ChargeItSpot is fundraising again as it doubles down on back-of-house ARC kiosks for retailers

In 2020 and 2021, after years of focus on phone-charging stations for customer use, venture-backed ChargeItSpot started serving the retailers themselves. The Bourse-based company took on a new pain point in the sector — time, money and energy wasted on docking, charging and fixing the devices used on retail floors or during checkout. Its charging stations still exist in stores, but the company’s new focus would be on its Asset Recharge Centers (ARC), CEO Douglas Baldasare told Technical.ly in February 2022.

The mobile device management kiosks allow store associates to sign out devices used on the floor and report problems, keep them charged and organized, and save time for managers who used to oversee the process. ChargeItSpot first piloted the locker-like devices with Navy Yard’s Comoto Holdings, owner of RevZilla.

Now, after about 18 months of focusing on ARC, ChargeItSpot just signed a big client: Sam’s Club. The Philly company will be placing two ARC machines in each of the retail warehouse’s 600 locations later this year. The lockers allow for associates to quickly scan in and out handheld devices, report issues and streamline maintenance and repair on those devices.

“Our associates are already telling us these lockers allow them to stop worrying about lost or
damaged devices and gives them more time to focus on taking care of our members,”
Sam’s Club’s SVP of Operations Chad Donath said in a statement. “All of our clubs and our club associates will benefit from this technology. It’s just easier.”

Baldasare told Technical.ly this week that the pilots with ARC so far have allowed stores to cut down on the number of devices they have to purchase for their associates, because they get damaged devices back in working order more quickly, and broken devices are removed faster. Stores that used to operate with about 100 devices have cut that number down to about 70, per the CEO.

Baldasare said ChargeItSpot is also raising another round of venture capital, recently closing $5.7 million of a $10 million round. The raise is going toward the rollout of its Sam’s Club deal, the continued development of ARC’s technology and toward continuing to expand its team. ChargeItSpot’s headcount is now at more than 150 people.

“We realized we were kind of unintentionally, uniquely positioned to solve these challenges, given what we’d built for consumers, and how we had adopted to serve this back-of-house need,” Baldasare told Technical.ly. “And now ARC is the vast majority of our business.”