Why I invested in evvn

I am excited to announce that I have invested in the latest seed funding round of evvn by Future Motion , a platform designed to unlock the second-hand electric car market by measuring and certifying EV battery health.

Sustainability continues to be a key pillar of my investment thesis and tech plays in the Electric Vehicles (EVs) space continue to be of interest. How could they not? With my investment in evvn, I am taking an active interest in the future of EV ownership; a future that will include both new (initially) and used (eventually) EVs. While few people are thinking about used EVs at the moment (estimated to be <3% of the total used car market in 2021 and, according to SMMT data, UK used electric vehicle sales increased by 57.1% in Q2 this year), I have no doubt in my mind that the used EV market will grow and follow the boom in new EV sales (trailing of course, as newly purchased EVs slowly find their way to the used EV market). It is widely expected that there will be over 1M EVs on the road in the UK alone next year, rising to an estimated ~14M by 2030. The demand will be there – but what is the right tech play.

Battery packs account for 30-40% of the value of the average EV today. Manufacturing defects, driving behaviors, charging patterns and weather conditions can all significantly impact the health of an EV battery over time. Vehicle data company Geotab provides us with a useful rule of thumb: an EV battery will degrade by 2.3% every year. But is that estimate enough? Shouldn’t there be a reliable way to measure the condition of the battery of a used EV? According to the Office for Zero Emission Vehicles (OZEV), “providing information on battery health will support consumers in the used market to make informed comparisons between vehicles and reassure concerns over battery degradation.” So it should come as no surprise that as more and more EVs enter the used market, pressure is growing on manufacturers, car dealers and individual sellers to provide detailed information on battery health so that buyers know what they're buying (and sellers can maximise value from the vehicle they are selling).?

Are there any solutions currently available? Well, current EV owners will argue that their vehicle’s dashboard can give you an estimated range, but most of them will also add that the dashboard estimates are usually flawed; the dashboard estimate works OK as a rough estimate and it should be seen as such. As EV adoption increases however, we need more transparency toward the health of EV batteries – transparency being the key word here. Transparency will be both a prerequisite to and an enabler of the growth of the used EV market. Some independent solutions do exist; companies like Recurrent, Geotab, Eatron, Aviloo and others are working to tackle this problem, some relying more on hardware solutions than others – hardware-heavy solutions though invariably require a direct connection to the vehicle, which brings limitations in terms of coverage and availability of data.

This is what attracted me to evvn. I believe evvn’s approach is different, in that it is developing a scalable solution providing full EV coverage via an accurate, easy to use, hardware-free interface. To achieve that, evvn’s battery health tool will be positioned to address the need of ownership of the used electric car space online, incorporating a ‘knowledge-hub’ aimed at consumers looking to understand the many facets of electrification, in one neat platform. This will enable at least two distinct revenue streams: D2C transactions within the platform itself (aimed at both buyers and sellers) and B2B2C partnerships (via licensing the core tech to brokers/ marketplaces).

As always, when I look at investment opportunities, I always like to zero in on team and value proposition (ideally, rooted in some distinct technology/ IP) and my assessment of evvn wasn’t any different. Led by Managing Director Patrick Cresswell, with a decade of experience in shared and electric mobility (incl. ex-MD of Ubeeqo UK), evvn has had support from Sustainable Ventures and has been building a team of experienced mobility SMEs (such as Chris Morris) and technical experts (such as Tony Duffin) to develop its product offering. The team is certainly strong and suitably experienced, which is a key reason why evvn has been developing a distinct value proposition; rooted on software, broad EV coverage, access to data to ensure accuracy, proprietary algorithms, speed of deployment and, of course, scalability.

There are risks of course. The used EV market is still at its infancy and evvn is working to launch its web platform (imminently) and to develop its app (for release in H2 2023). As other players already have (good, but partial/ still developing) solutions in the market, evvn will need to develop a product that not only addresses the customer need, but also provides a more accurate and easy-to-use experience vs existing solutions. The problem is big enough and important enough to attract more players (and more capital) in the future, so having a distinct value proposition that allows you to scale with the market would be key to success.

The journey ahead for evvn (and the broader used EV market) is an exciting one and I am certainly super excited to be able to support evvn (and the Future Motion team) on its journey.