EV battery startup Ample raises $160 million in latest funding round
Khaled Hassounah, Ample CEO & Co-Founder, joined Yahoo Finance Live to discuss the company's latest funding round and his outlook for the EV sector.
Video Transcript
ADAM SHAPIRO: The CEO and co-founder Khaled Hassounah is joining us with news that you just raised another $160 million. Tell us how that's going to help you, because as I understood from your last visit, what you provide is a very quick, 10-minute swap of a device that charges the battery and is interchangeable with all kinds of platforms.
KHALED HASSOUNAH: That is correct. And now, when we last were on we talked about launching Ample, announced the partnership with Uber to a first pilot deployment in the Bay Area. Since then, we've worked on cementing some partnerships so that we'll be able to scale it across the US, across Europe, across Asia, since we're ready for prime time. We can really get people to move to electric very quickly. And this round of financing will give us the capital needed for us to go and execute on that.
EMILY MCCORMICK: And Khaled, when you think about your growth strategy, how many of these swapping stations would you actually need to put in a given area to make sure that you're there when a driver does need that new battery?
KHALED HASSOUNAH: That's a very good question. Our model works more like a gas station in the sense of people come in and out very quickly. So you don't need a lot of them because you have a lot of cars just parked waiting upon them. So typically, we need a small number in a city. Our number is between five and 10 in a Metropolitan area, which is what we started with in the Bay Area. And that gives you enough coverage so you can get started.
And as you have more and more vehicles being added, of course, you can keep adding more to increase your capacity. So six weeks is typically our planning and deployment phase for a city. So within six weeks, you can get a charge anywhere within 10 minutes.
ADAM SHAPIRO: Khaled, the key here, though, is that your platform works with just about every EV out there, is that correct? Whether I have a Tesla, whether I have a Leaf, whether I have a Lucid automobile, if they ever actually do deliver them, I can use this?
KHALED HASSOUNAH: Correct, correct. Now the car has to come equipped with an Ample system. But we've built the system so that it is a drop-in replacement of the original battery. So in a way, from a manufacturing perspective, it's identical to installing the original battery the car was designed to work with. But when you buy the car, if you're a fleet, which is what our target customer is, you want to buy 10,000 cars, you just order them with the Ample system rather than the original battery. But then we have about 10 car models we're working with. And we're adding more as we progress and deepen our relationship with the OEMs.
