A British startup has raised $2 million (£1.49 million) in pre-seed funding to address one of the more stubborn problems in electric vehicle adoption: public charging points that fail, and leave drivers with little recourse when they do.

Enera, which provides AI-powered customer support software to charge point operators, closed the round earlier this month. The investment comes as EV sales continue to rise, with electric vehicles now outselling petrol cars in a number of markets. However, the infrastructure that supports them has lagged behind. The company says that 29 per cent of public charging sessions still fail, a figure that points to a gap between the pace of EV adoption and the reliability of the networks drivers depend on.

When a charge point fails, the person standing in front of it typically has no engineer to call and no clear way to understand what has gone wrong. Enera's product is built around that gap. The company supplies charge point operators with AI support agents delivered through voice and text, available at any hour. Additionally, it provides a control room dashboard that compiles information from backend signals, hardware logs, and driver support calls. The result, in theory, is that operators can see in closer to real time where their networks are breaking down and why.

Nicholas Marquardt, co-founder and chief executive of Enera, said the problem extends beyond EV charging. "EV charging is the sharpest example of a much bigger problem: the world increasingly runs on distributed, connected hardware, but when something goes wrong the person standing in front of it isn't an engineer," he said. "Operators can't see where their experience is breaking down, and users carry the cost. We are building the AI recovery layer for that entire category of infrastructure, starting where the pain is sharpest and the market is growing fastest."

The funding round was led by Lakehouse Ventures, a US-based investor group for which this deal marks its first investment outside America. Divergent Capital, also from the United States, and Masia, a Spanish firm, participated alongside a number of angel investors.

John Neamonitis, founder and general partner at Lakehouse Ventures, said the decision to back Enera was driven by a gap he saw in how AI customer support technology has been deployed to date. "AI customer support has been one of the most well-funded categories of the last two years, but almost all of that capital has gone into asset-light industries," he said. "Enera is one of the first teams we have seen credibly take this technology into asset-heavy infrastructure, where the stakes are higher and the integrations are harder."

The distinction matters. Software businesses can iterate quickly and absorb errors with relatively low consequence. Charging infrastructure is different. A failed session means a driver unable to complete a journey. The integration work required to connect AI systems with hardware logs, backend signals and operator dashboards is more complex than deploying a chatbot on a retail website. Enera's bet is that this complexity creates a defensible position, and that the same approach can eventually be applied across other categories of physical infrastructure once the model is established in EV charging.

Whether the company can deliver on that ambition remains to be seen. What is clear is that the reliability problem in public charging is real, widely experienced and, so far, inadequately solved. Before pursuing any broader development, the pre-seed financing will be utilized to demonstrate the product's scalability on EV networks. For now, Enera's focus is narrower: making sure that when a driver pulls up to a charge point and something goes wrong, they are not simply left standing there.