Go Eve raise funding to develop DockChain: a ‘chargepoint multiplier’

Go Eve, a company that has come into existence  as a result of work involving  Imperial College London and University College Dublin (UCD),  have raised £3 million in seed funding following a successful demonstration project at Imperial.

Go Eve’s unique offer is known as DockChain, an innovation which will allow multiple cars to be charged from a standard, high power DC charger through a series of inexpensive, daisy-chained boxes.

In addition to charging multiple vehicles over time, the system also allows the flexibilty to charge them in a number of ways, one car being prioritised over the others, for example.

The fact that the DockChain boxes communicate with each other in a local network means that they charge the cars according to whatever priority you decide. They also communicate with the back office to ensure only authorised vehicles can charge, or to override the charging priority, or to respond to periods of high or low energy costs.

The system will have enormous benefits wherever groups of electric vehicles congregate, such as office or  apartment car parks. Go Eve cite one example that highlights much of DockChains’s versatility in one sentence: ‘Rental car fleet parking lots, where you need to be able to charge cars without causing multiple car movements, where you want to be able to ensure that electricity only goes into your cars, where you want to prioritise particular cars based on bookings, etc.’

Being fully scalable,  it is perfectly possible for a landlord or company to install 10 charging docks to begin with and double the number when greater capacity is required.

The new funding will allow Go Eve to run a customer trial at the London Electric Centre, who supplied the electric cars for the demonstration project. The trial will run at their garage in Queensway, across the park from Imperial and it is anticipated this will operate as a live test lab for DockChain, as something of a showcase for potential customers to see the system in operation.

‘This funding sees us through into 2024, when we will probably look at a Series A round to fund expansion,’ says co-founder and marketing Director John Goodbody. ‘We’ve already had lots of interest from other investors, who would like to come in once the product is certified, or when the pilots are complete and we have our first revenue-generating customers.’