ChargeMate joins investor Brian Bell on the Ignite Startups podcast

What happens when the future of transportation depends on infrastructure that still fails one out of every five times?

Brad Crist, co-founder and CEO of ChargeMate, is tackling one of the least glamorous—but most important—problems in EV adoption: broken charging experiences. Before founding ChargeMate, Brad spent more than a decade in climate tech, working across energy, automotive, and EV charging at companies like Accenture, Faraday Future, Volta, and Spring Free EV.

After helping scale EV charging networks from hundreds to thousands of stations, he saw the real problem up close: chargers may look “online,” but the driver experience often tells a very different story.

ChargeMate is building an AI operating layer for EV charging reliability—combining chat, voice agents, backend charger diagnostics, remote commands, and human escalation to help operators resolve issues faster, reduce support costs, and recover lost revenue.

In this episode, Brad breaks down why charging failures are often not about broken hardware, but about payments, apps, user confusion, software glitches, vehicle-charger handshakes, and fragmented operating systems.

Give it a watch here: