They fixed what nobody else would touch

Kameale C. Terry and Evette Ellis built a company around a problem the industry kept mislabeling.

Kameale Terry grew up in South Central Los Angeles, the eldest of four in a first-generation family, the daughter of Belizean immigrants. She grew up surrounded by freeways and watched her neighborhood carry the cost of that air.

Years later she was working at EV Connect, running programs for a charging network. She noticed something strange. When a station went down, it took forever to get anyone out to fix it, because the industry sent electrical contractors. But the problems usually weren't electrical. They were "communication issues, vandalism, firmware updates or swapping out a part" work no electrician was needed for, and no one else was trained to do. TechCrunch

So she quit.

In January 2020, Kameale and Evette Ellis founded ChargerHelp — a platform that trains, dispatches, and connects technicians who repair networked EV charging stations. Evette came on as chief workforce officer, and that title is the whole thesis: the company wasn't just fixing chargers, it was building the workforce that could.

They went looking for the scale of the problem and found it. Across roughly 5,000 stations in some 45 states, about a third of the infrastructure wasn't dispensing electricity at all. The anecdote had become data.

What they built on top of it: contracts with EV Connect, ABB, and Spark Change. More than 18,000 field service interactions across 17 states — the largest dataset of its kind in the country. Over $20 million raised. And in California, they helped draft the nation's first EV charging reliability law.

But the part Kameale measures herself by isn't the funding. Technicians start at $30 an hour. Every employee holds equity. Everyone gets health benefits. And when she's asked what winning looks like, the answer isn't about ChargerHelp at all:

"True success will be seeing multiple ChargerHelp alumni launch their own companies." Betaboom

A founder, counting the founders she makes.

Kameale C. Terry and Evette Ellis · ChargerHelp · Idea to Product, 2020