By Paul Lienert
(Reuters) – ChargePoint, one of the world’s oldest and largest electric vehicle charging networks, has closed on a $127 million funding round, much of it from existing investors, the company said on Wednesday.
The latest equity financing round gives ChargePoint a total of $660 million raised since its founding in 2007, and most of that has come in the past four years. Before this raise, the company was valued at $1.25 billion by investor website PitchBook.
Based in Campbell, California, on the southern edge of Silicon Valley, ChargePoint has attracted funding from both private venture investors and large strategic investors, including German automakers Daimler AG and BMW, German electronics supplier Siemens AG, the venture arm of oil giant Chevron Corp and the trading affiliate of Japan’s Toyota Motor Corp.
Among returning investors to the latest round are American Electric Power, Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, Singapore GIC and Chevron Technology Ventures.
ChargePoint Chief Executive Pasquale Romano said the new funds will be used to build out the company’s rapidly growing charging network in Europe.
“Investor confidence in this segment has gone through the roof,” Romano said in an interview. “Big investors like the Canada pension board and the Singapore sovereign wealth fund often come in at a later stage to help (a young company) scale up.”
An incomplete charging infrastructure that is still being built out in many parts of the world is often cited as one of the bottlenecks holding back mass adoption of electric vehicles.
ChargePoint says its global network currently has 115,000 charging ports, most of them in the United States, and it aims to build that to 2.5 million by 2025. In comparison, Tesla said it has about 17,500 chargers worldwide.
(Reporting by Paul Lienert in Detroit; Editing by David Gregorio)
