electric vehicles are the transportation of the future, so it stands to reason that their charging networks wouldn't rely on yesterday's business models. And it also makes sense that in the industry's early days, there's more than one charging business model trying to gain a foothold. Elon Musk's Tesla Motors has its approach, combining a long-distance corridor EV charging network with home stations for its own car models. But there's another model that started with the around-the-town charging concept that's now reached 28,000 locations, more than doubling its range in the past two years. ChargePoint, which describes itself as the world's "largest and most open" electric vehicle charging network, now has more than 28,000 total charging spots, and its CEO, Pasquale Romano, likens his company's approach not to Tesla but to another disruptive company: Airbnb. "Airbnb is the largest hotel chain in the world, and they don't own a hotel. We're the largest electric vehicle charging network in the world, and we don't own a charging station," he told CNBC's "Squawk Alley" on Monday.

Pasquale Romano, ChargePoint CEO Source: ChargePoint

ChargePoint, which raised $50 million in new funding earlier this month, led by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, helps existing businesses set up charging stations in their parking lots, "and then we make all those individual groups of chargers, that are owned by those individual businesses, look like one network to the driver to make it easy," Romano said. Even though an electric vehicle driver may pay ChargePoint through their mobile application, that money is remitted back to the charging-station owners. The company offers its mobile application for free to help build up its network of drivers. "What's interesting about our model is [that] our customer, technically, is that site owner," Romano said. "However, we view the driver as important, even though the driver doesn't pay us directly, because that is the overall underpinning of the entire market." That owner could be a Whole Foods or a commercial real estate operator that has puchased an EV unit for a corporate campus.