How I pivoted careers from design to launch a climate tech startup that's now backed by Uber
NEWS | 16 December 2024
Tiya Gordon worked in design before she pivoted to cofounded It's Electric, a climate tech startup. Gordon launched the company in 2022 after struggling to find an accessible EV charger in Brooklyn. She shared how they raised $11 million in grants and investment from prominent investors like Uber. This as-told-to essay is based on a transcribed conversation with Tiya Gordon, 45, the founder of electric charging startup It's Electric. The following has been edited for length and clarity. I'm a New Yorker and a staunch believer in public transportation. For most of my life, I never owned a car. During the COVID-19 pandemic, all the forms of public transportation I used daily were unsafe. I had to think about how I could transport my then-five-year-old and how I would reach family members if something terrible happened. I considered getting a car for the first time. I made this list: It was written in Sharpie on a piece of grid paper, and it said, "New?" "Used?" "EV???" However, I had to immediately eliminate electric vehicles from my potential options because, in 2020, there was no accessible place to charge them in Brooklyn. I realized there was a lack of infrastructure to transition to EV cars and that was the seed idea for my company. Although my career was in design, I pivoted and cofounded a climate tech startup called It's Electric in 2022. We're focused on scaling electric vehicle charging in densely populated cities. We're now a company of 10 people and we've received $11.8 million in funding and grants. Uber invested in our seed round. My best advice is to find simple solutions to big pain points and prove your work with receipts. We found a simple solution for electric charging When we started building It's Electric in 2021, my cofounder and I conducted research to determine what was preventing EV chargers from being deployed quickly and at scale in US cities. In a city like London, there are a lot of lampposts that have been retrofitted into curbside chargers because they can handle 220 to 240 volts of electricity. In the US, the power feeds in our lamposts are typically much lower, at 110 volts. If we wanted to have lamppost chargers, we'd need to upgrade the utility main and corresponding interconnection agreement, load analysis, transformer, submeter, and customer connection box. We discovered that one asset in cities, that has plenty of power ready to go, is buildings, which we can use to power public chargers. If a library, home, or commercial building agrees to power a public charger, we share revenue with that building to give them passive income as an incentive. It's a very simple idea. We say it's not deep tech, it's shallow tech. Running a pilot helped get investors on board Our business started with just us two founders, but after we raised a $2.2 million pre-seed round in May 2023, we hired our first two employees. During our pre-seed stage, multiple investors told me that our idea was so simple that it must not work, or surely someone else was already doing it. We had to prove that a simple solution could be effective. One way we did that was by getting our pilot off the ground in 2023. We secured our partnership with Hyundai after winning their EV Open Innovation Challenge. Winners were selected based on their potential to expand market access to electric vehicles. We knew we needed to test in the real world and in a notoriously hard-to-open city. So we approached the New York City Economic Development Corporation to ask if we could pilot our technology on their buildings in the Brooklyn Army Terminal. After much work, this became our first pilot and was crucial to landing investment. Our work on this pilot was so successful that EDC launched a brand new program based on our pilot. Have receipts and discuss your wins Our pilot demonstrated that our solution offsets emissions, and we could collect data from the demo to show it was scalable, low-cost, and quick to install. The pilot meant I could provide investors with proven results. We'd gone beyond what investors expected of us, which placated their queries and also attracted investors we hadn't yet spoken to. Having a small-scale demonstration of your solution is more helpful in pitching to a large corporation than trying to sell a concept. It meant we were able to demonstrate a Series A level of progress at a pre-seed level. So many investors said, "If it is so simple and such a good idea, then why aren't others already doing it?" My answer was, "Because no one else is doing it, we are the first." My advice to founders is to be tenacious but make sure you have the receipts. We talked about our wins, such as prize nominations and media acknowledgments, to show investors that, by the jury of peers, our solution is winning. Uber invested in our seed round In July 2024, we closed our $6.5 million seed round, which was co-led by a Nordic fund, Failup Ventures, and Uber. Now, we're a team of 10. Related stories Our involvement with Uber began when we met representatives from the company at a conference. Everyone thinks of companies like Uber as big corporate giants, but we started our partnership with them by chance. It wasn't a sales or business meeting; it was just two optimistic people working in transportation who had a great conversation. A big challenge to Uber's zero-emissions goal is that Uber drivers live in cities and don't have garages, so it's really hard to charge electric vehicles. We provided a cheap, fast solution for urban drivers to charge electric cars. Uber needed more drivers to adopt electric cars to reach its goals, and we pitched ourselves as that stepping stone. A series of productive conversations helped us build this partnership. Having Uber support our solution has been a great validation for our startup. It's also meant we've had access to smart people on their team to understand different policies and how we can help meet city goals. My advice for founders who want to develop relationships with established companies is to try to solve problems for other people. Don't say you want a partnership because of what it can do for your startup, but put yourself out there as the problem-solver for a larger corporation. You want to find their pain point and point out that there isn't a solution that's already in the market.
Author: Charissa Cheong.
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