Pull into any highway service station in Australia and the choreography is a century old: fuel, a fluorescent-lit shop, a pie under a heat lamp, a receipt. Bell Resources looked at that same slab of concrete and asked a different question. What if the stop itself was the product, and everything happening on it - charging, washing, coffee, the electricity flowing in and out - ran off a single piece of software?
That is the wager behind Bell Resources, a company founded in Sydney in 2017 by Mark Avery. It began as a plan to string ultra-fast electric-vehicle chargers across the country. It has since grown into something more ambitious: a network of what the company calls Roadside Hubs, integrated sites that combine fast charging, automated car washing, clean energy, cafes, smart retail and even energy trading, all coordinated in real time by artificial intelligence. The pitch fits on a bumper sticker the company actually uses: Clean Car. Full Charge. Great Coffee. Done.
The name01A tribute hiding in plain sight
The name is not an accident, and it is worth pausing on. Bell Resources is a nod to the Bell solar cell, the first practical photovoltaic cell, built at Bell Labs in 1954. It was the moment sunlight became a credible way to make usable electricity. Avery, who watched Australia become one of the most solar-saturated countries on earth, borrowed the reference deliberately. Roughly two million Australian households now have panels on the roof. He saw that not as a finished story but as a distribution network waiting for a business model.
The insight is quiet but sturdy: a road trip is an energy event. You arrive with a depleted battery and leave with a full one.
Do that at scale, and a rest stop stops being asphalt and starts being a grid asset. That reframing - from fuel retailer to energy operator - is the thread that runs through everything Bell Resources has built since.
What it does02Four businesses on one slab of concrete
Most founders pick a single product and defend it. Avery stacked several on top of each other. A Roadside Hub is designed to earn money in more than one way at the same time, from the same footprint, during the same twenty minutes a driver is standing around waiting for a battery to fill. That waiting time - usually treated as a problem - is the whole thesis.
The individual pieces are not new. Chargers exist. Car washes exist. Servos have sold coffee for decades. What Bell Resources is trying to do is put them under one roof and one profit-and-loss statement, so that the economics of a site do not live or die on a single line. If charging margins compress, the wash and the retail and the ad screen keep the lights on. If the grid pays well for stored energy on a hot afternoon, the batteries earn while the chargers sit idle.
The software03What the AI actually does
Every startup says "AI-powered." Fewer can say what the AI does when you plug in. At Bell Resources the answer is unglamorous and, for that reason, believable. The software layer - now branded BellX OS after the company's rebrand to BellX - handles the parts of running a site that humans are bad at: balancing electrical load so a bank of fast chargers does not trip the local grid, shaving peak demand when power is expensive, pricing a charge dynamically against the wholesale energy market, and deciding when the on-site battery should sell rather than store.
This is the difference between a car park with chargers in it and an energy business. The physical assets are the body. The software is the nervous system that decides, minute by minute, whether a given electron is more valuable sold to a driver or sold back to the grid.
04Customers, from commuters to fleets
The first customer is the everyday EV driver - the commuter who wants to charge quickly, leave with a clean car, and not stand in a concrete box to do it. But the more interesting customers sit behind them. Ridesharing drivers and commercial fleets need predictable, high-throughput charging on tight schedules; downtime is lost income. And further out, Bell Resources talks openly about autonomous and connected mobility - a future where vehicles route themselves to hubs, top up, and get cleaned without a human deciding anything. The company frames its sites as infrastructure those vehicles will need whether or not anyone is behind the wheel.
The car is the easy part. The charger, the wait, the boredom, the dirty windshield - that is the friction.
The founder05A roll-up specialist points at the highway
Avery's background is the detail that makes Bell Resources legible. He is a non-practising solicitor with a law degree and an MBA from Bond University, where he held a law scholarship in the late 1990s. Before energy, he was an operator of roll-ups - businesses assembled by acquiring and integrating many smaller ones. He has completed more than 100 acquisitions across childcare, property and legal services, including folding 89 childcare centres into a single national platform.
That history explains the strategy better than any deck could. A roll-up specialist does not think in single stores; he thinks in networks, in standardised sites, in a repeatable template stamped across a map. Applied to charging, that instinct produces the Roadside Hub: not one clever location but a format designed to be replicated. Ask Avery about work-life balance and he waves it off. "As an entrepreneur, a work life balance doesn't really exist," he has said. "I don't really consider it work."
Money06Small team, capital-heavy dream
Here is the tension at the centre of the company. Building a national network of physical sites is one of the most capital-intensive things a business can attempt, and Bell Resources is doing it with a small team and, so far, modest funding. It has raised roughly USD 2.3 million across five rounds, including a USD 300,000 Series A that closed in December 2022. Investor names are not public.
The gap between ambition and balance sheet is real, and it is the honest question hanging over the company. The counter-argument is that the software and the site template are the hard intellectual work; the concrete can be financed, partnered or built out in stages once the format is proven. Whether that holds is the story still being written.
The market07Where it fits, and who it is up against
Australia's EV charging map is filling in fast. Evie Networks, Chargefox, Tesla's Supercharger network, JOLT and the fuel majors bp and Ampol are all planting chargers. Against that field, Bell Resources is making a deliberately different bet. It is not trying to win on the largest number of plugs. It is trying to win on the site itself - to make the destination worth choosing because you can charge, wash, eat and leave in one uninterrupted stop, all run by software that also earns from the grid.
The comparison Bell Resources invites is less with a charging company and more with the reinvented forecourt that fuel retailers themselves are chasing. The difference is where each side starts. The majors start with fuel sites and bolt on chargers. Bell Resources starts with charging and software and builds the site around them. Same destination, opposite direction of travel.
The bet08What it is really building
Strip away the branding and Bell Resources is a bet that the petrol station - a fixture so ordinary we stopped seeing it - is about to be replaced, and that whoever designs its successor owns valuable ground. Not just the charging, but the twenty minutes, the data, the ad screen, the energy flowing in both directions. The company describes culture in one word, Avery's word: unity, "taking a unified step towards a common goal." For a firm trying to do several things at once on a single slab of concrete, it is a fitting choice.
Whether eight people in Sydney can build a national network is the open question. But the idea is portable, and that is often what matters first. The future forecourt is a stack, not a store. Bell Resources is trying to be the company that proves it.