Tritium Brand Guidelines: Brisbane Fast Chargers, Insolvency & a New Owner

Three solar-car engineers from the University of Queensland.

Tritium began at the University of Queensland in Brisbane. The university says its three founders, David Finn, Paul Sernia and James Kennedy, were brought together to race in the World Solar Challenge as members of its SunShark solar-car team, that the company’s journey “began in 1999” and grew out of that racing, and that the three founded Tritium in 2001. CarExpert reported in August 2024 that the business started in Brisbane as an engineering consulting firm and introduced its first DC fast charger in 2013.

The fast charger became the business. In an October 2018 university news story, Finn, then co-founder and chief executive, said the company had “more than 200 staff and counting” and was expanding its Veefil-PK operations in Brisbane, with offices in the US and Europe. The university says Tritium “went global in 2017,” and that in 2018 it was named the Premier of Queensland’s Exporter of the Year and won the Manufacturing category of the Premier’s Awards for Excellence, along with awards at Brisbane’s Lord Mayor’s Business Awards.

The university link stayed close. The university says Tritium installed four solar-powered chargers at its St Lucia and Gatton campuses, and that a Tritium e-Mobility fellowship was set up with the St Baker Energy Innovation Fund and the University of New South Wales; its page names the investor Trevor St Baker as Tritium’s chairman. At that stage, the same page says, Tritium’s manufacturing remained in Brisbane and the company exported to 24 countries.

Nasdaq, Tennessee and the administrators.

Tritium listed on the US Nasdaq exchange in 2021, CarExpert reported, and in January 2023 signed a deal to supply fast chargers to BP. It also built a large factory in Lebanon, Tennessee, which Canary Media says opened in 2022 and can make up to 30,000 fast chargers a year. In late 2023 Tritium closed its Brisbane factory to bring its manufacturing together in Tennessee, CarExpert reported, a move made in an effort to return to profit; the magazine added that the company’s attempts to raise capital from Australian state and federal governments had not succeeded.

The effort fell short. In April 2024 Tritium declared itself insolvent and an administrator was appointed, CarExpert and Canary Media reported, and the company received a delisting determination from Nasdaq. Canary Media wrote that the insolvency put at risk the jobs at the Tennessee plant, deliveries of new chargers and the upkeep of chargers already in service.

A buyer came four months later. On 8 August 2024, Autocar Professional and WION reported that Exicom, the New Delhi maker of chargers and power systems that describes itself as India’s largest maker of EV chargers, had signed a definitive agreement through its Dutch subsidiary, Exicom Power Solutions B.V., and other subsidiaries to buy the business and assets of the Tritium group, including the Tennessee factory and the Brisbane engineering centre. Exicom’s announcement said Tritium had sold more than 13,000 DC fast chargers in 47 countries.

In October 2024 Entrepreneur India reported that Exicom had acquired Tritium, and that it planned a factory in Hyderabad to adapt Tritium’s technology for Indian conditions, including wide swings in temperature. Tritium’s life as an independent listed company had ended; the name carried on under its new owner.

How EV charger makers present themselves.

Makers of electric-vehicle chargers sell a box that most people only notice when they need it. Their pictures therefore tend to put the hardware where it lives: a wallbox on a garage wall beside a parked car, a row of rapid chargers under a canopy at a motorway service area, a cable plugged into a car at dusk with the screen lit. The setting tells the buyer which kind of charging the company means, from overnight at home to a short stop on a long trip.

The second set of images is about the system rather than the plug. App screens show a charging session, a schedule or a fleet of chargers on a map, and diagrams show how power cabinets, posts and software connect. For makers that sell mainly to charging operators, depots and retailers, these pictures often matter more than the car, because the customer is buying a network that has to be installed, monitored and serviced.

Factories are the third theme. Many charger makers show their own production lines, with cabinets moving between stations, technicians testing power electronics and finished units waiting to be shipped, as a way of making engineering visible. Trade fairs play a similar part: events such as Power2Drive in Munich and the international EVS electric-vehicle symposium are where new chargers are unveiled, photographed and compared.

Many of these chargers spend their working lives in someone else’s colours. A rapid charger may carry the livery of the operator, the supermarket or the fuel company whose forecourt it stands on, so a maker’s identity often rests on form: the shape of the cabinet, the placement of screen and cable holders, and a name that may appear only in small type. Reading these brands means looking at the hardware as closely as at the logo.

Designed in Australia, made in the US.

Today the brand trades as Tritium Power Solutions, and the old tritiumcharging.com address now redirects to tritiumpower.com. The website sums up its footprint in three lines: “Designed in Australia. Manufactured in the US. Supported from the UK.” It says research and development still runs from an engineering and testing centre in Brisbane, “where the company began,” with chambers for electromagnetic and environmental testing and a lab for checking chargers against real vehicles; that the Lebanon, Tennessee plant is its global headquarters and the factory where its chargers and rectifiers are built and tested; and that it opened a service and technical-support centre in Coventry, England, in early 2025.

Its product language rests on one idea. The company says every Tritium product, charger or rectifier, runs on its own liquid-cooled power modules housed in sealed enclosures that keep out moisture, salt and dust, and it presents itself as an early maker of a liquid-cooled, IP65-rated fast charger. Its charger ranges include the RTM75, which it describes as a compact all-in-one unit with twin cables for forecourts, shops and small fleet sites, alongside the PKM150 and the TRI-FLEX and DC-FLEX platforms. It has also added GRID-FLEX, an 800-volt DC rectifier that it offers for data centres, renewable plants and battery storage, and it describes EV charging as “our first vertical, not the ceiling.” The company says its quality, environmental and health-and-safety management systems are certified to ISO 9001, 14001 and 45001 by LRQA.

For a design guide, Tritium shows how an engineering brand that grew out of a university solar-car team kept its name through insolvency and a sale, with its laboratories still in Brisbane, its factory in Tennessee and its message centred on sealed, liquid-cooled hardware. Compare Kempower, another maker of DC fast chargers, and ABB, whose businesses include charging hardware. For this guide we use a deep navy, a cabinet steel grey and a solar amber with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Tritium’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.