On December 16, 2025, Ample, Inc. filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of Texas. Two months earlier the company had employed close to 200 people. By the time the petition was filed, it was down to two full-time staff and 15 contractors kept on to wind things down. Ample had raised more than $330 million since 2014 from investors that included Shell Ventures, Japan's ENEOS, Thailand's PTT, and Repsol, chasing a genuinely different idea: instead of plugging a truck or van in and waiting, you'd pull into a station and swap a depleted battery pack for a charged one in a few minutes.
Eight months later, the case still isn't closed. An asset auction scheduled for March 4, 2026 was called off after the company's remaining hardware and equipment sold privately instead, and as of the most recent court filings there is still no confirmed reorganization plan. Ample is not dead in the news-cycle sense; it is dead in the slower, more instructive sense of a company working through the mechanics of failure in public bankruptcy filings.
For commercial property owners, fleet operators, and site hosts, that slow unwind is worth more than the original headline. It's a specific, documented case of what can go wrong when a charging vendor's whole pitch rests on a proprietary format, and it's worth reading before you sign with any vendor selling something other than a standard plug.
What Ample actually built
Ample's system was mechanical, not electrical, in its core innovation. Modular battery packs sat in a robotic swap station; a vehicle pulled in, and a mechanism removed the depleted pack and installed a charged one, targeting a job done in minutes rather than the tens of minutes a fast charger needs. The company marketed it primarily at commercial and rideshare fleets, where vehicles run predictable routes and downtime has a direct cost, and it built out stations in markets including the San Francisco Bay Area. It raised a $31 million Series A led by Shell Ventures, then a $160 million Series C in 2021 led by Moore Strategic Ventures with ENEOS and Shell Ventures returning, pushing total funding past $330 million across five rounds.
The pitch was not crazy. Charging speed was a real constraint for fleets in the early 2020s, and a swap that takes minutes beats a charge that takes an hour. The problem is that the constraint it was solving started closing out from under it.
What changed underneath the business
By the back half of 2025, DC fast charging on many modern passenger and light-duty EVs, the vehicle class Ample's own pitch centered on, routinely moved a vehicle from around 10 percent to 80 percent state of charge in roughly 20 minutes, on hardware and connectors any fleet could also use for every other vehicle it owned. (Heavier-duty fleet vehicles, with larger packs and lower charge-rate limits, still take longer.) For the light-duty case Ample targeted, that collapses swapping's time advantage from "minutes versus the better part of an hour" to "a few minutes versus 20." At the same time, a swap-based model asks a fleet to accept things a standard charger doesn't: battery ownership questions, uncertainty about the health and history of whatever pack you're handed back, a subscription relationship with one vendor, and infrastructure that only that vendor's vehicles and stations can use. Ample itself pointed to supply chain disruption and a pullback in public and private clean-energy investment as headwinds in its own bankruptcy filings; those industry-wide pressures compounded a business model whose core advantage had already narrowed.
Ample is not the first company to bet on swapping and lose. Tesla demonstrated a 90-second battery swap in June 2013, but did not open a pilot station to the public until March 2015, at a site behind a Shell station near Harris Ranch, California; the appointment-only pilot saw little real-world demand and Tesla closed it within about a year and a half, per contemporaneous reporting from Green Car Reports and TechCrunch. Better Place, a startup that tried to build an entire swap-based ecosystem for passenger EVs, raised roughly $800 million and filed for bankruptcy in Israel in May 2013, with its remaining Israeli assets and intellectual property later sold off for a small fraction of that, according to reporting from TechCrunch and CSMonitor at the time. The model does work at scale in one market: China, where NIO has built battery swapping into its core strategy across a large, company-operated network, backed by a standardized vehicle platform NIO controls end to end. That's the tell. Swapping has only worked when one company controls the vehicle, the battery, and the station together. Every attempt to sell swapping as a service layered on top of other people's vehicles has failed.
The bankruptcy case, briefly
Ample and an affiliate, Ample Texas EV, LLC, filed their petitions on December 16, 2025 under case number 25-90817. Court filings put the company's assets at $10 million to $50 million against liabilities of $50 million to $100 million, including roughly $35 million in unsecured convertible notes that would have come due in July 2026. The company secured $6 million in debtor-in-possession financing from Twelve Bridge Capital to fund a wind-down and asset sale process rather than a restructuring.
That process is still running. An early motion sold a walk-in EV testing thermal chamber to Amperesand Inc. for $150,000. The larger machinery and equipment auction planned for March 4, 2026 was cancelled after the company's remaining assets, referred to in the docket as the Onyx Sale Assets, were sold through a private transaction instead. As of the most recent professional-fee reporting in the case, no Chapter 11 plan of reorganization or liquidation has been filed, and the general bar date for creditors to file claims closed February 28, 2026.
What this means for a commercial buyer
None of this means every unconventional charging technology is a bad bet, or that every startup is a bankruptcy waiting to happen. It means a few specific questions are worth asking before you commit a site, a fleet contract, or a capital budget to a vendor selling something other than standard, interoperable hardware.
Does the format work without the vendor? A charger built on J1772, CCS1, or NACS keeps working for your fleet even if the company that installed it goes under; another qualified contractor can service or replace the hardware, and your vehicles keep charging on the same plug. A proprietary swap station, a proprietary battery format, or a proprietary connector only works as long as the company behind it does. If a vendor's core offering only works with that vendor, ask what happens to your site, your fleet, and your uptime the day they don't answer the phone.
Is the technology solving a problem that's still there? Ample's swap advantage narrowed as fast charging got faster. Before betting on a novel approach, ask what has to stay true for the underlying problem to still be worth solving in five years, and whether the gap it closes is shrinking on its own.
Who else uses this, and can you leave if it doesn't work out? A single company controlling the entire stack, the way NIO does, can make an unconventional model work. A vendor asking your fleet to depend on a format nobody else supports is asking you to take on their business risk as your own.
What to do now
If you're evaluating a charging vendor with an unconventional pitch, whether that's battery swapping, a proprietary fast-charging format, or a novel ownership structure, run it through the same questions above before signing. Favor standard connectors and interoperable hardware for the core of your investment, and treat anything proprietary as something you'd need a specific, well-understood reason to accept. For the broader framework on separating durable savings from one-time bets when you model a charging investment, see Building a Realistic ROI Model for Commercial EV Charging, and for a frank look at when a charging project doesn't clear the bar at all, see When EV Charging Doesn't Make Sense.
Last factually verified: 2026-08-26 against Electrek's December 19, 2025 reporting on Ample's Chapter 11 filing; Clean Trucking and Inc.'s December 2025 coverage of the filing and workforce reduction; the Ample, Inc. bankruptcy docket (Case No. 25-90817, U.S. Bankruptcy Court, Southern District of Texas) via Verita Global, the court-appointed claims and noticing agent; TechCrunch's August 2021 coverage of Ample's Series C; Green Car Reports' and TechCrunch's reporting on Tesla's 2013 to 2015 battery-swap pilot at Harris Ranch, California; TechCrunch's and the Christian Science Monitor's 2013 coverage of Better Place's bankruptcy and asset sale; and reporting on NIO's battery-swap network in China. evcharginghelp.com is editorially independent and receives no compensation from any company named here.