EV charging startup Electra has secured a green loan of up to €433m from a group of eight banks as it continues to deploy charging stations across Europe.
The loan, which comprises €283m in committed funds and €150m in future capital, comes a year and a half after Electra raised €304m in equity as part of its Series B. It brings total funding raised by the startup, in both equity and debt, to over €1bn.
Electra, which is building a network of fast-charging stations for electric vehicles (EVs), currently operates 510 stations across nine European countries (France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Italy and Spain). It plans to reach 700 stations by the end of the year and 2.2k stations in 2030.
“Building a station costs between €500k-700k,” says Electra’s CEO Aurélien de Meaux. “So we need a lot of cash to deploy our network.”
The funding will enable the company to increase the density of its network in countries where it is already present. “In countries where we expanded more recently, like Switzerland, Austria, Germany and Spain, we must continue to invest massively to build a network,” says de Meaux.
Scaling up
Electra builds both the physical charging stations and the software supporting the process, including services like booking a slot on the app, automatically recognising a user’s vehicle and paying for a charge.
The company partners with real estate players like supermarkets and hotels to build and manage stations on parking lots, and makes revenue from every charge. In 2025, Electra expects to hit €70m in revenues and it plans to be profitable in the next 18 months.
This was critical to convince bankers to loan funds, says de Meaux. “We managed to demonstrate we have reached a certain scale and we have an interesting economic equation,” he says. “We convinced them by showing solid execution.”
Despite Electra’s success, Sifted data shows equity funding for climate tech in Europe fell 40% in the first six months of 2025 compared to the same period last year.
“The sector has hugely cooled down,” says de Meaux. “Two or three years ago, there was loads of funding and investors overlooked the quality of businesses. [...] Now, they are more demanding, they want to see tangible business models with revenues and users.”
This also means the market is increasingly consolidating around a smaller number of winners. De Meaux says Electra plans to use the new funds to position itself as a consolidator — and is on the lookout for opportunities to buy competitors.
“We’ll be going after companies that can help expand our network, which have sites and infrastructure,” he says.
Backing EVs
For De Meaux, the new funding shows investors are still keen to back EV technologies.
“The technology is here, the autonomy is here, the prices are going down, charging networks are developing,” he says. “Putting a doubt on this trajectory would be fallacious. [...] EVs are going to be the dominant technology of the 21st century.”
EV ownership in Europe is rising, largely because the EU has banned the sale of new petrol and diesel cars from 2035. But it’s critical that the rules don’t change, says De Meaux, pointing to the EU Commission’s recent proposal to change existing sustainability reporting rules for businesses.
“If we fall behind, we risk being overtaken by some of our US-based and Chinese competitors,” says de Meaux.
