We built the thing we needed ourselves.
Volty makes EV charging billable in apartment buildings without any hardware at all. It started as a problem its founder had in his own carpark, became a hackathon entry, and won.
Winner, Pinch Me! I Want $50K
Pinch Me! I Want $50K was a national hackathon presented by Pinch Payments together with The Founders Union and Scalare Partners. The brief was deliberately hard: in three weeks, build something real on Pinch's payments platform — not a mockup, not a pitch deck, a working product that moves actual money.
More than 150 teams entered and 68 made it to submission. Six were picked as finalists and invited to present live at Demo Night at The Collider in Sydney on 10 August 2026, in front of a room of investors, operators and the three partner organisations.
Volty won the $50,000 grand prize, judged on the strength of the build and its commercial potential. By Demo Night it wasn't a prototype: charging sessions were being metered from live vehicle data, charged to real cards, and settled to a managed merchant account — with a resident app and a strata console around them.
The prize money is going straight back into the product. Volty is being commercialised now, starting with pilot buildings in Sydney.
Presented by
Pinch Payments
The Founders Union
Scalare Partners
$50,000
Grand prize, Pinch hackathon 2026
150+
Teams entered nationally
3 weeks
From idea to a working product
Started in a Sydney carpark
I live in an apartment in Sydney, and I have the exact problem Volty solves. My car sits in a carpark with power points a few metres away, and none of it is set up so I can use them and pay for what I use.
It's not a technical problem — it's a billing one. Nobody can work out how to charge me fairly for the electricity, so the easiest answer a building can give is no. Some buildings padlock the power points outright. Others quote tens of thousands of dollars for hardware, then wait a year for a committee to approve it.
Meanwhile a quarter of new cars sold in Australia are electric, and two and a half million Australians live in apartments. Those two numbers collide in basement carparks every day.
So Volty skips the hardware entirely. Your car already knows how much it charged — it reports that to its manufacturer's app every day. Volty reads that same data, works out what the session cost, and charges your card. The building doesn't install anything. It just decides on a rate and switches charging on.
I built it because I wanted to use it. It's tested against a real building, a real car and a real basement — not a spec sheet. If you're in the same position, or you manage buildings full of people who are, I'd genuinely like to hear from you: support@volty.com.au.
What we care about
Four things that decide what gets built and what doesn't.
The short version
Volty is a brand of HJ Atlas Pty Ltd (ABN 46 701 729 777), based in Sydney, NSW. Charging payments are processed by Pinch Payments and settled to each building's own merchant account. Vehicle data comes from Enode, with the driver's permission, and can be disconnected at any time. Read the privacy policy or get in touch.
Bring Volty to your building
Tell us about your building and we'll be in touch as we roll out — or book a time and we'll walk you through it.