Mohan Ponnada - NEXUS Startup Competition Pitch #8: DeCharge - TOKEN2049 Singapore 2025

I'm Moan. I'm the co-founder at Dcharge and we are building the helium for EV charging. If you're not familiar with uh helium, we are the Airbnb for EV charging. That's a better way to say it. The problem is very evident.

We looking at three times more electric vehicles hitting the road when you compare to chargers, right? This is only going to get bigger at this pace. In the next 6 months, we are looking at one charger for every 120 vehicles. Imagine I mean a crude way to put it, but an interesting way to say this is imagine waiting for 120 people to go to the washroom before you get a chance. And it's frustrating and each person goes there for a minute, for an hour, right?

So that's the quantum of the problem for me and and the team that we're working on. This is a $500 billion market failure. But why is this failing? Right? The problem is if you take the top 10 charging companies in the world and look at their balance sheets, you will see that 60% of their capital is locked up in real estate, permits, rentals, and bloated costs.

But it proves two things. It proves what one centralized models don't work. But it also proves two things to us. One, demand exists. Two, centralized models cannot scale.

And this is the discharge breakthrough. What we do is that we activate sleeping assets. Right? What do you what do we mean by activating sleeping assets? What Airbnb did to unused rooms in the house, we do that to unused parking spaces in properties.

Our hosts or the property owners bring their own land. They bring their own power and they bring their own permits and through our technology and the platform we enable them to go live with their charging infra in 6 weeks when compared to 16 months for a centralized player and and at 70% cost efficiency. Now the reason why all our hosts love us is because one they get a daily fixed revenue two they get a insane 50% IRRa on their investments and three they get to own a piece of the company through tokenized infra now we have seen this network effect repeat itself over and over again in our pattern so they come with one they buy one charger they buy more and they bring their friends this network effect has allowed us to scale to more than 10 geographies in 6 months and we are growing very fast. Now Dcharge is sort of a movement right now. We are not just a network.

We see that our community has seen the value in what we are building and they're very interested. They have moved on apart from individual projects we are now investing in large scale projects.

It was a nice pitch. Um what is the crypto component here though? I think Airbnb for chargers is like a good line. Yeah, see we tokenize the entire investment that the pool itself is tokenized and we deploy into infrastructure in high yield locations and then the yield is paid back. So the ownership from both the two-sided marketplace is all token based.

Uh who has tried something like this before and um if they fail why did they fail?

So far everyone in this industry is all centralized. We have central operators who are trying to replicate the British petroleums or the Exxon Mobiles to become the next fuel company. But this is how the next energy company is built. It cannot be centralized. It has to be decentralized.

So right now we are the only people doing this.

Uh you said the people bring their own land and permits. I'm curious how do do you help navigate the personal individuals who are like bringing their permits like how does that process kind of happening? So in most most geographies most geographies if you're a local resident acquiring a permit is very very simple and it takes less than weeks to get it instead of centralized company registered somewhere else to come and acquire it. So we have teams that will just help them fill the paperwork and nine out of 10 times they just go to the power office and apply and get it themselves. It's very simple.

And how do you uh maintain quality you know once the hosts are up and running?

So we centralize the charging infrastructure itself. So we have partnerships across the world with OEMs that we certify and so if someone's buying in the US they are our partner company. We ship very quickly from them but the bill of materials is approved by us.