Battery swapping has long been a dream solution for the infrastructure problem standing in the way of wide electric vehicle adoption. Tesla famously tried but then abandoned the idea half a decade ago. But now a startup called Ample has raised $160 million to try to make it work — first for commercial vehicles, then maybe passenger cars and SUVs.
Given the approach Ample founders John de Souza and Khaled Hassounah are taking, they’ll need every one of those dollars, and then some.
The goal with Ample is to convince automakers to make versions of their electric vehicles that have a sort of adapter plate instead of a full battery pack, while everything else stays the same. Then Ample plugs a bunch of battery modules into that adapter. The modules can then be easily swapped at automated battery swap stations, allowing for a much faster “fill-up” that saves time and money.
Ample then turns around and provides these vehicles (and the battery swap infrastructure) to fleets that want to go electric. The reduced charging time, plus less burdensome on-site infrastructure — one swap station versus a number of high-capacity chargers — are among the selling points. Uber is already using a few Ample stations in the Bay Area and supports a handful of vehicles like the Nissan Leaf and Kia Niro EVs.
What’s more, Ample is also going out and sourcing the cells that go in the modular packs, meaning it has to elbow its way into an extremely competitive market for batteries at a time when the world’s biggest automakers are literally throwing billions of dollars at trying to bring more battery capacity online.
de Souza and Hassounah aren’t coming at this cold, though. They’ve been building up Ample for years now, and some of its original investors — including Moore Strategic Ventures, which is run by hedge fund king and Fisker Inc. backer Louis Bacon, as well as Shell Ventures — are contributing to this series C funding round. Ample has brought on some new outside investors, too, like the venture arm of Singapore’s public transportation operator, as well as PTT, the major state-owned gas and oil company in Thailand.
And while battery swapping may still seem unfamiliar and possibly unfeasible in the US, it’s taking off in China, where startups like Nio have inspired the government there to basically start demanding a national standard. With billions of dollars headed toward charging infrastructure as part of the Biden administration’s push to clean up transportation emissions, as well as a flurry of investments and mergers happening in the electric vehicle space, there may be no better time for Ample to take its shot.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
Let’s start with the funding because that’s the news. It seems like you’re bringing along some people who had already invested in the company, which I would imagine made a private round something that you would want to pursue and maybe perhaps a little easier than going another route. But obviously there is a large menu of options for funding these days for companies in the electric vehicle space, the automotive space in general, etc. What made you decide to go down this route that you’re about to announce?
John de Souza: I think the highest level of the question is do [we] want to stay private or do [we want to be] going public. I think for us at this point … there’s a lot to get done in terms of what we want to do in terms of bringing electric vehicles to to market, and we didn’t want any distraction from that. It’s a time where we’re focused on scaling and growing, and we are fortunate in that there are a lot of investors that see that and are willing to go through and work with us on it. So we decided for now staying a private company made a lot of sense, it allows us to keep the focus on exactly what we’re going to do.
I see that there are some familiar names involved in this round. Did you find any resistance to raising this much money in the private market? Or was the conversation easy enough? Do you feel like investors are sort of more up to speed now than they have been in the last couple of years as far as some of this technology goes?
John de Souza: There’s an opportunity to raise significantly more money. I think we chose an amount together with our investors that made sense. I think, if we wanted to go and raise more there’s an opportunity to raise more in the market. So I think investors definitely see the opportunity.
If you look back a few years, initially it was sort of, “Will electric cars ever happen?” or, “Is it electric, is it hydrogen?” I think that game has played out where now [people] see it’s electric. The question then became: “Is electric going to happen in the next 10 years?” That has gone. And so I think right now, it’s real. People see the tremendous momentum towards it. And they look at the different problems … there’s a bunch of people trying to solve the vehicle problem, you know, all OEMs are, but there aren’t many people that have a really good solution for the infrastructure, so I think that helped us. We have a solution that solves a problem and can be profitable. And so it was easy to go back in to find investors that saw it, understand it, and want to invest in it.
Khaled Hassounah: This round is kind of led by existing investors who’ve already been supporting Ample for a while, plus external investors. So external validation [shows] more and more people can understand and see the value of what you’re creating. But for us it was a very positive thing that our existing investors really saw the business grow and get what it is, to double down, and kind of say, “Okay, we want it scaled.” For us, this was the ultimate signal that this is not [investors] coming and getting the dog and pony show, going “Oh, this is great” — they actually understand it very, very deeply, and have been there for years, and just working with us to go to the next level.
There’s a somewhat long history to this idea, and I’m interested in what it feels like to try to build up this company now, when there is a much different set of circumstances like more money in the space and wider adoption of EVs.
Khaled Hassounah: I think when you’re talking about technologies fundamentally changing the way we do things, they more often than not are second and third attempts, right? So Google was not the first search engine, Tesla was not the first electric car. So to a great degree, very often it’s less about kind of coming up with an idea that is completely new and no one has ever thought through, because most likely, if no one ever thought about it, it probably has no merit, right? John has a slide which shows a car from 1944 that’s being battery swapped, so the idea of moving energy, physically, has a lot of merit.
I think where the innovation comes in understanding not how do you create an idea from scratch, but just the hard work of figuring out, well, how do you adjust the way you think about that idea so that it becomes viable, so that it becomes inexpensive, easy to deploy.
I think innovation comes more in that form. I mean we had to kind of fundamentally change one core aspect to it which is this idea of making it modular, because if you shift your mentality and say “Okay, it’s not one big bulk battery I’m going to move, I’m going to break it into smaller pieces,” a lot of things become a lot easier. But it requires a lot of innovation on the technology side.
Other than that, generally it’s just a lot of thinking on how do you make this practical economically viable, easy to deploy. And that’s where a lot of the innovation came from.
John de Souza: There are lots people that said “let’s make the OEM standardize,” which sounds great and you’re just pushing all the work on to the OEMs. We said, well, let’s not ask them to standardize, let’s do all the work ourselves. And as Khaled mentioned, modularity helped us solve it. But we said we’ll do the heavy lifting. The solution isn’t to say well the OEM should just all standardize their solutions.
One thing I want to ask you before we get into how things work, is that as you were raising this money, China has pushed really hard on this idea as well, and they are in some ways pursuing a sort of sweeping battery swap standard that may come to bear over there. Did that make it easier for you guys to raise money, and did that change your thinking technologically about how you might want to approach it, seeing what those companies were doing?
John de Souza: I think in the US, we don’t look enough as to what’s happening around the world. So, I think a lot of people are surprised that there is a lot of battery swapping going on in China.
I think what is even more telling is that China has 16 times the number of fast chargers as the US — why are they doing battery swapping? And that I think is when people realize, “Hm, there must be something that’s not working with these fast chargers.”
So I think that really helped in terms of, they did invest a lot in charging, and now they’re doing this … It’s an opportunity for us to learn from what they’ve gone through.
Khaled Hassounah: But one thing we have to be careful with is also making the assumption that we’re just taking technology from China and applying it to the West, because we have been working on this long before we even knew China was doing battery swapping. We’ve been at this for eight years. I think what China’s kind of pushing hard for it does [help], at least from a conceptual standpoint, it gets people familiar with the idea of, “even though China has built 16 times as many fast chargers as the US, they still kind of shifted, and there’s a good reason why that’s the case.” So it just makes kind of the overall argument a lot easier to sell. I think people pay a bit more attention.
But in a way, battery swapping China-style — where the government forces every large automaker to go ahead and introduce a battery-swapping solution — doesn’t work in our environment, our market, and the way we do business and the way we do policy. So we need a different approach that can create an infrastructure that can be used by multiple automakers without them having to go and become a fully vertically integrated provider. And [in China] there’s less considerations for labor costs, and you can just staff factories with people all day long and assume that you’re going to make it economically viable because the government will subsidize you.
We had to kind of home grow our own way of doing things that’s different that works within our environment. But I think the fundamental idea of moving energy physically is a lot cheaper, faster, easier to scale, [and] is the core idea here and I think it’s just maybe the commonality between the two.
We’re talking as the government here is still trying to put the final touches on a somewhat relatively big infrastructure deal, and that’s obviously a big focus of this administration. The awareness China brings to the idea of battery swapping is maybe advantageous to you. Establishing those differences between how they’re doing it and how you want to do it is important. Is there a political component to this, too? Does it help that China is working on this idea in the sense that you can say, “Hey, we need this too?” knowing how the reflection of what they’re doing versus what we’re doing is important to the policymakers in this country?
Khaled Hassounah: It does, I just don’t want to overemphasize that. We have to do things because they make sense, not because China’s doing them, because otherwise you end up with the wrong policy.
So, in a way we just have to think practically on how we get there, and we’d much rather kind of focus on that and say, “Listen, China China China” … and then that’s how you split people because you’re not making a solid, reasonable argument that makes sense.
On the technological side, you’ve both talked a little bit about this idea of keeping things modular trying to make it work for the OEMs. Can you walk me through a little bit more detail about what goes into that approach and why an OEM would want to embrace this idea?
John de Souza: Our approach with the OEMs is to give them an easy way to embrace this technology, and we said, we don’t want them to change the car, we don’t want them to have to change what they do. So the way we work with them is they continue to offer their fixed-battery…
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