How Shoreditch tech start-up ChargedUp is helping nomophobes

Founder Hugo Tilmouth, 23, wants to make sure you never run of phone battery. His company has launched a network of charging stations across the capital with plans to have 1,000 by the end of the year.

Laura Enfield

By Laura Enfield

Credit: Matt Grayson

Do you break out in a cold sweat when the battery symbol turns red in the middle of texting? You may have nomophobia – a fear of being without your mobile phone.

If so, tech founder Hugo Tilomuth could be your new hero.

The 23-year-old has launched ChargedUp, London’s first network of mobile powerbanks powered by green energy.

Based in London Fields (at WeWork’s shared offices, naturally), it has 40 charging stations in bars, restaurants, cafes and offices across the capital where people can hire a battery for £1 an hour.

And with plans to expand to 1,000 stations by the end of 2018 and beyond the capital soon after, we sat down with the Canning Town resident to find out more.

How does ChargedUp work?

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Download the app, search and find a charging station and scan the QR code to connect to it. Your phone talks to our server, it then talks to the station, assesses which battery has the most charge and automatically releases it.

You take out the cable on the side, which has an iPhone and Android charger, and plug it in.

The app will tell you how much you are spending. You get £1 free just for signing up and then it’s 50p for 30 minutes up to a maximum of £3 a day and then it’s £3 a day for 10 days until you hit £30 and then you have bought the battery and it’s yours to keep.

We prefer people to keep sharing the batteries as it’s more sustainable, but you can take it home and keep charging it with a micro USB and then swap it in the network for a whole year for free.

So if it is ever running low you can just stick it in a station and swap it for another one. Generally a battery will charge a phone up a couple of times before it needs plugging in.

How do you prevent theft?

When someone signs up they add their card to it and we’re looking into adding apple pay.

If you keep a battery for more than 10 days you will automatically be charged £30.

Or you can press buy in the app at any point.

Why a sharing economy startup?

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We will eventually end up sharing everything potentially because it’s cheaper and more environmentally friendly and often much more convenient because it’s there on demand rather than you having to carry it yourself.

It’s one of the most important things that our generation can do as the planet has finite resources and we need to use things responsibly and be a sustainable as possible. It’s basically uncool to not be eco-friendly.

Are you the man who never runs out of battery?

I do as I use my phone more than the average person but I keep a power bank on me at all times.

I suffer a little bit from nomophobia.

When the battery hits that 20% mark it’s pretty stressful.

We rely on phones for so much. Being able to arrange to meet up with someone, use Google Maps to find the place you are meeting, use an app to get a discount on your drink or get a review of the venue, potentially pay for your drink and then you’re trying to get a lift home with Uber or cycle home with a Boris bike.

Whether you are a business person or not, we rely on phones so heavily I think that’s why ChargedUp has been so successful.

How did the business come about?

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I studied for a degree in renewable energy engineering at Exeter University and was involved with a project to do with charging mobile phones using solar power.

Our team (which included co-founder Hakeen Buge) got a number of awards and won some funding from Exeter and then a number of other awards from Shell through their LiveWire program and O2 from their Think Big program.

That gave us some funding to start developing the project. I knew co-founder Charlie Barron from a summer job at PaveGen (which converts people’s footsteps into electrical power) and he had worked with Forrest Skerman-Stevenson at another battery charging company and they came on board during the development stage.

We spent about a year and a half developing the application and the hardware and launched a month ago.

We have had £200,000 of funding in total including a pre-seed round and SEIS (Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme) round.

When did your interest in technology start?

A lot of my family are engineers and I always wanted to be one. I grew up in Wokingham and was always taking things apart as a child, making them into something new, learning how things work and annoying my parents.

I remember taking apart the DVD player when I was 12 and not being able to fix it, which my mum was not happy about.

How did you develop the idea?
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Originally we created a solar panel that connected to charging lockers. They could be anywhere because it didn’t need to be mains connected but it was really irritating having to leave your phone in the locker so that was where the a-ha moment came of having a sharing power bank model.

We started out trying to create prototypes with 3D printing, finding manufacturers for the batteries, having different samples made and developing the design and code for the mobile app and managing the stock of battery. Each one has a unique ID that the station reads when it’s plugged in so we can see which station you’ve taken it from and where you have returned it to.

It means when you’re finished with it you can just return it and don’t have to do anything with the app because the system automatically ends the rental.

We did trial at Royal Cornwall Festival and The Magic Roundabout bar to see if people would be willing to pay and we ran out of batteries pretty quickly and people really loved it.

The first public station was at Big Chill in Brick Lane.

What’s next?

We’re looking to expand into other types of venue and have 1,000 stations by the end of the year.

The demand is really good so it is just about producing as many as we can in our factory in China and getting them out there.

We have a team of 13, with five developers and we’re planning to hire more in the next few months, open up an investment round in September and expand significantly over the next few years.

It is the sort of service that can scale quite quickly and it’s a problem that everyone faces.

So it is about managing that growth and ensuring there’s a consistent experience for users as we get bigger.

We look up to sharing economy companies like JustPark, Airbnb and Uber and aspire to be a successful as them.

Why is sharing caring?

It’s what makes ChargedUp unique. The batteries are similar to powerbanks you can buy but a sharing economy uses less resources in the beginning.

We monitor the energy being used by the stations and have an agreement with a Ecotricity which uses energy off-setting to provide green energy to power the network.

Each time you borrow a battery you are increasing the amount of investment that goes into green energy in the UK so effectively increasing the amount of wind turbines and solar power.

Why should venues have a station?
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We did a survey of venues and found on average bar staff asked 12 times a day to charge phones which is really irritating.

ChargedUp is an easy solution and also solves liability issues.

Does age matter in startups?

Not if you can make stuff happen and have the hustle.

It can almost be an advantage because we have managed to open doors and speak to really quite impressive advisors because the team is younger so people are more willing to give you help.

In business in general we are a younger team but that is why we have hired people and found advisors who have a bit of grey hair and experience – to stop us making mistakes.

What advice do you have for other young entrepreneurs?

Just go for it there’s so much support in the UK and in London especially for young entrepreneurs to try and be as frugal as possible in the beginning and figure out ways to make things happen with the resources that you have.

I quickly realised although I could potentially build the whole thing myself it would take a long while which is why I brought on specialists.

Although I’m not writing every line of code the code that is getting written is much higher quality than mine and it’s all developing quicker as well as it’s not one person trying to do everything themselves.

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