Rocsys, the provider of autonomous robotic chargers for electric vehicles, today announced it has raised $36 million in fresh funding to expand its charging solution to follow the growth in EVs and self-driving vehicles.

The company said that SEB Greentech Venture Capital led the Series A funding round with participation from returning investor Forward.One, and additional funding from the Graduate Entrepreneur fund and the European Investment Bank, which is a global authority on climate impact finance.

Founded in 2019, Rocsys develops systems that use soft robotics and artificial intelligence computer vision to automate charging for electric vehicles. A car, truck or tractor needs only to drive up next to a robotic charging station and a robotic arm and a camera does the rest by detecting the charging port and automating the docking process. No human intervention is needed.

Crijn Bouman, co-founder and chief executive of Rocsys, argued that with the mainstreaming of EVs and the coming adoption of automated vehicles, it doesn’t make sense that most charging stations require people to get out and charge themselves. Worse, for fleets of autonomous cars, it doesn’t scale well and it’s less safe.

“With more autonomous transportation solutions hitting the market and the work site, the manual charging process just doesn’t make sense,” said Bouman. “Why should a car that can drive itself need a human babysitter to charge?”

By making sure that robots get the work done, humans don’t need to worry about the logistics, Bouman said. This could benefit both consumers and large business fleets. For businesses, it means that they can have their infrastructure grow at the scale that they need and it gets out of the way of their workers and does the job itself.

Of course, there’s also a huge benefit for autonomous vehicles, because it reduces the need for human attendants during the charging phase. With these vehicles already driving themselves from one side of the city to the other, working in shipyards and around warehouses, it makes sense that they should also have a robotic charging solution that allows them to dock and charge up.

“What’s unique about our approach at Rocsys is that we’ve built a system that can easily upgrade existing charging infrastructure to make it autonomous,” said Bouman.

Rocsys has already been working with some of the world’s largest automakers with the intent of getting autonomous charging standardized. It also partnered with SSA Marine Inc., a privately held marine terminal operator, which uses the technology to charge part of its electric tractor fleet at the Port of Oakland. Hyster-Yale Group Inc., a forklift and materials handling truck manufacturer, partnered with Rocsys to implement autonomous charging for some of its electric trucks.

The company has also taken a principal role in setting international standards for robotic charging, working with the International Electrotechnical Commission, CharIN (the Charging Interface Initiative) and ROCIN-ECO, a consortium that includes Audi AG, Porsche AG, BMW AG, Ford Motor Co., Mercedes-Benz Group and other major automakers. The aim is to equip fast charging stations along European highways.

Bouman said that with this funding, the company will continue to expand its presence in Europe and bring more operations, customer service and manufacturing into the United States. The company also intends to expand its team dedicated to partnering with automakers.

As for new platform features, Bouman said the funding will also go toward features such as automated parking guidance, new software integrations, and additional diagnostics and teleoperations support to make it a more seamless experience.

Image: Rocsys