Mohan Ponnada - NEXUS Final Round #3: DeCharge - TOKEN2049 Singapore 2025

Hey everyone, I'm Moan. I'm the founder of Dcharge and we are building the helium for EV charging. The problem is very simple, right? We looking at three times more electric vehicles on the road when compared to chargers. In next 6 months, we are looking at just one charger for every 120 vehicles.

And that problem is only going to get much bigger. This is a $500 billion market failure. But why is everyone failing though? The problem is that centralized models don't work. If you take the balance sheets of the top 10 charging companies, you'll see that 60% of their capital is locked up in real estate rentals and leases.

Right? But it proves two things to us. One, demand exists. It's off the roof. But two, centralized models cannot scale.

We've been trying for 10 years. It's not working. Dcharge breakthrough is very simple. We activate sleeping assets. But what does it mean?

what Airbnb did to unused rooms in the house. We do the same thing for unutilized parking spaces. Our hosts or property owners bring their own land. They bring their own permits. They bring their own power.

They love us because we allow them to go live and our technology enables them to go live in four to 6 weeks compared to 16 months. We allow them to go live at 70% efficiency. They love it because they get a fixed daily revenue. They earn a fixed IRRa of 50% and they own a piece of the company. Network effects are are repeatable.

We are seeing uh them coming one charger. They're buying more. They're buying their friends. We've scaled around 10 geographies through this approach and we are scaling fast. We are a movement now and community is investing in large scale projects.

The latest one we did is on point to deliver $1 million in revenue. We have 13 more in the pipeline. So with the current deployments, we are on track to deliver 2.8 8 million ARR we looking at 14.14 million and over the last 6 months we have onboarded thousand plus hosts our competition took six 3 years to get to that we have 1100 in the pipeline which is larger than most companies and we've done 470k in sales I'm a serial entrepreneur with multiple exits including a fleet electrification company so I know how to solve this problem I have lived through the nightmare of charging infrastructure I am backed by a really powerful team that comes from the likes of Tesla, Lucid, Continental, and other mobility unicorns.

And together, we know how to scale. So, we raising $5 million to get to 50% of the market leaders network at just.5% of the cost. If you're interested, here's a data room. It has all the information.

You should bet on the next big energy company in this space. Thank you for your time.

All right, judges, over to you, please. uh can you walk us through the life cycle of a host how they get onboarded with the equipment etc. Yeah. So they generally there's a very strong pull model. Uh we get a lot of referrals.

Our flywheel is the referral model and they go to our website, they buy a charger, it's shipped to them in three working days. They plug and play. We build bring the entire layer of demand, the revenue as well as the technology. So it's just between order to go live is less than 5 days.

Yeah. And you mentioned that you offer them a fixed IR. How does that work exactly? So we have pre uh predefined contracts with fleet management companies that allow us to generate demand. So we go to locations where they want us to be.

We know that there's going to be usage because they they need to service their fleets.

What about on the uh driver side? I mean how do they discover decharge? How does how how do you set pricing too for you know a given charge or a given area?

That's actually a great question. So this is a scarcitydriven market. So it is like finding water in a desert of sorts. So drivers are always looking out for the closest charger. We are seeing multiple pull mechanisms because uh if you take an example of let's say Tesla, you need to drive 10 minutes to the closest mall, stay there for an hour.

But we are seeing interesting models where people are finding charges in their suburb, parking it overnight and then picking up in the morning from the host places. And all of our charges are by default deployed onto Google Maps so that we're by default available there. But again, referrals are driving most of our usage as well because the network is saying come charge at my place and because more usage gives them more revenues.

Yeah.

Um can you tell us more about I know you said it's a referral network but the profile of the people who are deciding to become hosts is there a very specific type of individual that's coming to your website. Have you done any kind of analysis on this ICB? No actually so anybody who owns property is coming in. See the interesting trend is until now no one has packaged it together like we did. Uh we are giving them a plug-and-play solution the technology the software and the demand layer together.

So anyone who has like a empty driveway or anyone is owning an Airbnb any commercial property is kind of giving us inbounds. That's why our pipeline is so large because we are being very specific on who we want to work with in the first deployments and u yeah anyone with a property basically and who wants to make money.

So can you tell us more about this hardware that you guys ship over? Are you manufacturing it? Do you have partners?

So we did we have our own manufacturing capacity. We have assembly lines uh in Bangalore as well as Shenzhen. But we while scaling we encountered a very interesting problem of uh exports and tariffs when we were doing it to other countries. So we very quickly overcame that problem by working with local OEMs in each jurisdiction uh and doing like a IP exchange. So for their sales in our regions we deploy on their behalf uh and for in in the regions where we don't have the OEMs they deploy on our behalf but the quality and the bill of materials is signed by us.

So we are ensuring quality.

So how do you how do you ensure quality and what is like the price point of this?

So I'll just take a step back to abstract the question. The first challenge is if I'm controlling my quality centrally, it's a very big nightmare to scale because it becomes a world garden. So to for me to deploy in the US or Europe takes 100% uh tariff and other costs, right? So let's say my it's $10 cost is gloating to $30, but my local operator I'm able to acquire at $13, but the bill of material, all the materials that they use to produce it is signed off by us. So it's like already signed off.

So they have to use the same quality materials. The same thing with us. So when they get an order in Asia, we we ship it. So this allows us to ship within 3 days anywhere in the world as compared to 7 to 14 working days. curious about churn rate if you've seen any specifically or retention rate of hosts.

Well, that's that's actually a great question. Uh because our entire flywheel is the network effect and the referral bonus, we are seeing very low churn because centralized operators again have all of their capital locked up in leases and permits. They cannot pivot. So does this once they start seeing money coming through, they are just locked in. We we have not seen any churn so far.

I I know I I asked this yesterday, but refresh my memory. Where is like the main crypto component in all this? Because right now it sounds like almost like Airbnb and you know like like yeah what what's sort of the crypto component to charge?

I love that you asked this question. Uh the thing is I I believe and we have the conviction that this is the perfect use case for crypto because you allow unlock of capital across multiple markets and then you have this two-sided marketplace where ownership is easy for people to gain through tokens. So they earn revenue, they earn tokens. So if you are participating early, you get into like my community is thinking that hey they're getting into like a British petroleum or a shell early by owning equity there. On the other side all the rewards are also token and the entire finance is tokenized and the rewards are tokenized.

So uh I had a very interesting conversation with a very senior person from a regulator last year and they say that this is a perfect use case and it prime place to get into no action task force. So uh the entire flywheel is built using crypto as a toolkit rather than a buzzword.

So are you guys subsidizing host right now with like token rewards or if I'm understanding you correctly?

So our margins are very healthy. uh we are close to triple digit margins because of the scarcity. So we don't have to subsidize the rewards but we're also incentivizing them along with the the revenue that they make but the right now we're using this as an a lever. We're using token rewards as a lever to grow the network. So for the next 12 months and 18 months we want to get to 50,000 charges around the world because each port is like it's dispensing energy.

It's like an ATM and is making money. So by the time we get to 50,000 ports, we're looking at $10 million a day in revenue. So that is enough incentive for people to participate.

Is there more utility planned for the token that you guys are kind of giving right now as incentive?

Oh yeah, yeah. So the entire token economy, it becomes a network state by itself because the utilization can be paid through token. There's a value to the token. Uh in fact, we have a strategic exit could be like an ex acquisition by a very large player because we are helping them do something that they can't. When that happens, it could be like a very it could be an instrument by itself.

So we have the opportunity to define a D5 primitive if we really want to get there. Could even lead to road to becoming a stable coin of sorts, right? Like a energy back stable coin. So there are multiple things. But I think with the right minds coming together, we can always design those incentives.