How SPAN Looks to Electrify Millions of American Homes

<div class="block">Arch Rao, founder and CEO at SPAN, joined Cheddar News to talk about his company&#39;s ambitious goal to electrify 10 million U.S. homes by 2030. </div>

Closing Bell

Spend with a technology company that's focused on rapidly decarbonising buildings by making it possible to switch to fully electric alternatives of appliances like your um H VAC systems and water heaters, but also integrating new technologies like solar E V charging and batteries. How does this technology work? Uh We sit at the center of all these devices in our home. If you think about any home or any building in the world, it's powered through a breaker box or a circuit panel if you will. And we made a fairly analog device into a complete digital control system for the home. And by doing that, we're able to manage uh power being produced by the solar system being stored in your battery and appropriately allocated to the different devices in your home while completely avoiding the expense of having to upgrade the incoming service into your home from the Yes. So I want to dive a bit deeper into this because I think every American, every business arch is obviously very cost conscious right now while still wanting to be environmentally friendly. So I see that the panel has a price tag of $4500 what are the savings baked into this if someone does choose to use your product and technology? Yeah, that's a great question. So, the typical cost of having to upgrade the power lines coming into your home can range between 2.5 $1000 for above ground, uh, power lines all the way up to $30,000 in cities like San Francisco where you have below ground power lines, are we able to avoid that cost in, in a, in 100% of homes that need to upgrade their power lines to electrical? But what's making our solution and other electrification products more compelling are programs like the inflation reduction Act that have direct rebates available to low and modern income households to afford these things with no money out of their pocket at home charging. Arch clearly is very popular these days. It's what most people in fact rely on. What's the at home charging component that customers can expect? That's a great question. Uh E V charging is now the fastest growing segment of appliances in a home. It's uh it's outpacing solar and home batteries. Uh but most first time E V buyers have to contend with the fact that their home electrical system is not designed to support uh the addition of an E V charger. So we have a dynamic E V charger allows homeowners to get uh the car's charged at the fastest possible speed because our system manages the amount of current being supplied to the E V charger and other devices in your home. And I see that there is an integration with Alexa Arch. I'm sure that does make it more seamless for users. How does that work? Yeah, we've been fortunate to have Amazon Alexa Fund as an investor in us. And that's led to a lot of interesting software integrations with the Alexa voice assistant in a home. It gives homeowners the ability to interact in a more organic way with the devices in their home. Especially trying to understand how their home is powered with clean energy and how much power is being consumed with different appliances in their home. I recently raised funding 96 million. Let's talk about how you want to deploy that capital. Yeah, we are fortunate to be raising a successful round of capital from incredible investors. This is our fifth round of funding altogether. We've released about $235 million in the last 4.5 years of our existence. The primary focus for us with this new round of capital is investing in R and D so we can make our technology available to more types of homes and more types of buildings here in the US. But also to increase the channels through which we can offer our product to every homeowner that's looking to either add solar, add resiliency with batteries or potentially take that step towards a fully electric home. What's the momentum that the Inflation Reduction Act Arch has provided a company like yours that clearly can benefit customers. Uh The Inflation Reduction Act I have to say is some of the most progressive legislation we've seen in the energy space in several decades now. And the Department of Energy today is perhaps the most engaged version of the D O E that we worked with. It particularly allows us to bring new technologies to portions of the population that otherwise would not be early adopters of technologies like E V s and solar systems. It's done an incredible job of pulling forward the addressable market for us, but at least five years, if not more. Right, Arch Rau, founder and CEO of Span Arch, thank you so much for coming on the show.