Monta bets EU AFIR makes tap-to-pay charging standard; €80M Series B

Monta is an operating platform for EV charging: software for charge point operators, businesses and hardware makers to deploy, run, price and bill chargers, plus a driver app with roaming across hundreds of thousands of charge points.

That AFIR's mandate — ad-hoc card payment and live data on every EU public charger — would make Monta's software and payment layer the compliance backbone CPOs buy.

US$30M round at a $155M valuation (Sep 2022, Energize Ventures); €80M Series B (Jan 2024, Energize Capital co-led with GreenPoint Partners and Denmark's EIFO), €130M total in three years.

Founded in Copenhagen in 2020 by Casper Rasmussen after he bought a Tesla and found charging infrastructure fragmented, unreliable and hard to pay for; he left a global CTO role and built a software layer to connect operators, owners and drivers, launching into a market that needed ~3,000 new public chargers a week across Europe.

Monta grew through 2022's $30M round at $155M, then raised an €80M Series B in January 2024 as AFIR (Regulation (EU) 2023/1804) prepared to force transparent pricing, ad-hoc card/QR payment and third-party data sharing on all new public chargers from April 13, 2024; 2023 ARR grew 600%, offices opened in Paris and Barcelona, and partners such as Siemens, Rolec, Uno-X and EGG joined its roaming network of 600,000+ charge points.

Scaling: the AFIR compliance angle became a product line (dynamic pricing, tap-to-pay terminals, data reporting), and by 2026 the platform lists 700+ industry partners and 1.6M+ chargers on its roaming network.

The regulatory opening is dated and enforceable: AFIR took effect April 13, 2024, mandating ad-hoc payment and data sharing on every new EU public charger.

Traction is specific: TechCrunch coverage (2022-09-14), €80M Series B announced 2024-01-23, 600,000+ charge points and 1M monthly sessions.

The wedge is clear: a hardware-agnostic OS sits between fragmented charger vendors and operators, so the compliance layer lands in software that already runs the chargers.

It shows the regulatory-openings pattern where a legal deadline converts an industry's interoperability problem into recurring platform revenue.

When a regulation standardizes payment and data duties across a fragmented market, the neutral software layer wins: the deadline turns an industry problem into recurring revenue.

As of 2026-09-02 Monta is scaling: it continues to add charge point operators and hardware partners across Europe, and its public API exposes AFIR-compliant roaming charge points, availability and ad-hoc pricing. The company lists over 700 industry partners and more than 1.6 million chargers on its roaming network, and positions AFIR-compliant payments and data reporting as core product features rather than compliance add-ons.