Chargifi Needs MSPs for Wireless Charging Boom

Written by Lynn Haber
January 18, 2019

Chargifi is powering up the market for wireless charging as a service.

U.K.-based Chargifi, founded in 2013, is making a grab for the global wireless charging market and is looking for partners – MSPs in particular – to grow with it in North America.

Chargifi came across our radar when it announced, earlier this month at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, a partnership with Belkin International to integrate wireless charging technologies and pursue enterprise accounts. (In 2018, Foxconn, a subsidiary of Hon Hai Precision Industry, acquired Belkin for $866 million.)

Chargifi offers what it calls “Smart Charging for Business,” or smart access to power.

While we all know that wireless computing is great, often the problem with wireless isn’t connectivity but rather power, or the need to stay charged. Wireless charging changes that equation, but it’s not ubiquitous — yet.

Chargifi is on a mission to change that with its cloud management platform, which takes care of the mass deployment of smart wireless charging. Chargifi’s smart technology enables two-way communication between Belkin’s wireless-charging hardware and the Chargifi cloud-management platform, providing dashboards with analytics that give actionable insights on customer behavior, as well as diagnostics on the health of the charging spots on the network.

A BIS Research report released Friday predicts that the global wireless charging market is expected to reach almost $21 billion by 2023, a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 41 percent between 2018 and 2023.

Chargifi’s Dan Bladen

Channel Futures caught up with Chargifi CEO Dan Bladen to talk about the company’s road map and role for partners.

Channel Futures: How about you introduce us to Chargifi?

Dan Bladen: We founded Chargifi after my wife and I went traveling for six months and we kept running out of power. We kept diving into coffee shops, restaurants and hotels looking for power sockets so we could recharge and reconnect with friends and family back home. After a while we realized that we weren’t struggling with connectivity; we were struggling with power.

That’s everybody’s struggle — the need to stay charged. We believe at Chargifi that without power, nothing else happens. So if you can influence how and when people get access to power, then you have a chance to influence the rest of their journey.

Over the past few years, power has been going through a transformation. The world is going electric and electric is going wireless and we are helping to do for power what Wi-Fi has done for connectivity — cutting the cord and enabling the world to go truly wireless.

CF: Chargifi has a global presence?

DB: We’re based in London with operations in Belfast, Northern Ireland, North America, and we have a small operation in China. We’re rapidly expanding across those regions, primarily in North America and the U.K.

… We’re backed by some great investors, led by Intel Capital ($2.7 million) in 2015. Since then we raised an additional $8 million — HPE invested as part of another round we did in the spring of last year.

HPE acquired Aruba and was part of the group that perfected cloud managed Wi-Fi deployments; we do the same thing but do it for wireless power.

CF: Do you have a channel partner program?

DB: Absolutely … we primarily sell through the channel. We have a partner portal where partners and existing customers get …