The charger is the cheap part. The paperwork is the problem.
Here is a fact about electric-vehicle chargers that does not make it into the launch videos. The physical charger - the box, the plug, the thing you actually see in a parking lot - is often not the expensive part of putting one in the ground. The expensive part is everything around it: the site walk, the layout, the cost estimate, the electrical design, the proposal, the redesign after the customer says the number is too high, and the second proposal. The industry calls these the "soft costs," which is a soft word for the place where a great deal of money and time quietly disappears.
Monterra, a San Francisco software company founded in 2022, is a bet that this is a software problem. Not a hardware problem, not a policy problem, not a vibes problem - a software problem, of the specific and boring kind that has been solved before in other industries. The company builds tools for EV charging installers: the contractors and electrical firms who show up to a fleet yard or a strip mall and have to figure out, fairly precisely, what it would cost to electrify it.
The pitch is almost aggressively practical. You open Monterra, you pull up satellite imagery of the site or upload the plans, and you design the charging layout directly on top of it. As you place things, the software models the cost in real time. When you are done, it generates the outputs that used to take an engineer days: a customer-ready proposal, a bill of materials, and an electrical schematic. There is a rules engine, so a firm can encode its own quoting logic once and let the software price the next thousand jobs the same way a senior estimator would. It even runs electrical analysis on the raceways to check that the wire is sized correctly before the quote goes out, which is the sort of detail that separates software built by people who know the domain from software built by people who Googled it.
Why this is interesting, in the Levine sense
The thing about infrastructure booms is that the people who win are not only the ones pouring the concrete. They are also the ones who make pouring the concrete faster to sell. This has happened before. In residential solar, a wave of software companies showed up to handle exactly this kind of design-and-quote workflow, and it turned out that making installers faster was a genuinely good business - because installers are paid per project, and anything that lets them do more projects, or win more of the ones they bid on, is worth real money to them.
Base10 Partners, which led Monterra's $2.5M pre-seed in November 2023, said more or less this out loud: they expect EV charging to "play out as it has in industries like solar." That is the whole thesis in one sentence. If you believe the United States needs something like 30 million chargers by 2030 - the number Monterra cites - then you cannot get there by asking a limited supply of engineers to hand-draw every site layout. You get there by handing the installers a tool and letting each of them do the work of several. The tool is the constraint. Monterra wants to be the tool.
What makes the company more than a pitch deck is that its customers report the numbers you would need to see for the thesis to be true. According to a customer survey the company points to, firms using Monterra cut their lead-to-proposal cycle time by 50 to 75 percent and raised their proposal win rates by up to 50 percent. Elsewhere the company cites a 2 to 5 times increase in project throughput and roughly 80 percent time savings. These are self-reported and should be read as such. But they are the correct kind of number - not "users love our dashboard," but "we sent out proposals faster and won more of them," which is the only metric that matters in a business paid by the project.
Lay out a charging site on satellite imagery or uploaded plans; infrastructure configurations generate automatically.
Real-time cost modeling and infrastructure budgeting, without paying for expensive early-stage engineering first.
Auto-generated proposals, bills of materials, and electrical schematics - the documents that close the sale.
The founders
Monterra was co-founded by David Kim, its CEO, and Kelson Reiss, its chief product officer. Kim's background is the useful kind for this problem: he spent years on the utility and energy side, designing EV charging programs, deploying smart-grid infrastructure, and planning energy-efficiency programs. In other words, he was on the phone with the installers before he built software for them. Founders who build the tool they used to wish existed tend to build a more specific tool, and specificity is the whole game in construction software - the difference between "a proposal generator" and "a proposal generator that knows how conduit and raceways actually work." Reiss brings the product-and-engineering half, having shipped software to millions of users at larger tech companies.
There is a nice tell in how the round came together. Some of Monterra's angel investors are also its early customers - the installers themselves put money in. That is either a very good sign or a very good sales tactic, and in practice it is usually both: the people who use the thing daily decided they also wanted to own a piece of it. The round included Base10 Partners as lead, Future Climate Venture Studio (via R/GA Ventures), and Very Serious Ventures.
What you can actually do with it
If you are an EV charging contractor, the concrete offer is this: speed up your site walks with a mobile app that captures geo-tagged photos and field data, so nobody is retyping a clipboard back at the office; build a virtual quote in minutes instead of days; manage RFQs with structured templates; and hand the customer a clean, professional proposal while the lead is still warm. The company has said an AI-powered layer for organizing project information is on the way, which is the expected next chapter but not the reason the thing works today. The reason it works today is that it removed the tool-hopping - the five different pieces of software a firm used to stitch together to get from a parking lot to a signed contract.
The honest limits are worth stating too. Monterra is a small, early company - around a dozen people, one disclosed funding round, a young category. The productivity figures come from its own customers. The competitive field is less a single named rival than the fragmented, manual toolchain most installers still use: CAD, spreadsheets, generic proposal software, and institutional memory. Monterra's argument is that this toolchain is the competitor, and it is a beatable one.
Which brings it back to the caption on the logo. The EV transition gets narrated on stages and in keynotes, but it will actually be won in loading docks, fleet yards, and the back corners of parking lots - by the people holding the clipboards. Monterra makes software for those people. It is not glamorous. It is, if the solar analogy holds, exactly the kind of unglamorous that turns out to matter.