TORONTO, Aug. 26, 2020 /CNW/ – Toronto-based SWTCH Energy Inc., has raised $1.1 million CAD to expand its product and service offerings to metropolitan areas across North America. This new round brings the total amount raised by SWTCH to $3.5M CAD in equity, grant, and non-dilutive funding. The round was led by IBI Group and included Active Impact Investments, Cogito Capital, Export Development Canada, and Ontario Centres of Excellence as co-investors.
A MaRS Cleantech company and graduate of the CSI Climate Solutions, Communitech Fierce Founders, and DMZ Sales Accelerator programs, SWTCH was founded in 2016 to address the unique challenges of urban electric vehicle (EV) ownership. Increasingly, EV owners live in urban multi-family settings, such as condominiums and apartment buildings, where they don’t have access to charging. At the same time, the entities that stand to benefit most from providing EV charging services—e.g., real estate developers, building operators, and property managers—don’t have a management solution to provide EV charging services cost-effectively. SWTCH’s unique approach to EV charging and energy management addresses the barriers to EV ownership in urban settings through open standards-based EV charging and distributed energy resource aggregation to improve grid efficiency; scheduling/reservation systems to optimize charger usage and revenue; vision-AI enforcement to prevent loitering of vehicles parked in EV charging spaces; and battery energy storage integration with load management capabilities to maximize existing energy infrastructure and minimize future upgrade costs.