ampUp

Reservation based charging network for electric vehicles with no hardware

Silicon valley

< 10 employees

< 10 engineers

$1m - $2m funding

Pre-series a

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ampUp(https://ampup.io/) is a mobile app enabling reservation based electric vehicle charging.

Before ampUp, EV drivers without a dedicated home charger had no service to go to for a guaranteed spot to charge their car. This group of EV drivers will grow and grow fast. Starting with 2019, there will be more affordable and longer range EVs that will be bought and leased by people that do not and will not be able to get a dedicated home charger. The current public charging infrastructure in most countries (except China) is not ready to support the explosive growth of EVs, and their business model is first come first serve. In such a condition, people without a dedicated charger will experience intense range anxiety unless they can charge their car in a guaranteed way.

ampUp is providing reservation based charging by aggregating shared private and home chargers with automated scheduling and payments, and the team is working on seamless host and driver interaction to provide the best experience possible. Since the launch users have been growing organically and globally. We have also received interest(LOIs) from public charging operators to partner and enable reservations on public chargers.

Why join us?

Ranked by TechCrunch as one of the best companies out of YCombinator W19 batch: https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/19/best-of-y-combinator/
We have a live product with growing users in US, Canada, Europe, Australia and New Zealand.
The electric vehicle and charging infrastructure market is in the trillions world wide.
We are well funded by VCs and famous individuals.

Engineering at ampUp

Engineering team and processes

Our current engineering team is mostly contractors. We have a release cycle of every 2 weeks. Our code base is in gitlab. We select features and bugs at the beginning of each sprint that go into the release at the end of the 2 weeks.

Technical Challenges

Interactive limitations of React Native. Integration of ampUp services with physical chargers and individual electric cars. Getting real time status from public chargers by crawling databases and polling APIs. Building a better road trip planning feature that incorporates driver preferences of restaurants, stops, driving habits, road and weather conditions. Payment unification on the public side. Building better analytics to accurately gauge user behaviors.

Projects you might work on

Yelp integration that ranks charger(private or public) based on number of good businesses(mostly restaurants and coffee shops) within walking distance to it.
Integrate with public chargers to enable reservations on them, and also coordinate well with ad hoc charging.
Viral features

Tech stack

React Native

AWS

Python

PostgreSQL

Firebase