Israeli electric vehicle (EV) charging company Chakratec has announced the completion of its third financing round in which it raised $4.4 million dollars from Israel's iArgento Group and Singapore's Goldbell. Chakratec's first investor was Capital Nature, which remains the company's largest shareholder. Chakratec has raised $7.6 million to date.
The latest financing round will allow the Lod-based company to conduct its first three pilot projects in Europe with three of Europe's leading utilities. The success of these pilots will lead to first orders later this year.
Chakratec CEO Ilan Ben-David said, "Chakratec has developed an innovative EV charging technology that obviates the need for upgrading the power grid, enabling rapid deployment of fast EV charging systems. The company is currently conducting pilot projects with three global energy providers that see our technology as the solution for reduced EV charging times, and a facilitator for global market penetration by electric vehicles."
Chakratec was founded in 2013 by three high-tech entrepreneurs with a track record in cleantech: Ilan Ben David, Nir Zohar and Dudi Pincu. The company has developed a unique, innovative energy storage technology powered by kinetic batteries using a flywheel concept. These batteries provide a high-power energy supply, allowing a large number (tens to hundreds of thousands) of charge and discharge cycles over a lifetime of 20 years.
Fast charging of electric vehicles requires a high-power electricity connection, which often necessitates a costly, complicated and lengthy process of upgrading the distribution network infrastructure. The use of kinetic batteries makes it easy to deploy fast EV charging stations anywhere, integrating all kinds of energy sources, at extremely low operating costs. The charging process developed by Chakratec can be compared to the flushing of water in a toilet tank - when a strong flow is needed, a lever is pressed and the tank empties rapidly and then fills up again. Similarly, when a vehicle enters a charging station, the kinetic battery empties, rapidly transferring the energy to the vehicle, and then fills up again. Chemical batteries cannot be used for this application due to the number of cycles and high power required.
Chakratec was recently awarded the 2018 Outstanding Venture Award of the NREL Industry Growth Forum competition - the world's most prestigious competition in the field of renewable energy (NREL, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Colorado, is a world leader in the field). The company has also won the 2017 eMove360oAward for Electric Mobility & Autonomous Driving, Energy Storage category.
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on May 21, 2018
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