Yarmouth startup wants to streamline EV charging process for fleet drivers

FILE PHOTO / COURTESY EFFICIENCY MAINE A Yarmouth startup wants to streamline the EV charging process for fleet drivers and managers.

Write a Comment

By Laurie Schreiber

For managers and drivers with municipal and commercial fleets who are making the switch from internal combustion vehicles to electric, a number of vexing questions arise.

“When they first get behind the wheel of an EV, they have lots of understandable questions,” said Bill Cooper, a former WEX Inc. executive who is co-founder and chief revenue officer of SBD Technologies in Yarmouth.

Photo / Courtesy SBD Technologies 

Bill Cooper

Those questions include:

How do I charge this thing?
How do I turn on the charger?
I seem to need to download an app for every public charger (supplied by over 30 different companies)...How do I pay for it and get reimbursed?
How do I know where to charge along the route I'm driving?
When I plug in at home overnight, how does the company pay for the electricity coming through on my home utility bill?

AI startup

SBD Technologies is a Yarmouth artificial intelligence startup looking to address those questions with the development of a platform to facilitate all charging needs for fleet EVs.

The platform includes an “AI agent” overlay to help drivers and fleet managers with a “fleet assistant” that can help them find and reserve high-speed chargers, turn on their chargers during non-peak hours for savings and to help the electrical grid resilience, and produce reporting, said Cooper.

According to SBD, its products allow drivers:

To charge at home (eliminating operational overhead and increasing accuracy while giving fleet managers oversight and control)
Charge on the road (eliminating driver range anxiety while providing fleet customers access to over 120,000 public chargers across 27 charge point operators on a single app and reporting platform)
Access AI assistance with everything from reporting to account management.

Fintech pros

SBD, which stands for “success by design,” is a start-up in Yarmouth that kicked off in July 2024. Its co-founders are Cooper; the company’s president, Kamal Ayad; and COO Carolyn Fitzpatrick.

Photo / Courtesy SBD Technologies 

Kamal Ayad

Cooper was with WEX Inc. (NYSE: WEX), a financial technology services provider headquartered in Portland, for 22 years and then at a few Series A and Series B start-ups in the software and AI spaces.

“I was focused on North America in the fleet card sales, marketing and relationship management efforts, signing multi-year contracts with Sunoco, Sinclair, etc. and launching a pair of fleet card programs focused on light duty and ‘over the road’ heavy truck programs,” he said.

He also ran the integration of WEX’s 2016 acquisition of Ogden, Utah-based fleet card provider Electronic Funds Source LLC.

Ayad and Fitzpatrick worked at IDEXX, WEX and National Grid. Their experience at WEX was launching the international fleet card program in over 33 countries around the world, Cooper said.

Photo / Courtesy SBD Technologies 

Carolyn Fitzpatrick

The company is headquartered at 701 U.S. Route 1, Suite 4 (in the Patriot Insurance building), and has three full-time employees and a handful of part-timers.

SBD’s app is on the market as a “minimum viable product,” which provides enough features to be usable by early customers. It’s expected the app will have a full “minimum viable product” launch by the end of March.

The bootstrapped company is speaking with venture capitalists and existing companies to explore potential investments and joint ventures.
“We’re in the process of raising our seed round,” Cooper said.

Growing trend

Fleet electrification is a growing trend, he said.

“We expect fleet EVs to represent one-quarter of the fleet vehicles in the U.S. and Canada by 2032,” he said.” The payments associated with charging these vehicles will be over $25 billion annually.”

He added, “We are seeing EVs being adopted in a number of municipalities across Maine. In fact, the city of Portland has an electric garbage truck in their fleet today.”

Over the past month, SBD announced two developments designed to advance the platform’s adoption.

It added Greg Strzegowski to its board of advisors. Strzegowski has 25 years in the fintech sector, including tenures at WEX as well as Georgia and California financial services firms CorPay and Marqeta. He brings experience in corporate development, particularly in acquisitions, sales and fundraising, considered key in securing capital to drive product development and scale SBD, according to a news release.

SBD announced a partnership with Emobi, a charging infrastructure firm headquartered in San Francisco, that’s expected to accelerate EV fleet adoption.

Empowering fleet operators

The partnership will integrate Emobi’s network of over 120,000 public EV charging locations across 26-plus networks into SBD Technologies’ platform, called FleetCharge.

"By integrating Emobi's advanced infrastructure into our FleetCharge solution, we're empowering fleet operators with the tools they need to manage their EVs with confidence, efficiency and ease,” Ayad said in a separate news release.

Emobi's technology provides accurate and user-friendly EV charger data, according to the release. SBD’s FleetCharge consolidates all charging data and payments into a single, user-friendly platform, providing reporting on energy usage and costs across home, depot and public charging locations.

"By integrating our expansive charging network with their FleetCharge solution, we're not only simplifying fleet operations but also enabling fleet managers to adopt sustainable practices with greater confidence and ease,” said Lin Sun Fa, Emobi’s CEO.

As an aggregator of charge point operators, Emobi will be seeing additional traffic to their chargers from SBD customers, Cooper said.

“We are using their acceptance network at over 120,000 public chargers to open up a universal charging network for fleet drivers,” he said.

Read Previous

Inclusion Maine conference postponed until August

Processing Your Payment

Event Info

Award Honorees

Topics

Regions

Biweekly Issues

Special Editions

Event Info

Award Honorees