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Honors Fund is thrilled to announce our latest venture into the future of electric vehicle (EV) charging and fleet management with GridLink. When we first encountered Josh Silets and the GridLink team, their passion for revolutionizing vehicle fleet management through sustainable tech was truly electrifying.

"A computing competition allowed our founders to do a deep dive into industries we know are changing drastically–infrastructure and power markets," Josh reminisces. "We care deeply about sustainability, and the competition allowed us to find a way for us to make an impact in the space we really excel at: software."

GridLink addresses the specific challenges that organizations and businesses face as they switch their vehicle fleets from traditional gasoline or diesel vehicles to EV’s. A fleet typically consists of multiple vehicles operated collectively by an entity, such as a delivery service, school district, government agency, or commercial company.

GridLink's software is pivotal in this transition by optimizing remote charging schedules, effectively cutting charging costs by 30-50%. This optimization ensures that fleet vehicles are prepared for operations when called upon—yet their potential goes beyond just driving. Additionally, GridLink's software provides essential capabilities for carbon reporting and data tracking, which are vital for organizations aiming to monitor and manage their environmental impact.

The acceleration towards electric vehicles is fueled by the need to cut carbon emissions, initiatives like the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), and reducing reliance on fossil fuels. And as EV sales surge, so does the strain on our old school electrical grid.

GridLink's market entry strategy pivoted from utility companies to school districts, utilizing the extended idle times of school buses to support the grid during outages—an approach Josh describes as a "blessing" for refining their vehicle-to-grid (V2G) functionality, which allows their fleet of electric vehicles to not only charge from the grid but also discharge electricity back into it, effectively turning vehicles into mobile energy storage units that can stabilize the grid during peak demand or outages.

"My co-founders are the two smartest people I know and are incredibly action-oriented," says Josh. "Gabe's (CTO) capacity to output code is incredibly impressive, and how he uses AI tooling for our development workflow should probably be implemented in every startup of our size. Ryan (COO) is such a natural people manager and has been a huge reason why our internship cohorts and hiring processes have gone as well as they have."

Currently lighting up Detroit's smart parking lab, GridLink has already established itself as a disruptive force in the EV market. Near future plans include electrifying school bus fleets through multiple grant programs, driving- or should we say, parking- their commitment to scalable impact.

Josh emphasizes the impact of Honors Fund's support: "The mindset development as a founder has been invaluable—understanding the true scale of how big this can really get. I've learned ‘how much I don't know,’ which has been instrumental in my journey."

In the next three years, Gridlink aims to manage a battery fleet size of 100 MWh (enough to charge an entire city) able to sell back into and support the grid, and the impact towards the grid ramps as they think about scale.

Josh and his team imagine cities running on EV energy—less pollution, fewer fossil fuels, and a lot more resilience in our energy systems.

That's the kind of future we're excited to invest in.

Learn more about Gridlink: gridlink.co