our beginning

Why Altricity Exists

I’ve been working on cars for as long as I can remember. In the 1970s, that meant helping my dad maintain our family vehicles, using his jump starter not just on our own cars, but on neighbors’ cars and even the garden tractor I used to cut lawns around the neighborhood. Dead batteries were just part of life, and jump starting was something you learned early.

For decades after that, nothing really changed. I relied on portable jump starters, jumper cables, and roadside assistance like everyone else. When a battery died, you dealt with it — usually with some inconvenience, sometimes with a long wait.

Then one day, I had a dead battery in a late-model car. The battery was weak enough that the key fob wouldn’t unlock the vehicle. Even though I had a portable jump starter inside the car, I couldn’t access it or the battery. I was locked out completely and had no choice but to call roadside assistance.

That moment was the turning point.

It wasn’t just inconvenient — it made me realize how fragile and outdated the entire jump-starting process still is. In a world of smart vehicles, mobile apps, and connected systems, we were still relying on an 80-year-old process that assumes ideal conditions, manual access, and external help at the exact moment something goes wrong.

By that point, I had spent my career building software and connected products — starting as a software engineer at Motorola and later working for more than 15 years on smart systems that combine hardware, mobile apps, vehicle telematics and cloud technologies. It was obvious to me that vehicle power recovery didn’t need another tool — it needed to be treated as a system.

I set out to design a better way, one that would stay with the vehicle, remain ready, and remove uncertainty when a battery-related failure occurs. I formed a small team, built early prototypes, and before long, Altricity was born.

What surprised us most wasn’t that the solution worked — it was how widespread the problem really is. Despite decades of technological progress in vehicles, the basic process for dealing with a dead battery hadn’t meaningfully evolved. Altricity exists to change that, by making vehicle power recovery dependable, predictable, and designed for the way modern vehicles are actually used.

Darin Minter

Founder, Altricity