EIC Accelerator Winner HeyCharge and the Offline EV Charging Race

HeyCharge's case is that conventional smart wallboxes depend on a constant internet connection to know who is charging, and that the basement garage of an apartment block is where that connection is weakest. HeyCharge, a Munich company founded in 2020, builds chargers that do not need the connection at all: the driver's smartphone generates a one-time cryptographic token, the user is verified at the wallbox over Bluetooth, and charging data is stored locally and synced when a connection is available, according to the company's technology page and its February 2026 announcement.

The EIC Accelerator selected the project, SecureCharge FLEX, at its October 2025 cut-off as a grant-only award. CORDIS records an EU contribution of €2,469,982.38 under the call HORIZON-EIC-2025-ACCELERATOR-02, in the challenge "Breakthrough innovations for future mobility", for a project running from 1 June 2026 to 31 May 2028. The project is five months old at the time of writing.

Why basements break smart chargers

In the company's account, a networked charger in a basement needs its link to the back office built first: network cabling, routers and ongoing connectivity maintenance, the items it listed to electrive in February 2026. Its argument is that removing the link removes both a cost and a point of failure. The company says installation costs fall by more than 40% because no communications infrastructure is needed, a figure electrive reported from material the company supplied, and no independent measurement of it could be found.

The market the company names is large: about 200 million Europeans live in multi-unit buildings, many with underground car parks with poor connectivity, per its announcement. Its founder's own story, told on the company blog, starts in 2017, when getting charging installed for his electric car in his apartment building's underground garage proved far harder than he expected.

What has been built before the grant

HeyCharge was already selling before the EIC award. Its seed announcement of January 2022 described commercial, revenue-generating installations across Germany, and the $4.7 million round was also reported by tech.eu. Aggregator sites give different totals for the money raised since; the company's own figure in February 2026 is €6.3 million of private funding, also carried by electrive. The company has announced no later priced round.

The deployment figures come only from the company, and they differ between its own pages. The February 2026 announcement gives more than 130 sites and 2,500 parking spaces in Germany. A product summary on the company website, read on 4 November 2026, gives more than 700 chargers at more than 135 sites and more than 2,000 parking spaces pre-wired for later use. Neither has been independently audited.

The named customers are large landlords. In May 2024 MEAG, the Munich Re group's asset manager, qualified HeyCharge as a partner for office building garages in its German portfolio, with first projects already done in Munich, Berlin, Cologne and Düsseldorf, as reported by electrive and Elektroauto-News. In January 2025 Vonovia, which has about 108,000 parking spaces, announced a partnership after pilot installations in underground and outdoor car parks, per electrive and the company. The stated aim was to turn the pilots into an offer for Vonovia tenants; no rollout volume, timetable or price has been published. The company's claim that its partnerships could open more than 123,000 further spaces is a projection, not a contract figure.

Its product line has moved towards retrofit and licensing. In January 2026 it announced with Emobi a retrofit that connects offline chargers to Emobi's North American roaming network of more than 140,000 chargers, per the company and S&P Global AutoTechInsight. In March 2026 it announced the CONNECT MagicBox, an adapter for existing OCPP wallboxes, launching first with Easee in Germany, Austria and Switzerland with availability expected in the second or third quarter of 2026, per Charged EVs and the company. The company also lists a European launch of its own HW18 wallbox with HUMAX in the third quarter of 2026. Whether either product is on sale today could not be verified.

What the EIC is paying for

According to CORDIS, the project is meant to take the platform to technology readiness level 8, finish vehicle-to-grid and dynamic load management features, complete certifications and validate deployment at large scale. The company's announcement adds demand response and dynamic tariffs, interoperability testing with third-party hardware, large pilots in several European countries, and a franchise model to sign up installers and operators. It puts the platform at readiness level 7 today.

1. Offline authorisation in operationIn useDeployed in German garages before the award, per the company and the MEAG and Vonovia reports in electrive.
2. Load management, dynamic tariffs, vehicle-to-gridIn progressLoad management is advertised for the MagicBox; no vehicle-to-grid deployment has been reported.
3. Multi-country certificationNot reportedThe company says the HW18 is Eichrecht-certified for Germany; no certification in another country has been announced.
4. Large pilots in several European countriesNot reportedEvery deployment the company has reported is in Germany.
5. TRL 8 by May 2028Too earlyCORDIS shows no reports or results for the project yet.

The grant against the private money

The award is a grant without an equity component, so the EIC Fund takes no stake. Set against the company's own figure for private funding, the grant is a large addition: about 40% of what investors have put in since 2020. No company register filings could be read for this article; North Data refused automated access, so staff, revenue and losses are not reported here, and the company publishes none of them.

Where it fits in EU policy

EU building law is pushing charging into exactly the car parks HeyCharge targets. Article 14 of the recast Energy Performance of Buildings Directive, Directive (EU) 2024/1275, requires new residential buildings, and those undergoing major renovation, with more than three parking spaces to have at least one recharging point, pre-cabling for at least half the spaces and ducting for the rest, as summarised in the article text. Existing multi-unit and older buildings are the project's stated target in CORDIS. The company also argues that a charger with no network link has a smaller cyberattack surface, a claim it makes on its own news page and that no independent assessment has tested.

The reporting is based on publicly available sources, listed below.