When Abdel Ali was weighing whether to buy an electric vehicle, he ran into a problem familiar to millions of urban residents: his building had no charging infrastructure and no plan to install any. Most would-be EV owners stop there. Ali, an alumnus of York University's Schulich School of Business, had somewhere to take the problem.

What happened next is a story about the kind of connection a university like York is uniquely positioned to create. An MBA graduate with a bold idea found a mentor at Schulich Startups who introduced him to his future chief operating officer. An accelerator delivered in partnership with YSpace opened doors to engineering faculties, municipal partners, real estate developers and funders. A conversation sparked a new idea that became Kiwi Charge in 2023: a Toronto-based robotics and AI company whose autonomous robots bring charging directly to parked vehicles with no fixed infrastructure required.

The timing matters. As governments, industry and researchers work to accelerate the shift to a low-carbon economy, EVs are playing an increasingly important role. At the same time, charging infrastructure remains one of the biggest barriers to adoption, with a recent CAA survey finding that 70 per cent of Canadian EV owners are dissatisfied with the availability of charging stations. Kiwi Charge is emerging as a leader in helping meet this urgent need, recently securing $1.7 million in funding through the Ontario Vehicle Innovation Network (OVIN) with support from General Motors Canada and Pfaff Automotive.

In this interview, Ali reflects on the origins of Kiwi Charge, the challenges of building a robotics and AI startup, and how York — as one of the top 100 universities for entrepreneurs in the annual Pitchbook rankings — facilitated dynamic connections  across academia, industry and government that helped shape his company.

For readers who are new to Kiwi Charge, tell us what your company does.

Abdel Ali: Kiwi Charge is a robotics and AI company that builds autonomous mobile chargers for EVs. Instead of drivers searching for a charging station, our robots bring charging directly to the vehicle. They navigate parking lots and garages on their own, connect to EVs, charge them, and disconnect—all without human intervention.

We are solving one of the biggest hidden barriers to EV adoption: access. Roughly 30 percent of EV owners live in condos or apartment buildings where installing fixed charging infrastructure can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and take years to complete. I wanted to build something that could bring charging to wherever a car happens to be parked, at a fraction of the cost, so that living in a condo or apartment doesn't mean giving up on going electric.

Was there a particular moment that convinced you this was a problem worth solving?

Ali: It started with a problem I experienced myself. I was considering buying an EV and then realized that the building I lived in had no charging infrastructure at all and no real plan to install any.

When I started asking around, I found almost everyone I knew in a multi-tenant building was hitting the exact same wall. That was the moment it clicked. The barrier wasn't the car, or even the charger; it was the high cost of installation, where roughly 80 per cent comes from conduits, electricians, and permitting rather than the hardware itself. If charging could come to the car instead of the other way around, that wasted 80 per cent disappears, and so does the problem.

Turning an idea into a working robotic platform is no small task. What were some of the biggest challenges you encountered?

Ali: The technical challenges were significant: we had to build a robot that could navigate real parking garages, survive Canadian winters, and connect and disconnect from a vehicle safely and reliably without a person involved. Winterizing the platform alone required extensive research and development.

On the business side, the challenge was proving demand and credibility before we had a finished product — convincing property managers, developers, and municipalities to bet on new technology.

We navigated both challenges by leaning on partners: accelerator programs gave us access to engineering expertise and testing environments we couldn't have afforded alone, and we prioritized developing real pilots early on so that we had evidence, not just a pitch.

Our earliest pilots were highly hands-on: I would visit buildings at night and manually charge residents’ electric vehicles using an early, non-automated version of our solution. Customers did not care whether a robot or a person delivered the charge; they simply wanted to wake up to a fully charged car. That experience validated the strength of the underlying need, helped us build our initial traction, and ultimately led to our first paying customers and key strategic partners.

What role did York University play in supporting your journey?

Ali: The York University innovation ecosystem has been central to Kiwi Charge’s growth from the beginning.

The support of Schulich Startups, and particularly the mentorship of Chris Carder, has been especially meaningful. His guidance helped us navigate the inevitable highs and lows of building a startup, and he personally played a critical role in helping us work through a difficult period with a key partner whose loss could have significantly disrupted our progress. He also introduced me to Aamir Abubakkar, who would go on to become a member of Kiwi Charge’s founding team and our Chief Operating Officer.

Through SmartTO’s Smart Mobility Technology Accelerator, delivered in partnership with YSpace, we advanced from an early prototype to a market-ready minimum viable product, roughly doubling our technology readiness level over the course of the program. The YSpace Network provided warm introductions to OVIN, municipal partners in Markham and Vaughan, real estate developers, and other ecosystem stakeholders. Many of those introductions developed into pilots, partnerships, and funding opportunities.

Together, YSpace and Schulich Startups gave us access to expertise, relationships, and opportunities that would have been difficult to secure on our own. Winning first place at SmartTO’s Demo Day and Schulich Startup Night 19 also gave us credibility at exactly the right stage of our growth.

And, of course, my MBA at Schulich shaped how I think about entrepreneurship as well. It reinforced the importance of validating customer demand before investing heavily in hardware.

Collaboration is a recurring theme throughout Kiwi Charge's story. Why has bringing together expertise from different disciplines been so important?

Ali: Challenges like EV adoption don't belong to a single discipline. Our work sits at the intersection of robotics, artificial intelligence, electrical engineering, real estate, municipal policy, business, and behavioral change. No single team can have all of that expertise internally.

Collaboration sometimes feels slower in the short term because more perspectives are involved, but it almost always leads to stronger solutions. An engineer working alone may build remarkable technology that nobody needs. A business leader might identify an attractive market opportunity without understanding the technical constraints. Bringing people together from different sectors helps uncover blind spots early, ensures we are solving the right problem, and ultimately allows us to move further and faster.

What are some partnerships that have had the most meaningful impact on Kiwi Charge’s success?

Ali: One collaboration that had a particularly meaningful impact came through SmartTO. Through our cohort, we connected with Centennial College's Applied Technical Project program, where engineering faculty and students worked with our team to winterize the robot and improve its electrical and motorized systems. They helped our lean startup accelerate its development while providing students with meaningful, hands-on experience in contributing to a real-world commercial product.

Since then, we've expanded that collaborative model. We hired students from York University’s Lassonde School of Engineering to support the development of Kiwi Charge’s robotic arm. We also worked with Ontario Tech University on battery systems and EV-charging technology and collaborated with the University of Toronto and the University of Waterloo on robotics research and development.

Beyond hardware, we also worked with the Vector Institute on machine learning for the robot's navigation and with Mohawk College’s IDEAWORKS on software development.

These are institutions and resources that an early-stage hardware startup would not normally be able to access easily. Each collaboration brought specialized expertise into our company, created valuable experiential-learning opportunities for students, and allowed us to advance far more quickly than we could have on our own.

What are you most proud of accomplishing so far?

Ali: We're now operating in real-world environments rather than laboratory settings. Through our pilots, we have delivered thousands of kilowatt-hours of clean energy, enabled tens of thousands of kilometres of electric driving, and avoided tonnes of CO₂ emissions, while contributing to several United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

We are still early in our journey, but we have grown our team to 14 employees and are actively creating new intellectual property and developing groundbreaking AI models in-house.

But what I am most proud of is simpler than the metrics. Residents in buildings that previously had no access to EV charging can now realistically own and charge an electric vehicle. We are removing a real barrier for real people, not simply building interesting technology.

Looking ahead, what opportunities excite you most?

Ali: We are focused on scaling beyond our current pilots. Today, more than 140 buildings are on our waitlist, and we have paid pilots underway with leading real estate developers, including Starlight Investments. We are also advancing commercial deployments with major automotive partners, including GM Canada, Pfaff/Lithia and a prominent EV manufacturer based in the United States.

Our immediate goal is to commercialize our patented charging technology, expand into additional cities across Canada, and begin entering international markets.

What excites me most, however, is the broader opportunity: if charging infrastructure can come to a building rather than requiring the building to be rebuilt around it, we can unlock EV adoption for millions of urban residents who do not have a driveway or a dedicated parking space with power.

Is there any advice you’d like to share with students and alumni who are aspiring entrepreneurs?

Ali: First of all, validate that people actually want what you're building before you spend money building it. My background in venture capital taught me that lesson, and it saved us from making a lot of expensive mistakes.

Secondly, do not try to do it alone. Nearly every major breakthrough we have had — whether technical, financial, or commercial — came through a partnership, a program, or a conversation with others, not something we figured out in isolation.

And, finally, use the resources around you. York University and the broader Toronto innovation ecosystem offer extensive startup infrastructure, accelerators, grants, and mentorship opportunities that many students don't realize are available until they start looking.

The support that YSpace and Schulich Startups gave us is hard to assign a dollar value to, but it has likely had as much impact on our trajectory as any single grant.