In the shared office space on the first floor of DTU’s innovation hub, DTU Skylab, founder of Gridlinx Martina Vojtkova is drawing up three employment contracts. The young company is on a roll, seeing that its solution which promises to enable car owners to connect their electric vehicle (EV) to a box, which not only charges the car, but also powers their private homes with green, cheap energy, is fully developed.
“By the end of 2024, we hope to have a finished, physical product that can be used in houses and also be shown to potential investors. So, it's like a buffer year,” Martina Vojtkova discloses about the first critical year in a startup’s life.
With an investment of over 1 million DKK in soft funding from the Innovation Fund Denmark, three of Gridlinx’s six founders are secured financially to focus on the development of the company full-time.
It also helps to be part of DTU’s well-developed ecosystem for innovation and entrepreneurship, where startups like Gridlinx get desk space, coaching and can work 24/7 alongside other ambitious teams.
Can save electric car owners several thousand kroner
What is also gaining momentum is the number of electric cars in Denmark. Today there are a quarter of a million electric cars on the roads, but in five years this number is expected to quadruple.
Electric vehicles typically have a consumption of 4,000 kWh per year. With Gridlinx's solution, car owners can achieve a cost reduction of up to 33 percent of their energy bill by a) charging the electrical vehicle during off-peak hours, b) storing the electricity in the battery pack and c) using just 5 to 10 percent of that power to supply their homes instead of power from the grid when it is expensive, usually between 17 and 21.
