Virta secures €85m growth funding
Electric vehicle charging platform business Virta Ltd has secured new €85 million growth funding.
The sum consists of €65m equity investment from Virta’s existing investors, led by the private equity firm, Jolt Capital with co-investors Future Energy Ventures backed by E.ON, Helen Ventures, Vertex Growth Fund, Finnish Industry Investment, Lahti Energy, Vantaa Energy, and Kotka Energy. The remaining €20m comes as a loan from Finnish government innovation investment fund, Business Finland, which sees Virta as a global forerunner in developing new energy technologies.
The Virta EV charging platform is used by over 1,000 professional EV charging businesses to operate charging networks and services in 35 countries. Together, these charging network operators constitute one of the biggest public networks in Europe. Including roaming, the network enables EV drivers with access to over 350, 000 charging points.
“The EV charging platform is mission critical for companies building global charging services. Our strong financial position enables us to secure the best growth capabilities for our partners,” says Virta CEO, Jussi Palola.
With the fresh funding, Virta aims to grow its charging transactions by more than fivefold in Europe and the Asia-Pacific region by 2025.
By 2030, Virta estimates electric vehicles will represent up to 90% of the total battery storage capacity in Europe. Connecting this battery capacity to the energy system and adjusting EV charging consumption in real-time (demand-side flexibility) are seen as one of the biggest enablers for the world to successfully multiply the share of renewable energy production, lower the cost of electricity for consumers, and increase the energy system resilience.
“Today, Virta has one of the leading platform patent portfolios with focus on energy technologies such as vehicle-to-grid (V2G), autonomous vehicle charging, and operating complex billion-scale network operations. With the new funding, we are now ready to take the global lead in making EVs an integral part of energy flexibility markets,” says Palola.
In the process, the Virta platform capacity is estimated to grow from the current ca. 2,000 MW to 12,000-15,000 MW, the size of 10 large nuclear power plants, by the end of 2025.
The funding round’s lead investor, Jolt Capital’s CEO Jean Schmitt, said: “Our strategy is to fund European growth deep-tech companies looking for a worldwide leadership. Virta has demonstrated a rare ability to combine hypergrowth, technology leadership and mature operations, enabling sustainable profitable scalability. We believe that Virta is now in pole position to win the race to platform market leadership in one of the fastest growing global industry sectors, ie EV charging and energy flexibility.”
Image courtesy of Shutterstock.