When Porsche partnered with venture firm UP.Labs, the mission was to create six start-ups over three years, all designed to solve the German automaker’s biggest problems and be compelling enough as a standalone business to attract other customers. .
On the Porsche list: software that helps manage and automate the performance of electric vehicles. Pull Systems, the first startup to emerge from the partnership, has developed a software product that the two companies say can solve it. Pull Systems, which is showing at SXSW 2023, also announced that it raised $5 million in a seed round led by UP.Partners.
“Cars are becoming a combination of software and a battery, and ultimately battery performance,” said Katelyn Foley, president of UP.Labs. “And OEMs really need to get to a place where they can understand both to stay competitive, because the things they’re really good at are actually the most basic parts of the car.”
Pull Systems is a software-as-a-service platform that provides performance management software to electric vehicle suppliers, manufacturers and operators. The product is not a battery management software (BMS), which is technically responsible for collecting battery data and communicating with the battery management system. The startup’s software is a compliment, explained Henry Furman, former product manager at UP.Labs, now product manager at Pull Systems.
And it has already been extended to the Porsche Taycan vehicles currently on the road.
The startup developed a library of machine learning models that can analyze and predict vehicle behavior such as driving and charging across the entire Porsche fleet. That kind of information, along with external data like weather patterns and road conditions, can be used to predict and then inform automakers or EV owners when a vehicle needs maintenance, when to implement over-the-air software updates, and even push after. sales revenue.
The software tracks and collects data from every vehicle in the Porsche EV fleet, which can also help identify performance issues that could be resolved with new firmware or determine the best second-life option for the battery when it reaches the end of its life. useful, Furman added. .
Ultimately, the company wants the software to be automated using machine learning tools.
“Our real vision here, within the complexities of electrification, is for cars to really be able to take over some of the management of their own powertrain,” Furman said. “We see a great opportunity for us to automate a lot of what is essentially rule-based type of conclusions for these different software updates.”
For example, the software could identify a weather front entering a certain area and issue a software update that helps optimize batteries, he explained.
That’s a compelling prospect for Porsche, a company that plans to expand its lineup of electric vehicles beyond the Taycan in the coming years, including the Macan in 2024, the 718 in 2025, a Cayenne and a yet-to-be-named full-size. all terrain.
Pull Systems plans to add several more automakers to its service over the next year.
The Up.Labs connection
UP.Labs is not a venture company, although it was created and operates in parallel with UP.Partners. It is also not a corporate accelerator or incubator, although it is creating new companies and working with corporations. The company, which was launched during UP Summit 2022 in Bentonville, Arkansas, is structured like a venture lab with a new type of financial investment vehicle.
Porsche is its first corporate partner. Foley told TechCrunch that more corporate partnerships will be announced this year.
“The way our model works is that we identify big areas of friction that touch high-value groups, and it’s the confluence of those two things that has to be in place,” Foley said. “So someone feels the problem acutely and touches a lot of money, and we won’t consider anything outside of those two areas.”
At first, the company dissects the corporation to find all the problems. UP.Labs identified 217 at Porsche and narrowed them down to a set of problems and complementary ideas that would solve them. An investment committee that includes UP.Labs, Porsche and UP.Partners narrows them down to the final pair that the team will begin incubating.
Under the three-year agreement with Porsche, UP.Labs will establish six companies, or two a year, with new business models focused on the automaker’s core activities, such as predictive maintenance, supply chain transparency or digital retail, according to Lutz Meschke, deputy president and executive board member for finance and IT at Porsche AG.
