Participated · Series A · Oct 2024

Treehouse has built AI models that predict job duration and material needs to minimize truck rolls for residential electrical work, focusing initially on EV charger installs. The company asks customers targeted questions and photos, can do virtual visits, and only sends a truck when necessary. Treehouse is licensed as an electrician and serves as the lead contractor, with independent electricians working as subs; it also employs electricians in California and Colorado. It operates in 40 states today and plans to be in all 50 by the end of the year, and intends to hire electricians in six to eight additional markets. The startup competes with Qmerit, Kopperfield, and Zero Homes and has partnerships with CarMax, Holman, Emporia, Quilt, and ChargePoint. Recent financing will be used to hire engineers and improve the company’s automation and quoting models as it expands geographically. Treehouse is a Detroit-based electrification company that delivers turnkey installations for home EV charging and is led by CEO and co‑founder Eric Owski. Its core product is an Installation-as-a-Service offering that pairs a proprietary network of electricians with automated permit documentation and end-to-end customer journey management. Treehouse's pricing technology provides instant, guaranteed quotes for home charging installation at the point of sale or via API, allowing installation costs to be integrated into vehicle financing. The company also compiles every federal, state, and local incentive for home EV charging to help owners maximize incentives and rate plans. Treehouse intends to use new funding to expand its Installation-as-a-Service to more than 30 states in the next 12 months and to invest in software to extend the offering to other electrification products. The company raised $10M in this funding round.

Participated · Series A · Sep 2024

AmpUp provides a smart EV charging platform and energy management solutions aimed at simplifying charging and balancing energy usage. The company operates a network of thousands of EV charging stations deployed for customers across North America, including JLL, CBRE, Domino’s Pizza, Goodyear, Under Armour, and Hilton. Led by CEO Tom Sun, AmpUp focuses on technology that supports a cleaner, smarter grid through intelligent charging and energy management. With the completion of its Series A, the company plans to accelerate market expansion and continue innovating within the EV charging sector. The round reinforces AmpUp's position in the commercial charging market and supports its ongoing product and go-to-market initiatives. AmpUp, founded in 2018 and based in Santa Clara, California, provides comprehensive EV charging services in North America. The company operates a platform and services for electric-vehicle charging deployment and management. In December last year Hyundai Motor acquired a minority equity stake in AmpUp, reflecting strategic investor interest. AmpUp previously received an investment from Hyundai's Cradle team in 2020 (amount undisclosed). Beyond those disclosed investments, the article provides no revenue, user, or other operating metrics. No explicit future product plans for AmpUp were detailed in the article. AmpUp is a Santa Clara, CA-based provider of an electric vehicle (EV) charging operating system. Its platform manages a network of Level 2 and DC Fast chargers deployed across North America for customers including JLL, CBRE, Domino’s Pizza, Goodyear, Under Armour, and Hilton. The company reports its network represents over 30% of all networked Level 2 charging stations in Connecticut and over 94% of all private chargers in the state. AmpUp also reports a 96.4% charge session success rate and nearly 100% system uptime across its integrated network. Led by CEO Tom Sun, AmpUp plans to deepen its presence in Connecticut by opening a new office in East Hartford in early 2024. In December 2023 the company received a $1.7M grant from the State of Connecticut’s Public Utility Regulatory Authority to support EV charging demand flexibility. AmpUp offers a proprietary EV charging operating system that centralizes management of multiple charge stations and locations, simplifies charge scheduling, and optimizes energy use. The platform provides increased visibility into key charging metrics and infrastructure control for organizations and drivers. AmpUp's software has been deployed across North America and Europe and serves customers including JLL, CBRE, Cushman & Wakefield, Citizens Bank, Hilton Garden Inn, and Holiday Inn. The company plans to accelerate fleet electrification by making smart charging solutions easier to scale and implement. A strategic investment and collaboration with Holman is intended to integrate AmpUp's charging data with Holman's vehicle operating data to reduce data fragmentation, mitigate fraud, and eliminate visibility blind spots for fleet operators. AmpUp is a Cupertino, CA-based software company and network provider that builds EV charging solutions for drivers, hosts and fleets. Its platform enables businesses and property owners to efficiently manage multiple charge stations and locations from a single interface. AmpUp operates across North America, including all 50 U.S. states, Canada, Mexico and Puerto Rico. The company's network and software have been deployed for customers such as JLL, CBRE, Cushman & Wakefield, Hilton Garden Inn and Holiday Inn. The business is led by CEO and co-founder Thomas Sun and combines network services with charging management software. The article does not disclose revenue, user counts, or other financial metrics.

Participated · Equity · Oct 2023

Formant provides a data collection and assessment platform that centralizes the complex sensor data produced by deployed robots and brings humans into the loop for managing those assets. The product is hardware-agnostic and supports a wide range of platforms including flying, underwater, mowing, delivery robots, quadrupeds and bipeds. Customers include Blue River (John Deere-owned), security robotics firm Knightscope, and BP. The company reports platform usage at scale, with customers operating on the platform with tens of thousands of robots. Financially, Formant recently announced a $21 million funding round led by BMW i Ventures, following an $18 million Series A announced last January. The new capital will be used to accelerate go-to-market efforts as the company expands from underserved sectors like agriculture toward more mature categories such as warehouse and manufacturing. Formant offers a unified platform that combines remote-controlling of autonomous robots, analytics, and tools to inspect and debug robot behavior (branded as “observe”). The product focuses on operation, assists (teleoperations) and analytics workflows to measure fleet ROI, assist frequency and performance trends. Formant intentionally does not build autonomy itself but integrates data across heterogeneous vendors such as Boston Dynamics, Fanuc and DJI to give operators a single view. Founded in 2017 by Jeff Linnell after he left Google, the company began as an API enabling robots to request human assistance and expanded to a broader fleet-management solution. Its software has been used to run tens of thousands of robots. Formant plans to double headcount over the next 12–18 months, build out engineering and sales operations, expand into Europe, and is hiring in locations including Pittsburgh after acquiring a stealth teleoperations company there. Formant provides a cloud platform that collects robot "shaped data" (LiDAR, depth imagery, video, photos, log files, metrics, motor torques and scalar values) and aligns it so a single human can monitor and intervene across fleets. The software parses those streams, alerts a human "foreman" when the system is uncertain, suggests options for remediation, and turns human decisions into training data to improve automation. Formant is launching a closed beta and reports SaaS pilots across verticals including food manufacturing, heavy infrastructure inspection, construction, training animals and retail use cases. The founders and early team are ex-Googlers with prior robotics startups and acquisitions, positioning the product as a cloud layer for robotics analogous to AWS/Google Cloud for data companies. The company raised a $6 million seed round from SignalFire to fund development and go-to-market ahead of a wider customer launch. Formant sees competition from large tech companies and incumbent engineering firms, and emphasizes enterprise customization and security as differentiators.