SplitEV: SplitEV scaled back its geographic reach to focus on 'Liquidity Cells' and discovered a massive, untapped EV ch

SplitEV is the Airbnb of EV charging — a software-orchestrated peer-to-peer marketplace that transforms idle private chargers into a bookable, distributed charging network. For the 80% of EV drivers without home charging, SplitEV delivers reliable, affordable access right in their neighborhood. For property owners — from homeowners and landlords to churches, hotels, and commercial lots — it turns an underutilized electrical asset into a new recurring revenue stream with zero effort. At scale, SplitEV is building something far larger than a charging app: a decentralized infrastructure layer that expands national charging capacity without new construction, reduces strain on the public grid, and accelerates mass EV adoption by solving the access bottleneck that hardware alone cannot fix.

Abi Odugbesan, Founder & CEO — New York, New York — in their own words, from their Builders application. Lightly edited for length; on the record.

The unusual bet

The bet that worked was actually a decision to stop doing what was working on paper. We expanded to 9 states early because geographic reach looked impressive in pitch decks and investor updates. But the data told a brutal story hosts were averaging less than one session across their entire lifetime on the platform. We had breadth with no depth. So we made the counterintuitive call to stop chasing new states and restructure our entire go-to-market around what we now call a Liquidity Cell — a 1.5-mile radius with 8 to 12 verified active hosts maintaining 90% peak-window availability. One dense, reliable cluster where a driver can open the app and always find a charger beats 400 scattered pins on a map. It meant our numbers temporarily looked smaller, but the unit economics and repeat booking rates inside those cells proved the model. That decision changed everything from how we allocate resources to how we talk to investors. Density is the product.

The hardest lesson

We chased geographic breadth too early 9 states sounded impressive on a slide, but a charger in Birmingham and a charger in Newark don't create a network. The hardest lesson was that density is the only metric that matters for a charging marketplace. One neighborhood with 10 reliable hosts within a 1.5-mile radius is worth more than 400 hosts scattered across the country. We restructured our entire go-to-market around that realization.

What surprised them

The entire company started from a text message. My neighbor asked if she could pay to charge her EV at my house and I realized I'd been living on both sides of the same broken market: a driver overpaying 6x at public chargers and a property owner sitting on an idle charger 22 hours a day. The counterintuitive part is that the biggest EV infrastructure gap in America doesn't require a single new charger to solve millions of private Level 2 chargers already exist, they're just locked behind driveways nobody thought to open.

The misconception

Everyone assumes EV charging is a hardware problem that gets solved by building more stations. It's actually an access and utilization problem. The U.S. already has 4 millions of private chargers the infrastructure exists, it's just invisible and inaccessible. SplitEV doesn't build chargers; we orchestrate a distributed network from supply that's already installed and sitting idle. The real moat isn't hardware, it's the software intelligence layer that makes a fragmented collection of private chargers behave like a reliable public network.

SplitEV — SplitEV.co