Founder Group takes 19.9% stake in SpacePlus EV charging operator

Founder Group Limited, the Malaysia-headquartered solar plant engineering firm listed on Nasdaq, has acquired a 19.90% equity stake in Nichcom Go Sdn Bhd, the charge point operator behind the SpacePlus EV charging network, according to the company's press release. The deal, disclosed on 25 August 2026 and reported independently, puts a strategic investor behind a charging operator that is expanding out of Selangor and has already put its charging app to work in the United States. Neither the consideration nor the implied valuation was disclosed.

The deal

Founder Group, a pure-play end-to-end EPCC solutions provider for solar PV facilities, said it had completed the acquisition of the 19.90% equity interest in Nichcom Go, the Malaysian Charge Point Operator behind the SpacePlus brand. Founder Group chief executive Lee Seng Chi framed it as a fit between two businesses: "they bring the charging network and customer reach, we bring the energy infrastructure to power it more sustainably."

Nichcom Go founder and chief executive Nilson Chong said the strategic partnership gives SpacePlus "the capital, expertise and energy capabilities" to accelerate a stated goal of 1,000 EV charging stations across Malaysia by 2028. SpacePlus began in Selangor, has expanded into Perak and Melaka, and is now moving into Johor public charging facilities. It also has its first overseas footprint: in the United States, the Terravis Worksport charger runs on SpacePlus's app infrastructure. The strategic logic is that Founder Group's in-house solar and battery energy storage capability lets SpacePlus move stations toward solar-powered charging over time — and the backdrop is a national grid that Tenaga Nasional Berhad has committed RM35 billion (about US$8.2 billion) between 2025 and 2030 to upgrade in support of the energy transition.

Why this matters

The infrastructure gap is what makes the stake interesting. The Ministry of Investment, Trade and Industry told Parliament in July that Malaysia had 6,416 public EV chargers installed nationwide as of 31 May 2026 — 2,143 DC fast chargers and 4,273 AC units — against a 10,000-unit target set for 2025 that has now been missed. The National Energy Transition Roadmap resets the goal to 30,000 charging stations by 2030. Of the chargers installed today, 6,176 sit in Peninsular Malaysia, 208 in Sarawak and 32 in Sabah. MITI also said it does not impose a price control mechanism on EV charging and encourages private-sector participation, which is precisely the opening a private charge point operator monetises. On the demand side, the Malaysia Automotive Association recorded battery electric vehicle registrations rising 109% in 2025 to 30,848 units, while JPJ data cited in the release shows 14,591 EV registrations in the first quarter of 2026, up 113.7% year on year. Research cited by the company puts Malaysia's EV charging market at US$539.4 million by 2030, a 23.25% compound annual growth rate.

The second point is that Malaysia's charging build-out is being financed through corporate and state channels rather than venture funds. JomCharge, operated by EV Connection Sdn Bhd, signed a memorandum of understanding with Worldwide Holdings Bhd, a subsidiary of Selangor's development agency PKNS, on 14 October to deploy at least 1,000 charging stations across the state within 24 months, against Selangor's own target of 4,000 stations by 2030. Gentari, Petronas' clean energy arm, signed an MoU with BYD Malaysia on 21 October to develop a high-powered charging network. Bus Cap (KL:BUSCAP) entered a two-year collaboration with StarCharge Energy on EV charging infrastructure on 20 October. SpacePlus is one of more than a dozen licensed charge point operators in a market where JomCharge grew from 476 points in 2024 to 680 in 2025 and ChargeSini from 196 to 501, a 155% jump. A 19.9% strategic stake is the capital route that actually funds hardware, grid connections and site leases.

For a Malaysian investor, the read is that the technology layer in this market is being built in-house and is already exportable. The asset Founder Group is buying is not concrete — it is the software that handles station discovery, real-time availability, wallet and payment across a network, and it is running on hardware in another country. A company that wants that capability for its own fleet or its own sites without licensing a global charge point platform builds it instead: that is the Selangor custom software track rather than another vendor line item, and the load-balancing and dispatch side of it is business automation.

What's next

Three things to watch. Whether Founder Group discloses the consideration in a later filing, which would put the first hard valuation on a Malaysian charge point operator. Whether SpacePlus converts the capital into the 1,000-station target by 2028 rather than the state-partnership model JomCharge is running. And whether the solar-plus-storage integration produces the first genuinely solar-powered public charging site in the country. The wider signal for investors is whether strategic capital keeps flowing into licensed operators at this pace — with the SpacePlus app already powering hardware in the US, the software half of this market looks regional.

Source: Founder Group Limited — investment in Nichcom Go, operator of the SpacePlus EV charging network