It started with a Tesla, a snowstorm, and a broken charging station.
In the dead of Canadian winter, Aryan Afrouzi, now co-founder of Voltra, found himself stranded in the middle of nowhere, unable to charge his EV. At the time, his friend Alexander Stratmoen was working on Cosine Networks, a startup focused on software-defined networking. One evening, during a trip with friends to a remote cabin, Aryan pitched a different kind of infrastructure problem: EV charging is broken, and behind it lies a much bigger issue, a fragile, outdated energy grid.
That fireside pitch led Stratmoen to join Voltra as co-founder and CEO, merging Aryan’s frustration with Stratmoen’s networking background. What started as a fix for EV chargers evolved into a bold attempt to redefine how we control energy infrastructure altogether.
Beyond Charging: The Voltra Vision
Voltra’s first product, Charge, is not your typical CPMS (Charge Point Management System). Instead of offering a clunky SaaS dashboard or hardcoded solution, Charge is a fully modular API platform that allows software teams to build custom EV charging experiences. Think Stripe, but for energy infrastructure.
“We want to empower two kinds of developers,” Stratmoen explains. “First, large charging networks who need composable services they can tailor to their own stack. Second, any software company that might want to offer EV charging, whether it’s a fleet manager, a condo operator, or a parking app.”
Voltra abstracts away the heavy lifting: integrating with legacy hardware, managing site-level energy distribution, and ensuring interoperability across wildly inconsistent standards. Their foundational product, Connect, allows customers to define devices in schema-based configuration files, wrapping proprietary APIs, OCPP commands, Modbus signals, and more into a clean developer interface.
What makes Voltra especially unique is its infrastructure philosophy. The company’s backend is designed for extreme concurrency and fault tolerance. This results in real-time connectivity with zero per-device fees.
“We want people to connect hundreds of devices without worrying about costs,” Stratmoen says. “Everything is usage-based on the API side. The connectivity is free.”
This model is especially appealing to property managers, many of whom have become unexpected early adopters.
A Grid on the Brink
Why now? Stratmoen believes the writing is on the wall: interconnection queues are growing, data centers are booming, and rooftop solar and batteries are decentralizing the grid faster than utilities can respond.
“This isn’t just about EVs. It’s about preventing a future where power is scarce, unreliable, and prohibitively expensive,” he says.
By turning parking lots, condos, and commercial buildings into programmable energy nodes, Voltra is building the scaffolding for a new kind of grid: distributed, intelligent, and developer-first.
Research Before Raise
Before seeking capital, the Voltra team spent over eight months validating their market assumptions. They compiled over 30 documents of original research, conducted hundreds of interviews, and mapped out go-to-market strategies tailored to the edge cases of energy infrastructure.
That diligence paid off. In May 2025, Voltra announced a $1.8M pre-seed round led by Contrary, with participation from Hanover Capital and Velocity Fund.
What’s Next: A Public Launch and Grid-Scale Ambitions
Voltra is preparing to roll out a full public release of Charge by mid-September 2025, coinciding with RE+ and MOVE America. New features like dynamic pricing profiles and ID-based authentication for condo tenants will round out the platform’s capabilities.
Behind the scenes, they’re also expanding support for energy storage systems and announcing new partnerships with hardware providers.
“We think about this as our Edison moment,” Stratmoen reflects. “From the invention of the light bulb to today, the structure of the grid hasn’t fundamentally changed. But over the next decade, everything will. And we want to be at the center of that shift.”
With one foot in Waterloo and another in Mountain View, Voltra is straddling legacy and future, betting that the path to grid stability runs through elegant software, resilient APIs, and developers who no longer have to fear touching physical infrastructure.
