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A stirring startup story
SparkCharge’s CEO, 27-year-old Joshua Aviv, graduat-
ed from Syracuse University with a Master’s degree in
Information Management and Data Science. Like the
internet pioneers of the 1990s, he started a company in
his dorm room, which he has now brought to the point
of releasing a product. The seed that grew into Spark-
Charge was planted by one of Aviv’s professors, who
said, “If you guys want to really change the world, you
should solve the problem of electric vehicles and the
need that they’re going to have for a better infrastruc-
ture. If you’re interested in learning about this, meet
with me after class.”
Aviv took him up on his offer, and the two were soon
spending hours talking about the nascent EV industry.
“After about a month and a half of that, I put together
a plan to install charging stations along the New York
State Thruway,” Aviv told Charged. “While looking
to do that, we realized that there were other use cases
than the typical situation where an EV owner has to
wait at a charging station to charge. So, I started devel-
oping portable charging stations that could essentially
be delivered to an electric vehicle owner anytime and
anywhere they wanted; whenever and wherever they
wanted.”
In 2017, Aviv met the co-founders of SparkCharge,
Christopher Ellis and Richard Whitney, and that’s
THE INFRASTRUCTURE
when the company began to take off. “We really started
developing this technology that allows an EV owner to
get level 3 charging delivered to them, essentially at the
push of a button anywhere.”Charge, don’t tow
A great use case for SparkCharge’s system is emergency
road service. Contrary to what many non-EV-aware
consumers seem to believe, “running out of charge” is
not a frequent occurrence, but it will surely happen,
just as ICE drivers occasionally run out of gas or find
that they have a dead battery.
Emergency roadside services represent “a huge mar-
ket that’s now going to be completely overhauled for
how you should service electric vehicles.” In fact, when
Aviv spoke with Charged, he was standing inside of a
towing shop looking at three tow trucks (the company
is one of SparkCharge’s first customers). “If you’re a
towing company, you no longer have to worry about
towing an electric vehicle, which means you can now
make more money and provide a better service for that
EV ow ner.”
Instead of towing an EV with a dead battery, a ser-
vice provider can use SparkCharge’s system to charge
it up wherever it is. “It saves time, money and man-
power,” says Aviv. It’s also a much better solution for
the EV driver, for whom getting towed is probably farImages courtesy of Sparkcharge