Einride buys EV-charging startup Flipturn for $38M

Swedish electric and autonomous trucking company Einride has agreed to acquire EV-charging startup Flipturn in an all-stock deal worth $38 million. The acquisition is Einride’s first since becoming a publicly traded company, and it is expected to close this month. Flipturn, which employs 17 people, will keep operating with the same team, according to an Einride spokesperson.

Flipturn was founded in 2022 and raised $15.5 million in venture capital to build an EV-charging software platform that can communicate with any charger over the Open Charge Point Protocol, the industry standard for communication between chargers and management systems. The software monitors the health of charging infrastructure, pulls in data such as vehicle battery levels, driving history, and routes to help companies manage charging, and integrates with on-site solar and energy-storage systems.

Einride CEO Roozbeh Charli said the deal “is a decisive step in our U.S. scaling strategy.” The acquisition also makes Einride a more vertically integrated company, letting it offer customers not just electric trucks but also the charging software needed to run them efficiently and reliably. That pairing gives Einride a stronger, more influential pitch to future customers weighing whether to add electric big rigs to their fleets despite reservations about doing so.

Einride is perhaps best known for its unusual, cabless, podlike autonomous trucks, but its biggest revenue driver is a fleet of 200 heavy-duty electric trucks it operates for companies including Heineken, PepsiCo, and Carlsberg Sweden across Europe, North America, and the United Arab Emirates. The company, which merged with a blank-check company and debuted on Nasdaq in June, recently landed Amazon as a customer. Amazon isn’t buying Einride’s trucks; instead, Einride owns and manages them through its own Saga AI software, for use by drivers in Amazon’s Relay freight network, an app truck drivers have used to book hauling gigs with Amazon since 2017.

Why it matters

Bundling charging software with the trucks themselves gives Einride a stickier pitch as it competes for fleet customers weighing the switch to electric big rigs, and ties its U.S. scaling plan to infrastructure it now controls end to end.