Joshua Aviv hopes to give electric car owners the freedom to travel farther.

One of the biggest impediments to electric car ownership is range anxiety — electric car owners save tons of money by avoiding gas stations, but often can’t find charging stations, which restricts the total distance they can travel.

Aviv is the founder of SparkCharge, a startup that aims to solve the problem of range anxiety by increasing the availability of highway charging stations for electric cars — about one every 40 miles. SparkCharge first came to fruition in February 2014, and is now fully funded and backed.

“I took (my friend’s Jeep) to get some gas while it was a quarter from being empty, and I put $20 in the Jeep and by the time I got back home it was almost empty again,” said Aviv, senior economics major. “I started looking into electric vehicles but there were a lot of limitations, like range anxiety.”

Reflecting on the process of building SparkCharge, Aviv noted some of the challenges he has faced, particularly with marketing. Aviv said he didn’t initially think marketing was going to be challenging, but added that it’s all about letting electric vehicle owners know that this service is available for them.

Now, SparkCharge is competing for market space with Tesla Motors. Aviv said SparkCharge’s small size is what allows it to be agile and “fly under the radar” against multimillionaire giants who can generate mass publicity with a single tweet. Its first electric charging station will be installed by the end of June. Consumers can drive up to the station, pay through a mobile app and then plug the hose into their car, just like charging a phone.

“It’s like teaching people how to use the phone all over again, like when the iPhone came out,” Aviv said. “Most kids can’t say they’ve built infrastructure that could be the next Exxon in a matter of years.”