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Tether
Turning EVs into batteries
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Tether addresses one of the most fundamental challenges in the clean energy transition: grid balancing. Because renewable energy sources like solar and wind are intermittent by nature, grid operators must constantly match supply with demand in real time, historically relying on fossil fuel peaker plants to fill the gap. Tether’s solution is a prediction and optimization engine for EV charging infrastructure. Its platform uses machine learning to predict periods of grid overutilization or underutilization ahead of time, then dynamically adjusts EV charging speeds across its partners' networks to absorb excess supply or reduce demand accordingly. That aggregated flexibility is bid on European balancing markets (where grid supply and demand are adjusted in real time), generating a new revenue stream shared back with charge point operators, vehicle manufacturers, and fleet managers.
The platform integrates with existing charging infrastructure, requiring no hardware changes. Vehicle-to-grid capability, where energy flows bidirectionally between cars and the grid, remains a longer-term ambition as compatible EVs become more widespread over the next five to ten years.
Check it out: tetherev.io
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Tether operates on a revenue share model, taking a percentage of the revenue generated by bidding aggregated EV charging flexibility on energy markets. The platform also generates recurring fees through data storage and analytics services.
Raised $1.5 million to date, backed by Draper B1, KFund, Enzo Ventures, Axel Carbon Capital, Inclimo Climate Tech Fund, and Earth Capital
Signed proof of concept agreements with two large European vehicle manufacturers and has multiple charge point operator clients in Sweden
Took part in the spring 2023 Techstars Audi Founder Innovation Lab class
Selected for MobilityXlab, working alongside Volvo Group, Polestar, Zeekr, and Ericsson
Named a finalist in the 2025 European Startup Prize for Mobility
Tether does not have open positions right now, but the company is constantly looking for new partners, engineers, and developers who align with its mission. If you are interested, reach out to us by replying directly to this email!
The throughline of Luis's career is the power grid. Even while studying electrical engineering at Florida International University, where he graduated cum laude, he was already focused on how energy systems operate and interact. That interest deepened during his dual master's in Renewable Energy through EIT InnoEnergy, where he studied Energy Innovation at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and Energy Engineering at the UPC Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya in Barcelona, alongside an entrepreneurship certification at Esade Business School.
He started at Florida Power & Light before moving to GE, where he worked across both the Power and Solar divisions, building expertise in energy controls, how power plants interact with one another, and the fundamental mechanics of grid stability. He then joined Northvolt in Stockholm as an Integrated Systems Engineer, working on battery energy storage systems. It was during his master's thesis that Rivas first studied using EVs as balancing assets for the power grid, the insight that would eventually become Tether.
Rivas founded Tether in 2022, going through the Esade eWorks accelerator before being selected for the 2023 Techstars Audi Founder Innovation Lab. He is also a recognized Future Energy Leader by the World Energy Council.
The clean energy transition has an underappreciated infrastructure problem. Renewables now make up 43.2% of the European power mix, but their intermittency creates constant volatility on the grid. Every time cloud cover hits a solar farm or wind drops, grid operators need to compensate in real time, historically by spinning up fossil fuel peaker plants that exist solely to absorb those swings. Demand for flexibility in Europe is expected to more than double to keep pace with an increasingly intermittent power system, and the conventional answer, utility-scale battery storage, is expensive to build and slow to deploy.
What Tether recognized is that the storage already exists. There are millions of EVs plugged in across Europe at any given moment. In 2025 alone, over 2 million battery electric vehicles were registered, reflecting the rapid scale of adoption. Each one is a controllable load that can be sped up or slowed down in response to grid conditions. In aggregate, they represent a balancing asset of real scale that does not require new infrastructure to unlock.
Tether's platform sits between the charge point operator and the balancing market, predicting grid stress ahead of time and dynamically adjusting charging speeds across its network to absorb or reduce demand accordingly. The revenue generated from bidding that flexibility on European balancing markets is shared back with operators, creating a new income stream on hardware they already own. The software-only model employed by Tether, which has no hardware requirement and an integration with the charger operators that takes under a week, is the right go-to-market for a fragmented operator market where capital intensity and thin margins are chronic pain points. European grid operators could benefit from a projected €4 billion in annual savings from optimizing the grid and making use of flexibility from available assets, and Tether is positioning itself as the software layer that captures a share of that value.
Tether’s platform turns EVs into grid-responsive energy assets.
By 2030, EVs on European roads could contribute up to 4% of Europe's annual power supply, enough to power 30 million homes, and by 2040, if all EVs are capable of bidirectional charging, over 10% of Europe's power needs could be stored and reinjected when needed. Tether's current smart charging model does not require V2G-capable vehicles, but the roadmap toward bidirectional capability as compatible EVs become widespread over the next five to ten years substantially expands the revenue opportunity per vehicle and per market. The EU has signaled that fully interoperable V2G solutions are expected to be widely available by 2027, giving Tether a clear regulatory tailwind for that transition.
Europe's fragmented approach to electricity supply security cost the continent almost €11 billion in 2024, and navigating each country's balancing mechanism adds complexity to every new market Tether enters. The charge point operator market is capital intensive with thin margins and commoditized hardware, which constrains how much flexibility value Tether can extract per operator. EV adoption, while structurally growing, has shown signs of slowing in key markets, directly affecting the density of the fleet Tether can aggregate. That said, the core business does not require V2G or rapid EV growth to function today. The immediate opportunity in smart charging coordination is real and growing, and the V2G roadmap is upside.
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