#185 it’s electric: Beating Tesla Was the Easy Part

0:00Welcome to The Pitch, where startup founders raise millions and listeners can invest. I'm Josh Muccio. And I'm Lisa Muccio. And on the show today, we have Tiya with It's Electric. She's raising$4 million. It's electric. Boogie, woogie, woogie. You can do it. It's electric. I don't actually know this song. I want to join you, though. It's the electric slide. I know, I know. But it's one, you know, I focus more on the dancing than the singing. I don't think you even know this dance. So I don't really think it's necessary to do the dance because... Because you don't know it. It's a podcast, so nobody can see me dancing, Lisa.

0:36Lies, all lies. Anyways, less boogie-woogie, more vroom-vroom. This, it's electric, is a charger for your vehicle, an electric one. So it's pretty easy to have an electric car when you have a garage where you can charge your car. When you live in the burbs. But if you live in a city and you park on the street, where do you charge your car? What are you going to do? Well, enter. It's electric. They're putting electric car chargers on public curbs in big cities so anyone can charge anytime. But if there's one thing I know in this world, it's that investors hate municipal government contracts. Because cities are notoriously slow at everything.

1:20Which makes it really hard to scale your startup. The pitch for It's Electric is coming up after this. But first, we are hosting two live events this season. One in SF, coming up at SF Tech Week. And another one in November in New York City. We're also hosting our next taping of Season 17 in San Francisco. Join us at any of these events. Go to pitch.show slash events. Companies shouldn't have to choose between speed and control. Amex Corporate connects cards with flexible spending controls and real-time visibility to help teams adapt faster. Built to simplify, designed to scale. This is Amex Corporate.

2:05Get started at go.amex slash Amex Corporate. Terms apply.

2:14Welcome back to the pitch for It's Electric. Let's meet the investors. Elizabeth Yen with Hustle Fund.

2:21Michelle Kwok: My best deals have been the ones that I've committed on the spot. Mike Ma with Sidecut Ventures. I got strings. I'm not an easy yes. Rohit Gupta with Future Communities Capital. Sloshing money around all over the place. And Michelle Kwok with Draper Associates. We were deep in the cut for three hours. My brain just like lit up.

2:48Michelle Kwok: It's electric. Hi. Hello. How are you? Good. Hi. I'm Tia. Hi, Mike. Nice to meet you. Nice to see you. Nice to see you. Hi, Tia. Elizabeth. Hi, Elizabeth. Nice to meet you. Good to see you again. Hello. How are you? Good to see you. Good. Hi, everyone. All right. Should we get started? Let's go. All right. So my name is Tia Gordon, and I am the co-founder of It's Electric. I build functional technology for cities, and I'm here with my raspy allergies from New York City, where we're racing towards a massive problem. The 80 ,000 rideshare vehicles in New York City need to be all electric by 2030.

3:25But how many public chargers do you think we have in New York City? London, comparable population, has around 10 ,000 public EV chargers. So how many public EV chargers are in New York City? Go. A thousand. Anyone else? 100. Public. Public chargers. So we have a massive problem in New York City that we need to solve, and we need to solve it quickly. My background is also based in New York City. The biggest project I worked on before co-founding It's Electric was all of the technology for the 9-11 Memorial and Museum of the World Trade Center. People don't realize it, but there's about 200 layers of embedded technology.

4:00And what I wanted to do is take all of that knowledge that I had and transfer it into my work for energy. So what It's Electric is doing is making sure that public EV charging is as ubiquitous as a fire hydrant. We're putting chargers on curbs in cities everywhere. And the reason why we are doing this is because we need to catch up. We being the United States, we need to catch up to the UK. We need to catch up to the EU. We need to catch up to the Nordics. We are way behind. And the reason why we're behind is because the accessory power, so the power that goes just below the sidewalk and that goes through the street lamps and the lampposts in cities like London and Paris and Rome, it's the right voltage.

4:41It's 220 or 240. But here in New York and in Philly and in D.C. and in San Francisco and in New Orleans, it's too low. It's 90 volt. It's the same as what is right behind you, but you're plugging in to plug in your phone when you're here charging. And so that's why we can't quickly scale charging the way that other cities have. So what is everywhere in a city that has power at the right level that we can power a public charger from? The answer is buildings. So we designed a charger that's powered by the spare capacity in buildings. The idea came to us in a fever dream during the pandemic. We built a little cardboard and rubber prototype that I put in front of my apartment building.

5:18I submitted that to Hyundai's Open EV Innovation Challenge. They gave me my first$300 ,000 of non-dilutive, which is now a total of$7 million of non-dilutive that we've raised, to be able to do our first prototype for New York City. And guess what? It worked. We went on to beat Tesla to win the contract for the city of Boston. Uber then backed our seed round 10 months to a year ago today. we had zero curbside chargers in the ground. Today, we are live in six cities. I'm here today because I am raising our extension of our seed. We raised our seed in 2024. So we're raising an additional$4 million to get us to$14 million in revenue, to build out our team, and to carry us through as we also start our expansion into Canada.

5:58So I'm looking for investors that are looking for a return into their fund and also investors that want to make a dent in the universe with me. Nice.

6:06Michelle Kwok: So what's your revenue looking like now? Yeah, so we just turned revenue on. So our charges in San Francisco are performing to scale where we're getting around$1 ,000 per month per charger. So what does that look like for the whole city of San Francisco? What does the contract look like? We're first of a kind in every city that we go into. So when we get these city contracts, sometimes you just get straight contracts, sometimes you get exclusivity. But other cities like San Francisco built a pilot and they raised three different companies against each other to compare them. Everyone had the same starting line of January 2025.

6:3625. We chose our site. We got our contract. We got our permits in place. We went to the board. The board approved us. Four days later, we had charges on the ground. San Francisco just let us put the first two in to test. The other two companies still have not put their charges on the ground because they use a direct utility connection, which is the old school way of doing things as opposed to our building powered. So we don't have a contract with the city to answer your question, but we're going to be able to now scale to their target of getting to 1 ,000 and 3 ,000 chargers as first mover in the city.

7:03We get to put chargers on the ground and we get to keep all the revenue. And other companies can try and come and compete, but we've already proven that we can beat the competition.

7:11Michelle Kwok: Can you remind us of like the grid infrastructure? How are you doing it with buildings and are there contracts with the commercial buildings? Yeah. So literally any building, a single family home, a library, a 30 unit apartment building, any building is eligible. All you need to do is go to the basement of that building, open up the panel and see if there's two slots open. That's enough to power a dishwasher. And that's what we use to power the charger. We then run a very shallow conduit from the building below the sidewalk to the curb. It's shallow tech. It's not deep tech. It's the most simple solution possible.

7:44And we just pull the permits to be able to do so. The contrary to what you're asking is the utility connection, which is where everyone else is basically trenching 10 feet down to the high voltage utility and looking to make that direct utility connection. That requires an inner utility connection agreement, which takes 18 months to procure. and those chargers, at least in New York City, each charger costs$180 ,000.

8:06Michelle Kwok: But for them, it's one contract and they get a bunch of connections. So how does it work at scale for you? So we work where we can get 40 or so buildings from a single property developer. Usually mid-sized boutique is our sweet spot or affordable housing associations work really well. City-owned properties are also great. But at the same time, we do have wait lists on our website and we do love doing one-offs with individual buildings for people that really just want to have the chargers in their neighborhoods as well. Why can't someone take another different property and run the same shallow tech conduit from breaker to curb?

8:41You actually have just domain that no one else can run this inside New York? Well, we're not in New York yet, to be clear. We're based in New York, but we're not deployed in New York. But yeah, one is in many of these cities, we have exclusivity, five, 10, sometimes 15 years. So they can't get in behind us in any meaningful way. So as you're thinking, if another competitor comes along and tries to build the same exact hardware as we have, some cities will not let them in, number one, because they already have the exclusivity of the contract. Number two, if it's an open city where they want to let other competitors in, the timeframe to get UL certification is about two to three years.

9:13So for them to be able to get the type of hardware design that we have, they would have to be in process and be running behind us. And that's going to be a really long period of time to do that. Third, they're going to have to convince landlords that we've already installed with to rip out a profitable piece of hardware and install theirs instead or compete directly next to us. The cities don't want competing hardware. They're looking for a conformed hardware solution throughout the city.

9:36Michelle Kwok: I'm trying to understand, like, I guess, what is the difference between public charging and private? Like, for example, at our local grocery store, there are EV chargers installed. I assume that's a private deal they've done with the grocery store. talk to me about kind of those differences and is it in price or how does it? What city are you in? This is down in Mountain View, California. Yeah. So we're referring to what's known as a destination charger, something that's off street, in a parking lot, in a shopping mall. And that's perfectly fine. A public charger is something that is fully available to the public on public right of way or on public streets where drivers are already parking their cars overnight, meaning you don't have to go to a Trader Joe's or a Walmart on the weekend to charge.

10:15You want to charge in your neighborhood publicly on the streets where Curbside. Okay, okay. It's curbside. Lot charging has actually really slowed down the market because it's really not meeting people where they are. A level two EV charge is a six to eight hour affair. And you don't want to ask someone to go to a Walmart for six to eight hours and sit in the parking lot. So you want to be able to have them go home, plug in their car, wake up to have the full battery. The same experience you have if you have a garage, which is the gold standard of EV charging.

10:41Michelle Kwok: So you're not focused at all on the private charging in the lots? No, it's a saturated market. We have no desire to enter that space. even though that's faster? It's faster. It's a lot easier to bring a backhoe into a Walmart parking lot than it is to negotiate the politics of the curb. So we have a unique edge. We have a more captive audience. We have a repetitive customer, as opposed to someone that's going to just be tangentially charging for one or two hours a day while they're shopping. But I guess there's this question of what the charging needs are. If somebody goes to Walmart and charges for a couple hours and then kind of has a workflow of, oh, I charge here, I charge there.

11:21Michelle Kwok: Like, is that sufficient? Because that's what people are doing now. So we want all of the above. I want chargers at workplaces. I want chargers in people's homes where they have driveways and garages. I want chargers in airports so you can top up before you go back home. But I also want chargers for the 70 million drivers in the United States that live in cities, specifically rideshare drivers that don't have access to a driveway or a garage. that need to be able to charge conveniently where they live. The reason why Uber came in and backed us is that their drivers are losing around 20 to 30 % of their revenue every single week for the time that it's taking them to find these chargers, wait in line for these chargers.

12:01And then their use of these chargers are blocking these chargers for the use of regular drivers that are putting on less vehicle miles traveled. What cities are you in? Boston? Boston, Detroit, DC, LA, San Francisco, Alameda is where we're currently live. We'll be announcing our next two cities over the next quarter. Remind me again about the sales cycle process and how those started and how they're going now. So there's two ways that we enter cities. One is through a competitive RFP. There's been four competitive RFPs to date for curbside charging in the United States. It's Electric has won three of them, and we are in best and final offer for the fourth right now.

12:37So we are really leading this space. And the cities that we're in where we're not doing a competitive RFP or a competitive procurement process, that's where we come in and build a pilot with that city to help them figure it out in terms of how they scale that charging. Why are you three for four or four for four in these RFPs? It just comes down to everyone else is trying to do it at the utility level. No one else is trying to bid at a building level. We have a few different differentiators. Sure. Building powered. Sure. Form factor. I can show you a picture of our chargers afterwards. They're really sleek.

13:08They look like little tiny silver fire hydrants and they have no cables attached to them. So we're the only detachable cable solution in North America. This is not weird. It's just European. This already exists everywhere overseas. But in the United States, maybe Gen 1 charging was a little dumb. Maybe they made everything look like a gas pump. Maybe they didn't have to do that. Because if you're putting beautiful chargers on people's residential blocks, where they're walking their dogs, where their kids are playing, they don't want cables laying in the street. There's no cable on our charger when a car is not charging.

13:40The cable is the first component that breaks on a public charger. I'm sure we've all pulled up to a public charger, and the cable has been cut or broken or mauled or a combination of the three. So we avoid all of that by being the distributor of cables until the OEMs start to put the cables in the car, the same way they do in the EU. Can you walk me through, what is the experience charging? So I'll tell you that the experience that I had, I went to go charge a loop charger over the weekend, and it was a$2 fee just to plug my car in and a$70 hold on my credit card. And I don't even know why they would do that.

14:18It's not our official tagline, but we like to say that we're the disco and sunshine of EV charging and that we're trying to make things just better and not shitty. There's no service fee. There's no credit card hold. It's very easy. You pull up to the charger, you have the cable and then you just tap your RFID on the charger or you hit go on the app. We also have the ability to have to pay with a credit card on our chargers. And then we're working on a form of technology that allows it to basically just automatically connect via the cable that we plug and charge. So the whole idea is that we're just taking out all of the friction for charging.

14:50My favorite thing to do is just watch people use our chargers, sort of like stealth behind the bushes. And to see them just like get the cable out, plug, plug, tap, and then just go. And they're done. And there's none of this chaos. Again, like my background is public-facing technology. There's no screens that are faded because they've been in the sunlight for two years. There's not a broken push button like phone keypad that you have to punch a pin number into. That's my whole background is putting public technology in physical space that doesn't break when it's exposed to people and the elements and cities and dogs and everything else.

15:25I know you don't work for Loop. Maybe why would they put a hold on my credit card? Because they know about you. It's so weird. It was a personal thing? It's personal.

15:35Michelle Kwok: It's just you. Oh my gosh. Yeah. I have no idea. I think that the entire EV charging industry in the United States did everything as backwards. And that we are here cleaning this shit up. And this is what we're here to do. And so what are your rates for charging? Yeah, we basically do an upcharge on the base rate for the kilowatt hour. We learn this by surveying drivers. And unanimously, we want to pay for kilowatt hour. So that's how we built the system. We can change it. We can switch it up in the back end. It's very easy. But right now, let's say the base rate for energy in San Francisco is 23 cents per kilowatt hour.

16:09We charge drivers 41 cents per kilowatt hour. And that arbitrage is our profit. This is how it already works overseas. The United States got it wrong. EV Gen 1 got it wrong. And its electric is getting it right.

16:22Michelle Kwok: Do you worry, especially in true use cases, ride sharing, that the autonomous ride sharing companies will come in and not need this? My favorite question.

16:36Tia's answer to her favorite question after this.

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17:47Michelle Kwok: Do you worry, especially in true use cases, ride sharing, that the autonomous ride sharing companies will come in and not need this? My favorite question. I love this question because where will 5 ,000 autonomous vehicles in New York City charge? Well, I think Google or Zoox or whoever would, I mean, they want to own the full stack, right? So they would probably set up their own. That's a depot situation, right? If you have, let's say, 80 ,000 rideshare vehicles and they're all human driven right now and they're AV in the future, that is 26 hours of consecutive traffic through the Lincoln Tunnel if you want to send those AVs to Jersey.

18:24or that is 16 Brooklyn bridges of continuous traffic if you want to send them out to Queens. You need to put charging where the drivers and where the autonomous vehicles are, and that is in the dense populated cities.

18:38Michelle Kwok: But I guess my worry would be that since these companies enjoy being full stack, both Amazon and Google, would they work with third parties? I kind of feel like they don't for anything. They can acquire us. Is that the goal? Is that the dream? What are you thinking in a few years? What's the timeline? We have a lot of options. We see a clear pathway to IPO. We also see acquisition possibility from an AV company. We see acquisition possibility from a ride share company. We see acquisition from a utility. We see acquisition from an OEM. You look at things like Rivian's Adventure Network, right? They're putting charges up by state parks.

19:13But who is the network for cities? It doesn't exist yet. We're building the first.

19:18Michelle Kwok: If the AV market is moving so quickly and you're thinking about potential acquisition from AV, wouldn't that acquisition come pretty soon? And what does that look like in terms of like a venture return? Yeah, I don't think it's going to come that soon, to be frank, because you look at the numbers of AVs, even your peak AV cities of LASF Austin, you're still below 5 ,000 autonomous vehicles in those cities. We're not nearly at a threshold where their charging needs are that great. We're looking at more of a position for us to be in a king's seat in about 10 years across those spectrums for either IPO or acquisition.

19:51Given the political environment that we're even at the municipal level, are you seeing like a slowing of demand or slowing of process with electric vehicles writ large? No. Let's check the oil prices today and see where we are. Fair play. Yeah. But it is a question of whether this, if this resolves, like this, This could be a month quarter blip and we're looking at investments. As you just said, it's going to be a long time. I'm kind of looking long horizon, particularly in the U.S. as your footprint. Yeah, we're expanding into Canada right now as well. They're going to have 40 ,000 BYDs in market in the end of next year.

20:26We also need to make sure that even though it's not the strongest market to start in in terms of adoption, it is the most promising market, especially if we just look at California. We can drive our entire business just from that one state. We're putting chargers in cities that they have really aggressive state mandates. So that's California, that's Massachusetts, that's New York, where they have green rides initiatives that require rideshare to be electric, where they have low carbon fuel standard credits, where we're getting money paid back from the state for every kilowatt of energy that we sell.

20:55So we have tiered, stacked reasons to be able to build our model and to be able to thrive as EVs grow. Also, don't forget, cities have also pushed a lot of their fleets into being EV as a cost savings mechanism against gas. they're not going to switch back at this point. What is the cost per unit? To fabricate$2 ,000, our highest cost is installation, around$9 ,000 per unit. We get a little bit of subsidies back from our utilities usually when we install. So all in, we're around$10 ,300 per unit. Payback is around a year and a half. We're getting 40 % utilization. We're making around$70 ,000 lifetime value on that single charger.

21:31How much is a charger in a grocery store parking lot? How much do those cost? Depends. Is it a level two? Is it a fast charger? Fast charger. Yeah. I mean, a fast charger installation is usually a 10-year payback. Let's say you're buying a small lot in San Francisco to install four Tesla supercharger station. You have to pay for that real estate, and then you have to pay for the about six-figure hardware per unit cost. The delta between level two and fast charging is massive, which is why we're squarely focused on level two as our solution.

22:01Michelle Kwok: And may I ask sort of an A-hole question? Please. You got started in the pandemic. So 2020 or 2021? 2022. Okay. Roughly four years now. But you're just going live with revenue. I guess what have been sort of the blocking points to going live with revenue in these cities? Sure. 2022, we literally had a cardboard prototype. So what we've been doing is we built a unique piece of hardware that no one else has. We built our entire supply chain around it. We are now manufacturing. We've onshore. We're fully Buy America, Build America, all produced in New York City. and we've been winning our city contracts.

22:38We've been doing our land grab significantly to make sure that we're blocking competition in the cities that we go into. If I was just putting these in a parking lot, I would be in a different revenue position because I would just be putting these in parking lots everywhere and making whatever revenue I'd be making from theirs. I am putting them on public curbs, which is very hard to do, which no one else has done. So that's what we've been doing is we've been building out this massive moat and also convincing city that this is possible.

23:03Michelle Kwok: But I guess where I'm going with this question is more of, I want to understand what is sort of the life cycle in working with the city. Because yes, I understand it takes time to build hardware and yes, it takes time to get a government contract. Once you have those pieces in place and you have many cities, but it sounds like you have two chargers in SF and it sounds like I'm unclear about the number in the end, right? Like typically when I see an enterprise sales cycle is like, okay, we have one customer and now we have one charger and then we find the next customer and we have another couple of chargers, right?

23:32Michelle Kwok: Like it's a little bit more linear, but it sounds like you've got a bunch of different cities in parallel, but they've barely started. Yeah, 54 chargers across six cities in 10 months. So we've been proving out all the points to the point now where we have our permits, we have our cities, we have our host properties that we work with. Everything is lined up for us to be able to hit the big green button and go big. This may set up the question because I'd love to know your fundraising history. So$7 million non-dilutive, Uber backed you. Walk me through the non-dilutive, dilutive, and then I will ask the A-hole question, which is, if it went so well at plan and you said you've hit all your milestones, why the bridge?

24:14Sure. $7 million non-dilutive that has been awarded. We've only pulled down around 1.3 of that. Venture, 2.2 pre-seed, which allowed us to build our first product, hire our first team. That was going back in 2023. Then in 2024, we raised our 6.5 seed round that was co-led by Uber here in the U.S. and fail-up in the Nordics. All together, that gave us our two years of runway. And so why the bridge? Because we are currently in the middle of negotiating some very large city contracts, as well as pushing into our Canadian expansion. And we felt that for us to do a really strong Series A, for us to be able to have this 14 million of first revenue, that's a nice boost for us to be able to get in.

24:55So I'm going to double click on that a second. That 6.5 million round had milestones and plans. And those plans have sound like they've gone awry, right? No. So then if that were the case, then why wouldn't you have raised the right round, a bigger round then? Was the plan to raise an extension? The plan was not to raise an extension. We're raising the extension because of the... So what is the delta between what the round thesis was when the 6.5 went in and where you are today? We're buying ourselves about another 12 to 14 months to close these city contracts. City contracts take a long time to close.

25:31And that's also a great moat for us. But when they take longer, it takes us longer to actually get chargers in the ground. So we need a little bit more time to get that work in place. I'll ask one more on this and then I'll let this go. Why did it take longer from what you thought? Oh, because you can't predict the rate at which cities move. if I knew what I knew now, then I wouldn't have done any of this because it's crazy. It's really hard. It's not easy.

25:59Michelle Kwok: I mean, big props to you for getting these six cities. It's really hard. Working with government is tough. I think at the same time, like because of that, unfortunately, I'm going to be out. It's not a lack of trying and trying to get these contracts. I think you've done a phenomenal job. I think that it's too hard to predict what these municipalities will do. And you've raised a fair bit of money already. So it's pretty diluted. We typically are first check-in. So for us, I mean, coming in$8 million later is not something that actually I don't think we've ever done. So unfortunately, I'm going to sit out.

26:36Michelle Kwok: But I hope you knock this out of the park. Thank you. You mentioned that you had just turned revenue on and that starts with SF. but you've already closed all of these cities with these contracts. So what do each of the contracts look like and how are you projecting revenue for the rest of this year and onwards? So, yeah, we have two different parallel revenue streams. We have our utilization-based revenue stream, which we're looking to get around$4 million in revenue once we have the chargers up and running. What we've learned also is that it takes a couple of months for them to ripen, for everyone to kind of understand the chargers are there and just start using them.

27:06We're looking at around$6 to$7 million at the end of this year and another$6 to$7 million for 2027, which then allows us to scale and then to hit that Series A stronger. Revenue is definitely not what we've been focused on. We know that the revenue will come once we have this solution because there's no one else that we're competing with. There's nowhere else to charge in these areas. We've had anecdotes come in from people that they were ready to sell their EV and they kept it because of our charges that are being put in their neighborhoods. So we're really bullish on what we've done. And now, like I said, it's time to hit the big green button for everything to happen at once.

27:40So can I just go back to fundraising history a second? 2.2 pre-seed, what were the terms of that? Seed was - Pre-seed. Yeah, pre-seed 2.2 on seven. Seed was 6.5 on 18 post. Where are you on this raise right now? Yeah, so this is priced. We've got a million open on the four and it's on 25 pre. Gotcha. Okay. This is not a fit for us. We're definitely not the firm. For you from this perspective, of this is a fair amount of dilution and you have more to come on merits evaluation and sort of the traction and time and capital that's why I'm out that being said I live in New York I have multiple EVs I am pulling for you and I would love to stay connected literally and be the first to plug in there and I know luckily this administration is going to be a little bit more amenable to yeah to what you're building that's awesome well I'd love to get you on our wait list for New York sitting please i'm here for it all right thank you i'll do it i'm in okay i don't have a number for you but probably 50 to 100 all right thank you it's just too big of a problem there are too many cars and there's nowhere to charge them i'm gonna put a hold on your credit card for that

28:50Michelle Kwok: you know he's good for at least 70 get it 70 bucks at a time okay there's no limit on that It shows up on his Amex. Yeah, I know. Every single time that notification until like 50K hits. That's awesome. That's a lot of miles though. A lot of points. True. Thank you. I think for the same reasons as Liz and Mike, we have to be, it's really tough for us to always interface with governments. I think the dilution is a little bit tough, but I could definitely see this being a really huge business. I think it's awesome that you've been able to get a lot of these multi-year contracts locked in. I think a little bit about it is it's just the IP mode as well.

29:30Michelle Kwok: It's like it's not quite there for us yet, but I want to use the charger. I want to see the charger also. I love a good design. Alright, thank you guys so much. Thank you. Thank you. Good to see you again. Take care. Let's get this done.

29:49Well, I guess only I get a handshake. You're the only kind of handshake.

29:54Michelle Kwok: That's what you get for investing.

29:58You get a handshake and a charge. Okay, so Rohit, what did you see in this business that none of your other panelists saw? It's a pain in the ass. I think she's sort of downplaying how difficult it is to build something and get it certified and get it approved and get cities to say you can do this. And I think that's also a reason to hesitate here, but she's done it. Like, selling to San Francisco sucks. I could see like, oh, I sold to Alameda. Well, Alameda is like a suburb of San Francisco. Maybe cities like that will bite. But the fact she's got some tier one cities on there that are doing this is pretty crazy.

30:34Michelle Kwok: Yeah, that's impressive. I think she's going to crush it. We've looked at a lot of EV charging and there's going to be a lot of different models that win, a lot of different products that win. I don't see anybody doing this. So why are you not worried about the dilution or the past fundraising history? and current valuation. Dilution is not great. Current valuation, I feel like, could be higher. Lower? Higher? No, I mean, you know, for the amount of money that she's taking, like, she should be raising at higher valuations. The only way you counteract dilution is with the higher valuation. Right, but, I mean, at the same time, it makes it harder to raise.

31:12And you're like$25 million and, you know, $4 million bucks, and this will put her, what, like,$10 something,$12 total raised? and another seven.

31:23Michelle Kwok: Yeah, she's raised almost nine to date. Yeah, 8.9. A lot of discomfort there. But I don't see anybody catching up to her in the next couple of years. I mean, I could see LA, the Olympics in 2028. They're spending a ton on infrastructure. I would want to ask her, like, what does that look like? Because they're going to be sloshing money around all over the place. Yeah. Okay. I think that's a wrap. It's time for lunch. All right. Let's go.

31:57Tia walked out of the pitch room with a$50 ,000 commitment from Rohit. A Rohitment. After the break, Rohit does his diligence in the sheets and the streets. The sheets? Spreadsheets, Lisa. Okay. Rohit takes a field trip to an It's Electric charger after this.

32:23Michelle Kwok: Your heart can tell you a lot about your health. Apple Watch Series 12 measures your heart rate every five seconds with the most accurate heart rate sensing in a wearable. So your vitals app, now with heart rate variability, can tell you when something is off. And your readiness score can let you know when to rest and when to push. Hear the story in every heartbeat with Apple Watch Series 12. The features described are for wellness purposes only and not for medical use. iPhone 11 or later required. based on Apple-conducted study of heart rate accuracy, August 2026. Visit apple.com slash Apple Watch Series 12.

32:54Welcome back. A few weeks after her pitch, we caught up with Tia. Well, good morning, Tia. How are you doing? Are we on? Are we recording? We are. Welcome to the post show. Good morning, guys. I'm doing great. How are you? Doing well. Okay. So, Tia, I've been wanting to know, how was your experience pitching on the show? Oh, it was so much fun. I really enjoyed everything about it. I enjoyed all of the other founders that I got to meet. And I'm text friends with several of them now. What? Can you name who you're besties with? Dasha, who has a company, Super Cool. There's also a climate podcast called Super Cool.

33:39So I've been trying to get Super Cool on Super Cool. Yes. That's so cool. That's awesome. I like companies that you really can like wrap your head around what it is that they are delivering and building. And I definitely start to blank out when we're talking about like middleware AI wrappers. Just kind of start doing like the Kermit nod. So, you know, Dasha's solution is real and it's great. So, yeah, I mean, it was just hats off, guys. It was so fun. Oh, so the way I remember your pitch is it felt intense to me. Like the VCs had some strong opinions, but you came out of the pitch room like ecstatic.

34:26Like you and I went into a green room afterwards to debrief and you were like, I love that. But it seemed like grueling to me. So tell me why did you love that? Wait, did it sound grueling in the recording? Was I being raked over the coals? It sounded like it was a lot that you were having to tackle. They were hard questions. Did it not feel that way to you? Well, that's my life. I'm a female founder who works in climate and hardware. So I get the short end of the stick every day. So that's a Tuesday for you. Okay. That's a Tuesday. Exactly. So no, nothing deterred me. I mean, like when I'm having conversations that people who all are, you know, California-based and they have garages and it's very easy for them to charge their EV, they don't understand the issues.

35:16Yeah. Or they live in New York and they don't have a car. It's a straddle that you kind of have to do to help them understand the larger problem. Yeah. That's super interesting that probably never ever is one of the VCs you're pitching your ideal customer. Sometimes they are. And that's when the conversation gets really good. But it's also like the same thing as if you're a femtech founder and you're pitching to MLVC about, you know, exactly. Problems that they're not quite aware of. Yeah. Yeah. You understand, Josh? Josh understands. Or you have a wife who shares TMI with you. Exactly. So you do understand some femtech problems.

35:59I do. Yeah. A little bit. By proxy. but you did get a commitment from Rohit in the room who was very quiet your entire pitch. And then all of a sudden he jumps in at the end. Were you surprised? He was very quiet. Just to give you some backstory there, we had had a competition or two before we were in the room and he just really understood what we were doing. So you'd been courting him? I had met him right after we closed our last round and he wasn't able to get into our last round. When we went to raise this round, I had reached back out and we were playing tag and going back and forth. And then he had said, you should go on the pitch.

36:42And I was like, oh my God, I just had a call with Josh three days ago. And it was one of those things where it was just, I love when like, where everything just sort of comes together. I don't want to say kismet or whatnot, but it's - It's fate. It was bound to happen. I love when there's little signals in the universe like that. And as a founder, you need those signs that something is going in the right direction. Future Communities is about transforming legacy. And for me, let's think about that broadly, moving away from gas and oil, rethinking how we distribute energy in cities. This is what we're going after with this electric, And those are the investors that we want.

37:24It's hard for me to be in a portfolio next to like, you know, healthy dog food. What, you don't care about dogs, Tia? I love dogs. I will sell really healthy dog food and I will crush it after this because that sounds a lot easier.

37:47than winning large municipal major city contracts and installing infrastructure that's basically moving electricity between buildings and cars. So yeah, dog food sounds amazing. All right, so back to the Rohit story. After the show, you had another call with Rohit. How did that go? It was great. Rohit told me he went to use the charger. So I borrowed a friend's car and drove out to your one, uh, one of your two chargers on Herman Street in San Francisco. Today's our experiment. You have an it's electric charging cable. We are preparing to charge. Plug charger in. Press start charger. Boom. Charging.

38:31Cool. Sick, dude. Car is intact. For now. Burn out. Happily, his car didn't explode. No, it won't. I guarantee that it won't. Don't know until you try. We are UL certified. We have every certification under the sun. But I told them, I was like, look, it's a startup. There's a chance your car might explode. No, no, no, no. I'm just bracing people for worst case scenarios. So, yeah, it was flawless. It worked. It was 35 sets a kilowatt hour, so significantly cheaper than Tesla. supercharger, which I think is what he normally uses. Anyways, I get it. Totally makes sense. I see where you fit in the market.

39:13Yeah, happy to join. You take 50K from me? I would love to take 50K from you, yes. Handshake. Handshake. Did Rohit sign a wire? Yes, he is wired in. We are done and dusted. He is on the cap table. He gets my investor updates. We text each other. I am so happy. Another bestie. Yeah. At what valuation? $25 million pre-money valuation. So we're raising$4 on$25 ,000. And Rohit came in at$50 ,000. Awesome. Congratulations. Thank you, guys. Thank you for making that possible. I'm so excited. Yeah. Well, you know, maybe it would have happened anyway, but maybe we accelerated it. We charged it. Yeah, we charged it.

40:00Okay. So how's the rest of the round going? It's going well. at the time of this recording. I'm just going to see what the New York Times headlines are today. What's going on in the Middle East?

40:15Okay. So we're still at war. And then the next Google search that I will do is oil prices. Oh, we're up. So yeah, the raise is going great. Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. We're really excited. We actually have had an influx of new interest from investors who are foreign, mainly from countries that are reliant on Middle East oil and who have high levels of EV adoption that are just skyrocketing right now. So we're really excited. We've closed a million on the round so far. On the three that's open, we have 4.1 in diligence. Okay. Awesome. Congratulations on that. Well, we all know that's not a close. Yeah.

40:58Yes, yes. I hear you launched in a new market. The greatest city of all time? Philadelphia? Clearly this was written by our producer.

41:15Yes, so It's Electric has won the award for the city of Philadelphia. We have a 10-year exclusive right to deploy on curbside there. Wow. It's for the largest deployment of curbside in the country. Philadelphia wants up to 1 ,000 chargers. Wow. We announced it the way I always imagined, where I called Historic Philadelphia, and I asked for a Betsy Ross impersonator. Of course you did. We put one of our chargers just standing in front of Betsy Ross's house, and I had this amazing historic actress. I love this. She stayed in character the whole damn time, and she was charging an EV and she's like, oh, Mr.

41:57Benjamin Franklin would love this.

42:02But I chose Betsy Ross because she is a founding female. Yeah. Shout out to Historic Philadelphia. Go birds. What else you got going on? Anything you're holding back? So I'm in LA today doing this call with you because we just announced our partnership with Slate EV. If you guys don't know about Slate. I don't. They are building a sub$25 ,000 EV mini truck. They are very cool as a company. Not only are they putting an affordable EV on the streets that's manufactured here in the United States, but they're making sure that whoever buys these EVs has a very clear plan on how they're going to charge.

42:42And so we are partnering with them to be able to put chargers on the blocks of new people who have just signed up for their pre-order for their slates.

42:51Michelle Kwok: What? Yeah. So we're super excited. They're like these really cool little modular Lego style cars. You can customize color. You can do accessories. Furthermore, because we're the only detachable cable solution in North America, they are going to distribute cables for us. So that's one of the things that you can say, oh, I'm going to be doing curbside charging. I want my slate cable. And we just did a big ice cream social with them in Koreatown. And we had really cool ice cream cups that said extra sprinkles, zero emissions.

43:20And that's what it's about. It's about reaching out to communities and just creating excitement around electrification in this country. Tia, I love what you're doing. Thanks, guys. Thank you. I don't know if you know this, but we have a fund. Okay. Did you know this? I half knew it. I thought it was for baby dog food. Dog food only. I didn't know if it was for me. I didn't know if it was for me. You are outside of our price range. Yeah. it's hard because it's like, oh, well, we could throw in a 50K check. And if you end up being massively successful, it doesn't return our fund. So it doesn't, the math doesn't make sense to write small checks.

44:02But like, I'm trying to figure out a way to go on the journey with you. Well, we also have what we call spiritual investors. So, you know, if it doesn't work, I'd love to make you guys our spiritual investors and put you on our spiritual cap table. Oh my gosh. Tell me what that means. Well, we've had lots of conversations like this where I've met lovely, amazing people. But like you said, the math didn't work. But you still get the updates. You still know what's going on. You don't get a return. You get a spiritual return, perhaps. You get really good karma. Storing up my treasures in heaven. Yes.

44:38I think it makes a difference. I think that when you help people in this world, it makes a big difference. Yeah. I 100 % agree. Okay, well, at the very least, we would love to be your spiritual investors, Tia. Okay. Done. Keep us in the loop in case we are able to also be financial investors. Fiscal investors, exactly. Don't rule us out.

45:07Gosh, this is a tough one. Really like the company. I like electric cars. She's made incredible progress on the company, even though it's like not necessarily enough progress for how much she's raised. Like the stuff she's doing, the contract she's getting in the city she's getting them is really, really hard to do. Yeah, it's impressive. But the price. Yeah, but the revenue is coming soon. It looks like she hasn't made progress because the revenue is little. It just feels like she did it out of order. Typically in a startup, you raise a little bit of money, you make a little bit of revenue. Then you raise more money and you make more revenue.

45:44But like she's basically done all of her raise and is now like teed up all of these contracts to like turn on at the same time. Yeah. So she gets all of the revenue. So it's just like a chunkier. Oh, it's chunky. It's a different model, different order of doing things. I just hope being a spiritual investor comes with the truck. Oh, my gosh. I want their truck so bad. I know you do. but you can only have it if you sell the stingray. No. No offer to invest in It's Electric is being made to the listening audience on today's show. But you can invest in The Pitch Fund, where we invest alongside the VCs on the show.

46:24We're currently deploying Fund 2, and we're open to new investors through the end of the year. To learn more, go to thepitch.fund. Next week on The Pitch.

46:32Michelle Kwok: How did you land on this problem set? I read papers when I'm sad. I like to read. It's actually really therapeutic. So as a scientist, science kicks you in the balls all the time.

47:14This episode was made by Josh Muccio, Lisa Muccio, Anna Ladd, and Enoch Kim, with deal sourcing by Peter Liu, John Alvarez, and Phoebe Sun. Music in this episode is by The Muse Maker, Breakmaster Cylinder, The Firmware Rebels, Boxwood Orchestra, Night Drive 2086, Cozette, and Peter Jean and the Runaway Queen. The pitch is made in partnership with the Vox Media Podcast Network.

48:06Thank you. Stop managing software and start managing your business with one unified system. Try for free today at odoo.com slash vox. That's odoo.com slash vox.