BMW invests $13 million in electric car charging company in Bulgaria

Car maker BMW recently invested US$13 million in Ampeco, a Bulgarian startup that develops software solutions for electric car charging. Given that BMW’s efforts lately have been focused around electric cars, mainly, it’s understandable why the company’s iVentures division chose such a company to invest in.

BMW seems to like the idea behind the Ampeco software, which works on any type of charging hardware

Ampeco has already been on the market for four years and develops software solutions for various partners in Europe to manage charging stations. Its software is compatible with various types of charging stations, making it a universal solution in this field. This means that it is easy for companies offering charging stations to implement operations management systems for charging station usage, controlling the power supplied to the socket and even managing fleets of electric cars.

The solution sold by Ampeco can be used by public institutions as well as private companies or residential complexes, and is easily scalable according to customer needs. The advantage of this solution, however, is that you don’t have to use one company’s hardware. You can install multiple charging stations from different brands and manage them all from a single application, and the software is even compatible with renewable energy production hardware such as photovoltaic panels.

Ampeco has 120 customers in 45 countries and manages 62,000 charging stations through its software at the moment.

“As electric car sales grow, access to charging infrastructure becomes more important than in the past. Ampeco’s hardware-agnostic software solution enables customers to launch and grow their charging networks quickly.”, said Baris Guzel, BMW iVentures partner.

Charging infrastructure has been one of the stumbling blocks most electric car manufacturers have encountered in many parts of the world. Unlike Tesla, which has set up its own network of chargers in the US and recently in Europe, most brands are dependent on third-party solutions. With a software solution such as Ampeco to manage the stations, companies that install them could reduce costs and effort by using multiple types of stations in the same network.