CHARLOTTE – BatteryXchange will install five battery-charging kiosks at Winston-Salem State University, as the two organizations have signed a partnership deal.
“Landing this partnership with WSSU is a dream come true,” said Desmond Wiggan Jr., co-founder and CEO of BatteryXchange in an interview with WRAL TechWire. “We often think about times when we were in undergrad and the inconveniences that came from not having a convenient charger on-demand.”
“When you think about it, there’s safety and security in the lifeline that a cellphone provides for us as consumers,” said Wiggan. The company kiosks that the company has designed provide ample charge for consumers, often at places where charging a device might otherwise be quite challenging or impossible.
The company, which won an NC IDEA SEED grant of $50,000 earlier this year, and also received an investment from Defiance Ventures in May 2021, was founded by Wiggan and co-founder Aubrey Yeboah in 2019 after experiencing regular inconvenience accessing a charging device during travel, Wiggan told WRAL TechWire in a May 2021 interview. During that same interview in May, Wiggan shared that the company was seeking to grow into additional industries, like colleges and universities, to provide and install battery charging kiosks.
“This is the first of many partnerships,” said Wiggan this week. “We’re really excited to open doors to other colleges, universities, and enterprise organizations.”
This partnership is special, though, noted Wiggan.
Wiggan and Yeboah both graduated from Winston-Salem State University in 2012, and as they were founding the company, they often traveled to other universities and colleges and observe how much focus there was on innovation and entrepreneurship, Wiggan told WRAL TechWire. “When going back to our HBCU, we didn’t see that same focus, so we decided to be the bridge for students to innovation and entrepreneurship,” Wiggan said.
Wiggan and Yeboah decided to hold their company’s soft launch during homecoming week at WSSU, said Wiggan, “to focus on showing students that looked like us and came from the communities we came from that they too could travel around the world and with hard work could build or create amazing innovation.”
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The company is now also involved in the university’s internship program, Wiggan noted. “We plan to change the representation that is present in the product space,” he said “because when we began our company there were not many people that looked like us that could help guide or help us.”
Though the partnership will begin with the university installing 5 kiosks, both the company’s Apollo model and its Hercules model, on campus with BatteryXchange, Wiggan believes that there is a potential expansion opportunity at this campus, and at other campuses across the nation, particularly as large in-person events are able to resume.
“As we look at the major universities that are within the region than across the nation we know that this channel will be a huge market opportunity and we are looking forward to its growth,” said Wiggan.
“We want to be a really, really big, $10 million company, in the next one to two years,” said Wiggan, who noted that the company is currently raising a seed round of financing.
Prior to the investment in May 2021, the company previously raised $200,000 from angel investors, Wiggan said, with a portion of those funds coming from an equity crowdfunding campaign. Wiggan is also a member of the NC IDEA Black Entrepreneurship Council.
