Palantir SPAC Lands Huge Deal With British Petroleum
Palantir SPAC Tritium Charging recently signed a deal with BP for just under 1000 new electric charging stations, as reported here by Forbes.
The deal comes on the back of Tritium expanding into the United States, Specifically Tennessee back in February, Their charging stations were actually front and center when President Joe Biden was giving a speech on investing more money for electric vehicle charging infrastructure in the United States.
The Tennessee deal is expected to create 500 jobs. If Tritium does a good job showing they can produce jobs, amazing products, and integrate with the local community - they will likely be in play for a larger chunk of the 7.5B that is being allocated just to EV charging stations in the recently passed infrastructure bill.
Why I Like Tritium
Tritium Charging is one of the main companies competing in the exponentially growing EV charging landscape.
Many people think Tesla has already won this market with their network of superchargers, but fail to realize that billions of cars will go electric one day. Most of those billions will not be Teslas, even if Tesla has a good chunk of them.
As a result, many EV charging companies, just like oil and gas companies (BP, Exxon, Shell, etc.) are going to be needed to supply the demand for countries around the world connecting to new electric grids to allow people to charge their cars at scale.
From the article,
“I’m delighted that with this new global agreement with Tritium, it will help bp pulse deliver its mission to provide fast, reliable charging for EV drivers and to accelerate the roll-out of the charging infrastructure needed as the world transitions to decarbonise road transport,” said Richard Bartlett, Senior Vice President, bp pulse, in a statement.
Founded in 2001, Tritium has recently seen major developments of its own. In December, the company announced an agreement with Shell to provide DC fast chargers to its business operations in Europe, South Africa, Asia, the Middle East and North America towards Shell's goal to operate 500,000 charge points by 2025 and 2,500,000 by 2030.
Tritium has been around for a while, has a first in class EV charging station product, and is now expanding internationally.
Why I Like Palantir's Investment In Tritium
I covered their investment in a video a couple months back here, and to me it seemed like this investment was part of a master plan.
The EV space is growing. It's going to be big. If ICE cars are phased out one day, which they will be, then there will be new winners in the EV space.
EV Car companies, software companies, EV Charging stations - and many, many more. Palantir has invested in 2 main strategetic companies in the EV space: WEJO and Tritium.
In February, Palantir introduced a new product with WEJO outlined here. The product was a new "operating system for electric vehicle charging stations," implying that EV stations will need an operating system for them to operate at scale.
This makes sense. EV charging stations have to communicate with grids, network providers, local municipalities, etc. They also have to effectively ration the energy they get and save because cars may be plugged in over night but not need energy once they are fully done charging.
WEJO specializes in connected-vehicle data. Palantir invested in them and is now introducing a product for EV charging stations via software, AND Palantir has invested in Tritium Charging - providing them an equity stake in two potential major EV players. Tritium is a perfect company to actually use the software Palantir & WEJO are creating for charging stations.
If hundreds of thousands of Tritium charging stations are around the world, all using a connected software built by Palantir and WEJO, other charging stations are going to want to license and use that software as well to scale to hundreds of thousands of charging stations world wide. The best charging stations mixed with the best software for them to effectively operate on will win.
Palantir is not making EVs, but they do recognize the enormous opportunity that exists within the industry, and through their strategetic SPAC investments, they might have a real shot at penetrating the industry without making a single car.
Thanks for reading the article. If you'd like to get in contact, please @ me on twitter here or email me at amit@dailypalantir.com.
