Transforming the EV Charging Experience: Why We're Backing ChargeMate AI
The next era of EV charging won't just be about building more stations, it will be about ensuring the ones we have actually work. That is why The Bond Fund is backing ChargeMate AI, a company building a vendor-agnostic AI platform to automatically diagnose and resolve real-time charging issues.
For the electric vehicle industry, the operational bottleneck is severe. Operators report 95%+ uptime, but actual driver visit success is only 70–85%. Globally, 1 in 4 EV charge sessions fail, resulting in an estimated $20 billion in lost revenue annually. Legacy support tools weren't built for real-time charging failures. Every failed session costs networks $10–15 per support call and $500 plus labor for unnecessary truck rolls. Worse, 1 in 3 drivers churn after a bad experience, actively stalling mainstream EV adoption.
Vendor-Agnostic Support by Design
ChargeMate AI is tackling this problem by serving as the intelligence layer in end-to-end support operations. Instead of a point solution, ChargeMate provides a platform that resolves over 80% of failure cases in real time, increasing revenue per asset.
Because their software works across the entire industry rather than a single brand, it helps drivers recover failed charge attempts faster while reducing support costs. This provides charging network operators with clear visibility into what is actually breaking.
A Cross-Network Data Flywheel as the Ultimate Moat
What makes ChargeMate especially compelling is that the platform improves with every charging session it touches.
Because the system operates across networks and hardware providers, ChargeMate is building a growing intelligence layer around how charging failures actually occur in the real world - from hardware issues to firmware quirks to recurring failure patterns.
That creates a powerful feedback loop. Every new customer and every resolved charging issue strengthens the platform’s ability to diagnose and prevent future failures across the broader ecosystem. Being tightly integrated with customers’ ops teams and with an automotive call center partner, ChargeMate establishes a human reinforcement learning loop – escalated issues are corrected and used for model retraining.
We also think the “buy versus build” dynamic here is important. Building a reliable AI support layer for EV infrastructure requires years of operational data, integrations, and real-world edge cases that are extremely difficult to recreate internally.
Co-founders Brad Crist (CEO) and Brian Lange (CTO) bring deep experience across energy, EV infrastructure, and AI/ML product development, and they’ve built the company with impressive capital efficiency from day one.
We’re proud to support the ChargeMate AI team as they work to build a more reliable foundation for the future of EV charging.