Pionix raises over €8M to unify global EV charging through open-source technology

German e-mobility technology startup Pionix has raised over €8 million to scale its open-source-based products for the global e-mobility industry. The late seed round was led by Ascend Capital Partners, with participation from Start-up BW Seed Fonds (managed by MBG Baden-Württemberg), Pale Blue Dot, Vireo Ventures, Axeleo Ventures, and additional investors.

Despite rapid development across e-mobility in recent years, EV charging remains fragmented. A growing ecosystem of hardware and software providers relies on proprietary, closed systems that often do not communicate smoothly with one another. This lack of interoperability has contributed to reliability issues, inefficient infrastructure maintenance, and charging session error rates of up to 25 per cent.

Founded in 2021, Pionix provides products that offer a shared software foundation for EV charging technologies, with the aim of improving reliability, interoperability, and long-term compatibility of charging infrastructure. In response to industry-wide challenges, Pionix initiated and has been a key contributor to EVerest, an open-source software platform that serves as a common base for charger manufacturers, charging operators, automakers, and fleets. EVerest is designed to reduce compatibility issues and support faster innovation across the EV charging ecosystem.

EVerest has evolved into a major open-source initiative in cleantech, with support from around 600 contributors across more than 70 organisations, and is used to power hundreds of thousands of chargers worldwide.

Pionix founder and CEO Marco Möller noted that reliability is essential for the e-mobility transition and that the current landscape of incompatible systems and high error rates has hindered progress. He added that open-source technology provides a sustainable way to address these challenges.

With EVerest at the core and our Pionix Cloud services and ChargeBridge hardware on top, we make it radically simpler to build, integrate and operate chargers that just work - every time. That’s what the industry needs to deliver a transition that sticks.

Pionix will use the new investment to address fragmentation in the EV charging sector by delivering open, modular enterprise products for both software and hardware.

The company also plans to accelerate the growth of the EVerest open-source ecosystem, working with its global community to deepen collaboration and support future initiatives that will shape the development of EV charging.