Pionix secures more than €8m in funding
Back in 2023, the open-source provider raised 5.5 million euros in a seed funding round led by yabeo Impact and Pale Blue Dot Investments. At the time, Pionix announced that it intended to use the money to establish the open-source “EVerest” application as a global initiative for standardised and faster development of charging infrastructure.
The current funding round of more than eight million euros was led by Ascend Capital Partners, with participation from the Start-up BW Seed Fund managed by MBG Baden-Württemberg, Pale Blue Dot, Vireo Ventures, Axeleo Ventures and “further investors”. One of the aims is to use the capital to scale the enterprise products for charging electric vehicles worldwide on the open-source “EVerest” stack.
“Despite rapid development across e-mobility in recent years, EV charging remains fragmented. The industry’s growing ecosystem of hardware and software companies operates proprietary, closed software systems that often fail to communicate seamlessly with one another,” the company explains. “Failures in interoperability and communication have led to reliability issues, inefficient maintenance of infrastructure and charging session error rates of up to 25%.”
The open-source platform that Pionix made available to the Linux Foundation Energy (LF Energy) in 2021 is intended to offer a solution to the industry’s challenges. “EVerest” is meant to serve as “a shared software foundation for all EV charging technologies, ensuring reliability, interoperability and future-readiness of global infrastructure.” The platform aims to eliminate compatibility issues and enable faster innovation across the industry. One of its customers is Amperfied. The charging infrastructure subsidiary of Heidelberger Druckmaschinen AG announced in September that it plans to use the “BaseCamp” software — an industrial-grade version of the open-source “EVerest” framework — as the operating system for its Amperfied Dynamic DC charging station. More than 600 contributors from over 70 organisations are now said to support the platform, which is expected to run “hundreds of thousands of chargers globally.”
However, Pionix also wants to use the funding “to unify EV charging technology under a common framework.” The company further explains that “Pionix Cloud is the specialized manufacturer backend software designed for EV chargers running on EVerest, while ChargeBridge is a pre-certified, plug-and-play hardware module that simplifies the integration of charging systems.” Together, these products are intended to help manufacturers and operators deploy reliable chargers more quickly while ensuring end-to-end interoperability.
“Reliability isn’t just a nice-to-have for EV charging – it’s fundamental to the e-mobility transition. The fragmented landscape of incompatible systems and high error rates has slowed the transition for too long, but open source offers a sustainable solution. With EVerest at the core and our Pionix Cloud services and ChargeBridge hardware on top, we make it radically simpler to build, integrate and operate chargers that just work – every time. That’s what the industry needs to deliver a transition that sticks,” said Pionix’s founder and CEO Marco Möller.
This article was first published by Daniel Bönnighausen for electrive’s German edition.
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