Chargebotic

Chargebotic is a San Francisco-based startup building autonomous charging infrastructure for robot fleets, founded in December 2025 by Anis Cheriet and Bo-Christopher Redfearn.¹ The company's product combines wireless induction charging hardware with orchestration software that enables robots to detect low battery, navigate to the nearest charging pad, dock, charge, and resume their mission without human intervention.³ Chargebotic participates in the Canopy Spring 2026 cohort at Founders, Inc.¹⁰

Origins

The company's founding hypothesis emerged on December 6, 2025, from a question about lunar rovers: a $100 million rover can die within 14 days on the Moon because energy delivery infrastructure does not exist there.³ The lunar surface presents extreme thermal swings, reaching -173°C during the 14-Earth-day lunar night, which drains batteries and disables solar-powered systems when sunlight is absent.⁷ Cheriet and Redfearn began researching how to deploy distributed energy nodes for opportunity charging across the lunar surface.

In the course of that research, the founders identified induction as the preferred charging method: wireless transfer eliminates the connectors that lunar regolith dust would otherwise jam, and removes moving parts that degrade in vacuum conditions.³ Their investigation surfaced prior art from Astrobotic Technology and WiBotic, which had conducted thermal vacuum testing of a wireless charging system capable of functioning across the full range of lunar temperatures (-180°F to 220°F) at 80–85% total system efficiency.⁷

The founders designed the Lunar Energy Node (LEN) concept: small, deployable charging modules buried in regolith for thermal protection and networked via mesh topology with AI-assisted routing.³ A related design, the LEN-P, specified a rugged cylindrical battery unit with a wireless charging dock, 1–2 kWh of storage, shock absorbers, thermal management, and ground-penetration anchoring — intended to survive being catapulted from orbit and impacting the lunar surface.³ A 3D-printed prototype at one-third scale (155mm form factor) was completed on January 5, 2026, informed by research into artillery shell aerodynamics and impact resistance.³

Pivot to Earth

On January 6, 2026, working out of the Artifact lab in San Francisco, the founders pivoted from the lunar application to validate the core technology on Earth first.³ Within that same day, they began building Spark-E, a custom rover, and a first-generation conductive charging station from scratch.³

Spark-E is built on a mecanum-wheel platform equipped with an NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano, a LiDAR unit, an OAK-D Lite depth camera, an IMU, ultrasonic sensors, and wheel encoders.² The robot runs ROS 2 with SLAM and Nav2 for autonomous mapping and pathfinding, and uses ArUco fiducial marker detection for precision docking alignment.³ In the first autonomous demo, Spark-E detected an ArUco marker, navigated to a conductive charging pad, and completed a full charge cycle with zero human intervention.³

In February 2026, the team evolved the navigation system into a charging orchestration layer: the robot detects a low-battery condition, plans a route to the nearest available charger, docks with millimeter precision, charges, and resumes its prior task.² During the same month, the team built custom induction charging pads using 3D-printed enclosures with copper coils, starting at 5W and scaling the design to 100W.³ The Chargebotic V1 system — mecanum-wheel robot, LiDAR, depth camera, induction charging station, autonomous navigation, and charging orchestration — was complete and operational by the end of February 2026, approximately three months after the company's founding.³²

Product

Chargebotic's commercial offering consists of three components: a wireless charging pad, a receiver module that mounts on a robot, and orchestration software that manages fleet-wide scheduling and routing.⁶ The hardware is induction-based, requiring no physical connectors between robot and charging station, which eliminates a primary failure mode in dirty or dusty industrial environments.¹

The orchestration layer handles battery state monitoring, route planning to the nearest charger, priority scheduling across multiple robots competing for chargers, and resumption of missions after charging.² The software is listed as in stealth development.²

The company positions its product against the market condition that robot fleets lose 30% of productive operating time to charging and battery management, that energy infrastructure cost at scale exceeds the cost of the robots themselves, and that no cross-vendor universal charging solution currently exists.¹ Chargebotic offers enterprise go-to-market through on-site audits: a visit to a fleet operator's facility, a charging workflow audit identifying lost time and energy, a custom charger specification (induction or conductive, indoor or outdoor), an orchestration software plan, and a written ROI estimate with a 90-day deployment roadmap.¹

Industries

Chargebotic identifies six target verticals. Warehouse and factory AMRs are the primary near-term focus, where robots are typically docked at fixed chargers rather than charged dynamically during idle moments in their routes.¹ Drones and UAVs represent a second segment, where charging turnaround time directly constrains fleet throughput and mission endurance.¹ Last-mile delivery robots are a third, with the proposal to distribute charging nodes across a delivery zone so robots can recharge without returning to a central depot.¹ Humanoid robots, industrial and outdoor robots operating in construction and agriculture, and the original space and lunar applications are also listed as target markets.¹

Founders

Anis Cheriet (CEO) grew up in Algeria and earned a Master's in Entrepreneurship and Project Management from Université Paris X Nanterre.⁴ He entered the EV charging industry in 2021 at Rexel, Europe's largest electrical distributor, traveling more than 10,000 km across France to train 350 B2B clients on EV charging hardware.⁴ He subsequently obtained the EVSE Expert certification (Q-P1/P2/P3) from Sicame Academy, qualifying him to audit and train on the highest European charging installation standards, and trained more than 100 professional electricians from companies including Schneider, Hager, ABB, and Wallbox.⁴

At Resonance / Groupe Firalp, Cheriet managed 73 sites within a national 1,040-location McDonald's deployment across France, each site equipped with 300 kW fast chargers, and developed a standardization framework that reduced deployment variables from 22 to 2.⁴ He directed EV deployment across 115 Carrefour supermarket sites as part of the retailer's official Paris 2024 Olympic Games partnership and served as project manager for a Tesla Supercharger V3 site installation and site coordination for Fastned ultra-fast charging hubs.⁴ At Altens, he built the company's heavy-vehicle charging strategy from the ground up, negotiating with 18 DC/AC hardware manufacturers and directing 17 projects for fleet operators including Scania and Renault Trucks on 24/7 logistics platforms.⁴ Across these roles, Cheriet deployed more than 2,500 EV fast chargers in Europe.⁴ He relocated to San Francisco, completed a Certificate in Human-Centered AI at Stanford, and co-founded Chargebotic in December 2025.⁴ His X handle is @anis_neyo.⁶

Bo-Christopher Redfearn (Hardware Lead) is a hardware validation engineer with more than a decade of experience in sensor systems, display validation, and lab automation.⁵ He holds an MS in Computer Science and has worked as a contract hardware test engineer at Apple validating tablet touch-sensor performance across charging configurations, a multi-sensor validation engineer at Cruise via Apex Systems managing LiDAR and camera testing, and a display sensor engineer at Meta via Basic Solutions developing Python automation for AR/VR display validation.⁵⁸ He was named among AllSpice's 50 Hardware Innovators and spoke at the Sensors Converge 2025 conference on sensor validation for autonomous vehicles.⁸⁹

References

1. Chargebotic | Universal Energy for Autonomous Robots(accessed Apr 24, 2026)
2. Chargebotic | What We've Built(accessed Apr 24, 2026)
3. Chargebotic | Our Story(accessed Apr 24, 2026)
4. Anis Cheriet | From 2,500 Fast Chargers to Powering Robots(accessed Apr 24, 2026)
5. Christopher Redfearn | Engineer. Speaker. Builder.(accessed Apr 24, 2026)
6. Anis Cheriet on X — introducing Chargebotic(accessed Apr 24, 2026)
7. Astrobotic's Wireless Charging System for the Moon Can Survive Lunar Night — Astrobotic(accessed Apr 24, 2026)
8. Christopher Redfearn — LinkedIn(accessed Apr 24, 2026)
9. Bo-Christopher Redfearn — Sensors Converge 2025(accessed Apr 24, 2026)
10. Canopy — Founders, Inc.(accessed Apr 24, 2026)