Our Story

Invisible Urban Charging was established in 2019 by co-founders Jake Bezzant and Nigel Broomhall, two friends living in New Zealand. Jake, a barrister and solicitor of the New Zealand High Court and former professional cricket player, had spent several years building a technology-enable parking solutions provider, Parking Sense, into a global company and had established himself as a leader in the industry. Nigel brought more than 20 years of experience in the energy industry, advising companies on smart energy management with a focus on renewables.

The biggest impediment to the widespread adoption of electric vehicles at the time was range anxiety. Drivers who understood that electric transport was safe and environmentally conscious still had to contend with the question of where to get a charge outside the home.

The solution, Jake and Nigel concluded, was a concerted push into public charging and offer a “charging as a service” approach to deploying EV charging infrastructure, ensuring that it was both financially viable for site hosts, but also supremely reliable for drivers.

Just as most businesses today lease their capital-intensive equipment — from diagnostic machines at hospitals to copiers in the office — every destination that had parking associated with it could lease an EV charger and provide that service in a capital-efficient manner with a focus on customer service. Because up until then, the alternative wasn’t working.

The EV charging incumbents had focused on the hardware and software — selling machines and apps — which left the customer struggling to maintain uptime. The percentage of EV chargers that were offline as a result fueled the range anxiety that so many EV drivers faced. With technology’s long history of becoming a commodity, Jake and Nigel wanted to focus on service, on uptime, on making it so easy for site hosts to deploy chargers that offering that service to their own clients wouldn’t distract them from their own core business.

But to solve a problem of that magnitude, Jake and Nigel knew that they would need to tackle a market larger than New Zealand. So they chose the biggest market they could — the United States. They also knew that to tackle such a challenge in the largest market in the world they needed partners up to the task.

In 2020, IUC approached Eileen Murray, then the Co-CEO of Bridgewater Associates, the world’s largest hedge fund, to present their approach and get her counsel on how to make it a reality. Eileen was a natural choice, given her career that spanned 40 years both as a long-time advocate for innovation, equity, and sustainability, as well as a seasoned executive who had helped some of the most respected global businesses in highly regulated industries scale their own operations without sacrificing strong corporate governance.

Together, the team honed the approach, engaged world-class partners such as JLL and CBRE for operations and maintenance, Siemens for charging technology, and JP Morgan, Redaptive and DLL for financing. The IUC approach, with its focus on reliability, service, and capital efficiency — as a stark contrast to other charge point operators that had focused on hardware and going public — was well received and those companies signed on to help IUC tackle the global opportunity in EV charging infrastructure, beginning with the United States.

Since then, IUC has signed up sites across the country and expanded into international markets — always with the same approach of putting service and ease of use first, operating responsibly. Because as the team sees it, the most sustainable business is the one that can stand on its own merits, that the market understands, and that meets a need better than anyone else.

Who We Are

We are about integrity; respect; performance; and working hard, collaboratively, and with speed. Our focus is on undoing the environmental damage that has been done, quickly; we know there is not time to waste.