The math for a gas station owner wanting to add a fast EV charger is simple, and it usually ends with a six-figure quote from the local utility. To deliver the 350 kilowatts an electric truck might need, you often need to upgrade the entire site's grid connection, a process that can cost over $100,000 and take over a year. Electric Fish, a Bay Area cleantech company founded in 2019, is making a different calculation. Its 350Squared system is a hardware wedge: a 400 kWh lithium iron phosphate battery pack that sits between a modest 30 kW AC grid connection and a high-power DC fast charger [MotorTrend]. The idea is to let a convenience store sell electrons at 350 kW without ever asking the utility for more power.
The hardware wedge
Electric Fish's bet is that the unit economics of avoiding a grid upgrade will sell the hardware. The company claims its system can be deployed in four to six weeks for less than $130,000 per charging port [MotorTrend]. That price tag is meant to compete directly with the cost of a traditional utility upgrade, while the speed of deployment targets the impatience of site hosts watching EV traffic grow. The system's 400 kWh battery acts as a buffer, slowly sipping power from the grid to recharge between charging sessions. The company also hints at an AI layer to optimize for grid vulnerability and energy arbitrage [Dealroom.co].
The team and the early capital
The founders bring a focused background in the core technology. CEO Anurag Kamal researched batteries at BMW and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory [electricfish.co]. Co-founder and CTO Nelio Batista rounds out the technical leadership [ZoomInfo]. Their early funding is a patchwork of public grants, including $1.69 million from an undisclosed source and support from the California Energy Commission and the Michigan Economic Development Corporation [electricfish.co] [Renewable Energy Magazine, Mar 2025].
| Founder | Role | Key Background |
|---|---|---|
| Anurag Kamal | CEO | Battery research at BMW, Oak Ridge National Lab |
| Nelio Batista | CTO | Co-Founder and CTO |
| Folasade Ayoola | Co-Founder | Role and background not specified in sources |
The silent counterfactual
For all the elegance of the technical premise, Electric Fish faces the classic hardware startup gauntlet. Founded in 2019, the company has no publicly disclosed customer deployments, partnerships, or named pilot sites. The sales motion is also unproven. The company's limited press footprint, mostly in automotive enthusiast publications, underscores its early, pre-commercial stage [MotorTrend] [CleanTechnica, Jan 2026].
What to watch in the next twelve months
The next phase for Electric Fish is straightforward: it needs to get its hardware into the ground at named commercial sites. Success will be measured in three tangible signals: the first flagship deployment, a venture-scale round, and operational metrics like uptime and charge session throughput. The real unit economics are not in selling electricity but in selling access to high-margin fast charging that would otherwise be impossible. If Electric Fish can prove its buffer is more reliable and cheaper than a new transformer, it might just rewrite the connection rules for a million parking spots.