Einride bets $38M on EV charging as it scales electric trucking

Swedish electric and autonomous trucking company Einride has agreed to acquire EV charging startup Flipturn in an all-stock deal worth $38 million.

The acquisition — Einride’s first as a publicly traded company — will expand its EV charging ecosystem as it works to scale its electric trucking business. The deal is expected to close this month. Flipturn, which employs 17 people, will continue operating with the same team, a company spokesperson confirmed.

Flipturn, founded in 2022, raised $15.5 million in venture capital to build an EV charging software platform that can communicate with any EV charger over the Open Charge Point Protocol, the industry standard for communication between EV chargers and management systems. The software monitors the health of charging infrastructure, pulls in data such as vehicle battery levels, driving history, and routes to help companies better manage charging, and integrates with on-site solar and energy storage systems.

Einride CEO Roozbeh Charli said the “acquisition is a decisive step in our U.S. scaling strategy.” The deal will also make Einride a more vertically integrated company, allowing it to offer customers not just electric trucks but also the charging software needed to run them more efficiently and reliably.

That’s an attractive, and potentially influential pitch to future customers that want to add electric big rigs to their fleets, but may be apprehensive to do so.

Einride is perhaps best known for its unusual-looking cabless autonomous pod-like trucks. But its biggest revenue driver is its fleet of 200 heavy-duty electric trucks, which it operates for companies including Heineken, PepsiCo, and Carlsberg Sweden in Europe, North America, and the United Arab Emirates.

The company, which merged with a blank-check company and debuted on Nasdaq in June, recently landed Amazon as a customer. Amazon isn’t buying Einride’s trucks; instead, Einride owns and manages the trucks —through its own Saga AI software — which can be used by drivers in Amazon’s Relay freight network. Relay, which launched in 2017, is an app that truck drivers use to book hauling gigs with Amazon.