Every great company has an origin story. Ours starts in an underground garage in Munich.
The Problem That Started It All
In 2017, HeyCharge founder Chris Carde tried to charge his electric vehicle in his apartment building’s underground parking garage. What should have been simple turned out to be anything but. Installing charging infrastructure in the building presented enormous obstacles — from connectivity issues underground to the sheer cost and complexity of getting a networked wallbox operational in a shared parking facility.
Chris recognized immediately that this wasn’t just his problem. As electric vehicles became more mainstream, millions of apartment dwellers across Europe would face the exact same challenge. The buildings where people actually parked their cars overnight — underground garages, multi-story parking structures, shared lots — were precisely the places where traditional charging technology failed.
From One Garage to Another
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the team found themselves working out of a literal garage, experimenting with different tools and technologies to solve the problem Chris had experienced firsthand. There was a certain poetry to it: a company born from frustration in an underground garage, being built in a garage above ground.
The team identified a critical gap in the market. Apartment buildings desperately needed charging infrastructure, but every existing solution was too expensive, too unreliable, or too complex to deploy at scale.
Three Obstacles
The company initially built a management platform for property owners alongside driver applications and standard wallboxes. But they quickly encountered three major obstacles:
Reliability. Traditional wallboxes depended on constant internet connectivity. In underground garages — the very place where most residential charging would happen — connectivity was terrible or nonexistent.
Complexity. Installation required multiple technician visits: network planning, electrical work, certificate provisioning, backend configuration. Each step added time, cost, and potential failure points.
Cost. The wallboxes themselves were expensive, partly because OCPP support required substantial radio and computing infrastructure built into every unit. And then there were the ongoing costs: telco fees for cellular connectivity, backend service subscriptions, maintenance contracts for network equipment.
Underground garages compounded every one of these problems. Inadequate mobile network coverage meant traditional RFID card systems were necessary as a fallback, adding inconvenience for residents while companies paid ongoing connectivity fees that eroded already thin margins.
The Breakthrough
The team realized they needed to rethink the problem from first principles. Instead of trying to force internet connectivity into environments where it didn’t work, what if they designed a system that didn’t need it at all?
That insight led to SecureCharge — HeyCharge’s patented technology that enables charger authentication and management via Bluetooth, with asynchronous data synchronization when connectivity becomes available. No internet required at the charger. No RFID cards. No expensive network infrastructure.
Writing EV Charging History
By 2022, the team had relocated to a converted car repair shop — still a garage, but a bigger one. The mission remained the same as the day Chris couldn’t charge his car: make EV charging work in apartment buildings, simply and affordably.
From a frustrating experience in an underground garage to building the technology that could bring EV charging to millions of apartment dwellers — that’s the story of HeyCharge. And we’re just getting started.
Be part of it when we write EV charging history together.