In the slow grind of getting Americans to plug in, the hardest customer is not the Tesla owner with a single-family garage. It is the landlord of a 40-unit apartment block in Oakland who has never thought about a load panel in his life. ChargeLink, a San Francisco outfit founded in 2021, has decided that landlord is the whole game.
The company is offering free Level 2 chargers to qualifying businesses through what it calls an Open Funding program, with delivery promised by December 2025 [ChargeLink Open Funding]. The pitch is straightforward: ChargeLink stitches together state and utility incentives, eats the upfront hardware cost for the property owner, and keeps a long-term operating relationship on the back end. For a building owner staring at a California Energy Commission deadline, free is a compelling number.
The bet
ChargeLink sells EV chargers, solar, storage, and microgrid packages to property owners, governments, and businesses, with a turnkey wrapper that handles design, install, and operation [ZoomInfo]. The most interesting recent move is hardware: a 6.5 kWh Power Module aimed at EV chargers, homes, and businesses, positioned to slot into the new wave of storage-linked charging incentives [Medium]. That matters because a charger without storage behind it is at the mercy of demand charges, and demand charges are what kill multifamily charging economics.
Founder Anatoly Corp, who studied electrical engineering and business at Stanford, has said the company signed $20M in pre-orders for chargers [Wefunder] and claims its platforms have moved more than a gigawatt-hour of energy [ChargeLink.com]. Both figures come from company channels and should be read as such, but they sketch a company that is shipping rather than slidewaring.
Opportunity
California alone needs roughly 1.2 million public and shared chargers by 2030 to meet its zero-emission vehicle targets, according to the California Energy Commission's earlier planning work. Multifamily housing is the worst-served slice of that demand. Most charging companies have built their unit economics around highway DC fast charging or single-family home installs, both of which are easier than wiring a 1970s apartment garage with a shared meter.
A back of envelope: a typical Level 2 dual-port station costs roughly $4,000 to $7,000 in hardware and another $3,000 to $8,000 to install, call it $12,000 all-in per station (estimated). California's CALeVIP and utility programs have at various points covered $5,500 to $8,000 per port. If ChargeLink can stack incentives to cover, say, 80% of project cost and finance the remaining 20% against a 10-year operating contract at $0.10 per kWh of margin, a station throwing 6,000 kWh per year nets $600 annually, or roughly a four-year payback on the unsubsidized slice. That math works. It only works if the incentive stack holds and the install crews are cheap and fast.
The team and traction
ChargeLink is led by Anatoly Corp, described in his own materials as a serial entrepreneur in energy and mobility [ContactOut], who has been the public face of the company since at least the January 2023 Master Plan post [Medium]. The team has built and operated charging stations independently of large institutional backing [ChargeLink.com], which is unusual in a category where ChargePoint and EVgo raised hundreds of millions before generating meaningful revenue.
| Metric | Figure | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Pre-orders signed | $20M | Wefunder |
| Energy delivered | >1 GWh | ChargeLink.com |
| Power Module capacity | 6.5 kWh | Medium |
| Free charger delivery deadline | December 2025 | ChargeLink Open Funding |
The honest counterfactual
What bears will say: ChargeLink is competing against ChargePoint, which has more than 300,000 ports on its network and a decade of utility relationships, and Blink, which has a public balance sheet and its own manufacturing. A solo-founder hardware company with no disclosed institutional round is a thin reed against that. The founder's own site references a prior partnership that did not execute as planned, where ChargeLink was meant to own 40% of the venture [AnatolyCorp.com]. Hardware-plus-install businesses are unforgiving of working capital mistakes.
What bulls answer: ChargePoint and Blink have spent the last two years cutting costs and trimming sales coverage, and neither has cracked the multifamily install problem at scale. A focused operator who treats the apartment landlord as the customer, rather than the driver, is going after a segment the incumbents have effectively conceded. The 6.5 kWh module also suggests ChargeLink understands that the next round of incentives is storage-weighted, not charger-weighted, which is where the policy money is moving.
What to watch
The December 2025 Open Funding delivery date is the near-term test. If ChargeLink can show a credible install count from that program, with named property partners and utility interconnection sign-offs, an institutional round becomes plausible. The other watch item is whether the Power Module ships as a standalone product or remains a charger accessory; the former opens a much larger residential storage market where Tesla Powerwall and Enphase already dominate.
For now, ChargeLink is a small company making a specific bet that the next million chargers in America will be installed not at highway rest stops but in apartment parking lots, and that the company that wins those sites wins a 10-year operating annuity. To get there, ChargeLink has to beat ChargePoint at the one thing ChargePoint has historically been weakest at: showing up at a 40-unit building in Oakland, on time, with a working charger and a paid invoice from the utility.