Ep. 28: Orlin Radev, CEO of Ampeco, on Scaling a Global CPMS, Smart Charging and the Future of EV Network

Welcome to the Smart Charge by RiDERgy podcast. This is Claudio Geyken, founder and CEO of RiDERgy. This is your show to learn about all things, energy management and smart charging innovation for electric vehicles and fleets.

Today I'm joined by Orlin Radef, CEOO and founder of MEO, the EV charging platform or back end or charge point management system as you want to call it, powering large scale networks worldwide. Since announcing a 26 million Series B in November 24, bringing a total funding to over 42 million, Ampeco has scaled to 180 clients across 60 markets. On its hardware agnostic or CPP platform, um Pecos footprint keeps accelerating from 62,000 managed charge points in early 2023 to close to 200,000 today, and marquee utilities like

Eon operating across 11 European countries on the platform. We'll talk with Orlin about his serial entrepreneur experience, how he scaled so fast, what his take is on the future of the EV market. What makes this software unique and what's next for smart charging? Let's get started. OK, Orle, nice to have you here. You just arrived, I think, to Berlin, right? Yeah, I just flew in and right away I came here to talk to you. How long does it take from Sofia to Berlin? It's 2 hours

so it's not far, but still, I mean. Uh, you have to take the time for the airport as well, so yeah, and this time I think you made it sometimes via with an electric vehicle to Berlin, and this time you, uh, you came by plane though, right? Yeah, it's much faster with a plane. You can, you figure I've made it with a with an EV last year I came for the for the conference with an EV and it took me. Uh, well, I had to sleep

at a hotel actually, but uh, I slept in a hotel in Budapest for 2 hours because the way I planned it, I would have had to arrive there at around 10:00 p.m. I spent like 8 hours on a border. Yeah, it was, it was awful, but control from this year, by the way, no such border control as long as I don't go through Serbia, which I went last time. So, so the EU this year, from this year, Bulgaria is now part of the part of the

Schengen. So as long as I go through Romania, so before it was before it was only for, for flights. So, uh, from this year it's the actual physical borders. So if I go through Romania, then I wouldn't be waiting at the border for 8 hours. That's good, yeah, for any EV driver out there, good to know. Yeah, and by the way, I don't know, maybe EVs actually have a benefit in this case cause I mean you're not spending that much of energy, uh just uh just

standing there. Right. Uh yeah. Yeah, I'm not sure if you follow the electro trucker a bit or if you know about him. He, he's like, um, moving throughout Europe with his electric truck, and then he went all the way through, uh, Romania from Germany to Romania to Turkey, and he was also showing the border control, especially if you need to transport stuff. It was like almost a day, I think, of waiting between Turkey and uh. Yeah, these, these, these borders really can take some time, especially

if you're transporting something with a truck, yeah. So anyways, it's not about that, uh, today, uh, before we get into Ampeo and, and really in the deeds of the industry and the EV industry, uh, can you share us a little bit about yourself? How would you introduce yourself to the what's your background, so to say? Well, I, depending on who's asking, I would like to say I'm an entrepreneur or I would say I'm a pro guy, but maybe I'm more of a pro guy that has

turned entrepreneur. Um, I've been building software products initially for, for, I mean, for my own ventures and for other startups and for enterprises. Ever since I finished high school, so this is how I see myself as a builder, as someone that, uh, solves, um, a usually a business challenge which uh with uh with a software product. Yeah, yeah, I, I, I learned that you already built something in high school, so how was the start really for you to build? Where did it come from? Have you

ever thought about that? Well, I think this is a very classical story. I, I, I started with solving a problem that I experienced firsthand. I was really into games and uh I wanted to play with my friends, uh but we didn't have um broadband internet, so I started an internet service provider and together with actually um my co-founder and CTEO of Aeu and he was then in uh in college, I was in high school and we started this company, we sold it in like 9 months

mostly because uh we started it in January. Uh, and I was in the 11th grade, so not the last one, but the one before that. So by September I had to decide, am I going to do a business or am I going to finish high school and you know, high school dropout doesn't sound like a great start in life. I mean college dropouts, I mean this plays out well for uh for some people in Silicon Valley, but I mean high school dropout didn't sound like a

great start, so we sold the company, but I was, I was hooked on entrepreneurship and uh quickly after that I found a way to. To continue doing this and I've co-founded probably around 10 companies before Ampeo, but yeah, for the longest time it was the, the one that I had for the longest time was a software development company where we mostly built the products of other startups and by working with them we became co-founders of some of those. Um, and this has been an exciting journey

before Mpeku which is now our idea for the past 7 years, something that we are building of our own. Uh, interesting. So you, you then after your high school decided to study like something like computer engineering or what was the, the I, I, I was studying network engineering, um, telecommunication sort of, yeah, exactly, but networking, but hm, I didn't go far. I mean, I studied this for 2 years and uh then I decided I'm not doing this. Uh, I also tried, uh, programming. Uh, by that

time, Alex, my co-founder, he, he was working at a software development company, and, uh, I went and, uh, had an uh, sorry, an internship, uh, with, uh, with him for 3 months, uh, tried to become a developer, and I figured I won't be a developer. I mean, I like what developers do, but I want them to do it for me, but I'll not be the one developing things. And eventually I switched to my studies to management and this is what I graduated from from college, uh

but yeah, it's, I've been excited about building software products, only I don't want to be the one writing the code. But you have uh the ability to write, did you ever write before or is it? No, no, I mean I tried and uh and I decided it's not for me so I. You know he's writing the specifications, but someone else is actually building it and the the co-founder that that you were working with, he's more of a coder type. Yeah, he's he's a, he's a, I

don't know, the the best engineer I know and a software engineer and so yeah, he's always been building uh the stuff that I come up with. Nice. Yeah, that's a good person to know. Yeah. And you, uh, then how did you then create this company that were that the software development one it was it during the studies or was it then after it was actually after after the studies and it was, um, both of us with my co-founder we worked at another company, uh, not together

I mean he, he worked for another company. I worked for another company, but, uh, we started it because we really wanted to build a software company where we build our own software product we didn't have the idea though, so we figured we'll. We'll gather the team and uh we'll, we'll be building someone else's ideas until we come up with one, and it took us like 10 years. So in 10 years, I mean we were still building someone else's ideas, and I mean it was amazingly exciting

don't get me wrong, and uh I learned a lot, so we, we both learned a lot, but uh it it went for far too long uh before we actually ended up deciding, well, we're just building someone else's ideas, at some point we need to decide what are we building in this world and uh. This happened 7 years ago and Aeu is the uh yeah, the, the result, yeah, the result of that. And, and just to give a flavor, uh what type of ideas were you working

on before Aeco? Yeah, as I said, it was someone else's idea, so they were in very different, uh, sectors. Like, for example, we've, where we've built, um, warehouse management software. We've built, uh, one of the exciting things we built was actually, uh, a like an online farmers' market. It was, or at least it looks to the end consumer as an online farmers' market, but it was more of a logistics platform that made it possible to source produce from very small farms and get them delivered to

customers directly in the city. Uh, and it was, it was a lot of work. Uh, I got involved in this way more than just the product. I at some point I actually managed this company. Uh, it was amazing, exciting, got me, got me, uh, introduced to, um, sustainable, um, uh, foods, um, uh, um, producing food in sustainable way into. Smaller farms and what they struggle with um and yeah it was it was very exciting uh but again it was someone else's idea which I got excited

for and I helped to build the product that uh that makes it possible but uh eventually it wasn't it wasn't mine. Yeah, nice and how did you discover then the the market need for Ampeco? How was that uh inception so to say? Well, interesting story. I mean I always thought I was going to build um a software product so. Uh, at some point after 10 years building someone else's idea, I said that's enough. Uh, let's put a pause on this and decide what we're going to

build, and the decision I came up with was actually that I'm going to run, uh, a car sharing business, so not software at all, or at least I mean not pure software. I actually, my, I got my, uh. Mm, I got the idea by, I, I was, uh, I was visiting Munich and I got to, to rent, um, a BMW. I don't know what was the service then like Sharen or something, yeah, yeah, but it was before Share now but, um, anyway, I mean I, I

like the idea. It wasn't electric by the way, it was, uh, it was just, just the idea of the shared economy where you don't own the vehicle, you get to use it, it gets used by multiple people, it doesn't stand, uh, idle. And so I really like this and I said well this is this this sounds like something that I would do. I mean our previous endeavor with the with the farm to uh farm to table thing it it was kind of in the shared economy

uh as well so yeah I decided this is this is a great idea so I researched the topic and I decided this is what I'm going to do. And I thought these cars should be electric. I thought at some point they're going to be autonomous, but at least from the start they will be electric. So while researching the what it goes into building a car sharing fleet and running a car sharing business with electric vehicles, um, I figured I'll be doing this in Sofia in Bulgaria

We didn't have an EV charging network to use, so we'll have to build EV charging networks, so. I went to talk to hardware manufacturers and I thought uh I'll be buying uh EV charging stations so that I can use them with my fleet and when I asked them about how I'm going to connect the chargers to my car sharing software, I didn't get very good answers, um. Until eventually I stumbled. To a software company from Austria that actually was building the EV charging management software, and

I was like, why do you need an EV charging management software? I mean, I have the hardware, I have my car sharing. I mean, I should be able to connect the hardware somehow. Well, it turns out, EV charging is way more complex than uh than what I thought and I got uh I got to um dig deeper into that and more and more I realized it's actually a very underappreciated um um topic and space which has a lot of complexity. I mean you have physical devices

so you have the IOT component, you have the energy management component, you have all these billing and um uh I mean the whole AI operations uh aspects to it. Um, it's an interesting, uh, intersection between transportation and energy, um, and yeah, the more I got to understand the space, the more I got excited and eventually I actually pitched to my co-founder the idea man we should be doing actually an even charging management software, so let's do what we know how to do, build a software product

and yeah, uh, with some research we ended up with uh with uh. Thesis of building a platform that others can use to run an EV charging business, and you dropped down the car sharing part. Yeah, I didn't get to have a car sharing feed after all, but yeah. Fair, fair, and um. Yeah, so the, the beginning was it this is always and usually in business is a different story than what it is now. So maybe you can also give how it's changed from the initial idea

to today or did it at all actually. Yeah, I mean, um, it's for us it changed a lot because it started with uh let's have a let's uh start a car sharing business to let's build the software platform that's, uh, would manage EV charging networks, uh. So it was a huge change from idea to from from one idea to another but once we once we settled on the EV charging space and uh um did our research we had a very uh specific idea of what we

are going to be in this space and to be honest we haven't changed that uh a lot since then so we, we, the way we looked at it was we tried to imagine how this space would look. When there are no more doubles to happen, I mean, I'm thinking in this is an emerging market. So in an emerging market until the market settles, until you get to, um, to become mainstream, you have multiple doubles to do. So every double comes with change of technology, business cases

um, business models, so things look very different, but once it settles. You want to you want to understand what the market looks then and we, we figured it would be a market which would be relatively consolidated. We don't see, uh, that there would be like thousands of EV charging networks, uh, in any given market, uh, but it wouldn't be so consolidated that it's, uh, it's only companies doing fully vertical like if I make a parallel to car sharing. I don't think it would, it would be

it, I think it would be much more, uh, consolidated, and this means it makes much more sense to do fully vertically integrated, um, build your own software, even build your own hardware, and run your car sharing business. I think this is where Tesla is going at this, this, uh, this is where probably way more is going, uh, but in EV charging, I think there'll be just enough fragmentation to justify a, uh, a common platform. That can be used by the by the actors in this space

and so we ask ourselves. What would be this platform when the market matures and we went back from there. So if, if we need to get there in like 15, I mean we thought it would be 15 years now I think it's 15 years from now, so. Uh, but, uh, if we go, if we go back from this, uh, from this point. How, how do we, how do we get there? What, what are the path we have to follow, and we started with, um, with something

that's marketable. And we climbed up to the to the point where, where we wanted to be, where we sell to the ICP that's uh that we envisioned would be, would be our ideal customer eventually. got it. And I, I also read or learned that you were an outsider in the industry and had to, it was hard for you in the beginning to get really hold of the basics and, and getting to understand really what the, how the market vibe was. How did you go about that

to, yeah, to get really knowledgeable about the market? Yeah, we were absolute outsiders. I mean when you think about it, I'm starting this from Sofia, um, this is, uh, at a time where we barely had any EV charging, uh. Um, uh, any EV charging networks, uh, there, so I'm not, I, I, I didn't have a chance to base this on my own experience. I had no previous, uh, experience in the energy space, transportation space, infrastructure, so I mean I'm coming entirely from the software space with

zero connections or experience in what I'm going to do in recharging, which is great. Because I have no baggage preconceptions, that's, yeah, absolutely, I mean I'm blank slate just to be clear, nobody because you were I think 6 as well, co-founders, yeah, we were 6 co-founders, but I mean, uh, other 6 co-founders just to, to paint the picture, I mean it's me and my CTO and then another friend of ours who is our chief commercial officer, so Kim, he comes from selling enterprise software, and then

the other 3 are engineers, software engineers, so really no experience in what we're going to be building. Other than I mean we know how to build software, but that's what we know we don't know anything about the space that we are going to be building this software for, so no preconceptions, blank, uh, a blank page that we can fill in only, only with the right things if we have the, the, the luck to learn the right things. So we, we had to, we had to become

insiders from outsiders we had to become insiders and the way we did it, it was our first year was 2019. We went to all events that we can, we can find uh to go to. Um, some actually were quite far-fetched and didn't move us that uh that far. I mean we even went to one of the first event events we went to was actually in Dubai. Uh, so again, not the, the, the place to learn from when maybe charging, but I mean it's, it actually, it

actually helped, uh, helped us paint a picture as well. But yeah, it took, uh, a lot of conversations with people that are already doing something in this space, uh, and a lot of critical thinking so that we can filter out the, uh, someone else's preconceptions and, uh, I mean we've gotten a lot of advice that we didn't follow which I, and I think we, we were right not to follow. Do you mind or or I'll give you, I'll give you an example. I mean a friend

of mine. Early on, I don't know if it was 2019 or maybe it was probably 2019 that that happened. He, um, um, I got, uh, we, we met, uh, Thomas Diver and he was, um, he was just, uh, stepped out, stepped off of, um, CEO of Hebject, and, um, he was, he, he gave us amazing insights, Amazing insights. He was so generous with his time. He invited us to Berlin, had a full day workshop with us. Um, to help us, um. Hone our yeah proposition proposition

and generally I mean our, our, our business model and strategy and so on but mostly I mean although again amazing insights super generous with his time but Davanti told us guys you're entering an already crowded space. Very little room for differentiation and yeah, go do something else. I mean focus on fleets, for example, I mean that was, that was one of the ideas he, cos I mean what you're trying to do, you would have to outcompete people that are doing it already and are doing it

very well. That was in 2019 it was, I think it was 2019, yeah. And uh yeah, that was, that was one advice we didn't follow. But if I was if I knew what he knew and I was advising these uh these two guys from Sofia, uh, I'll probably give them the same advice. So I'm, again, it was everything else that we learned from him, it was, uh, we, it was, uh, it was so helpful and we incorporated, but, uh, we didn't follow the advice and we

we pushed through. Good example, and I, I like Thomas as well, he was a podcast guest as well for those that want to listen. He's very good insights, but indeed, yeah, that's a very. Um, I think insightful point to say that once you're an outsider you, you are free to just be naive and also challenge preconceived notions that I think this naivety is a very important aspect of entrepreneurship. I mean very often it's the naivety, um, not knowing why this wouldn't work, so you make it

work. Um, I probably with, with everything I know today if I go back to 2019. And I have to formulate a plan of what we're going to do. I'll be crazy to do exactly what we did and hope that it will work out. Uh, but yeah, I didn't know that back then, so, and do you remember on the flip side, something that, uh, was given to you as advice that you cherish a lot that was super useful that you actually implemented them. I don't know, it's

probably, I mean there's uh there's things that are details but, uh, all of them stuck up for sure. I, I can't, uh, I can't pinpoint a specific one, but we learned, we learned a lot from talking to people. And that's, that's the only way we could do it. We had to, we had to tap into someone else's knowledge and then stick this stitch these things together so that we can formulate our own thesis and, uh, plans and yeah, we tried to show progress as soon as

we had some, even if it's just, uh, mockups of something so that we can get instant feedback, be it from customers or insiders. Uh, and this, this, uh, this guides us on the, on, on figuring out how to, how to do it. And the best event, uh, that was the most useful to you in this in that, uh, time, was it the ICNC that you're back here or was it I think, I think, I think there's two events that, um, really. I really made a difference

for us. One was, um, one was actually the first. Um, industry event that we went to was move in, it was in London. It was. 2019 as well uh and I think it was in March so we started the company in October 2018. In March we went to move we went um there as um with a with a startup, um, tickets or something. I started to bootleg I mean they have this line of uh. 1 m booths with a poster there, yeah, exactly, and so what

we, what we didn't have was any budget to spend. What I had was 5 more co-founders, so 6 founders. I made sure we, we rented an Airbnb and we just went all 6 of us there. So I mean if you can't show much more than this, I mean just show numbers so that so that we can have more conversations because in the end it was about we're still at a phase where we. Where we had something to show, but it was mostly mockups and early version

of the software and mostly we needed feedback and we needed to learn and there's just that many conversations you can do you can have as a single person, so I brought everyone and um and it was amazing and this is, this is the event where we met one of our first quite signature customers um we didn't sign them then but we got them excited then they were actually they were an exhibitor and a sponsor. And they got excited by what we showed them and a year

later at the same event we uh we signed the contract. I mean it was symbolic. I mean we signed them like a month earlier but we on paper we signed it. So that was that was that was the first one that made a difference and the second one was the, the first ICNC that uh that we went to which really. The amount, the value that we got out of it, um, by in the form of conversations and insights, it's, it's really accelerated us nice and uh

so the first customer was really then also that one from, from the movie event, yeah, they were not the first customer because in the meantime we signed a few other customers, but they were the first in the UK of significant size and um an important low and they helped, uh, they helped us uh also. Develop the platform in a direction that make it uh that made it um suitable for others like them and usually it's difficult to find the first ones uh what was the process

uh to convince those uh that obviously asked the question where have you done it before and what did you say show the advantage enough just think just think you just think also that what we are selling is at the core of your business. So it's the one thing that can't fail and it's the one thing that you connect everything else to and you buy it from a company that's a startup from Bulgaria so I mean think about how difficult uh of a sale this is so

we didn't have any traction or proof points um so we had to compensate with value. It was about how much better it is for the use cases that you need to solve. And we just tried to make sure it's so much better that you have to make a compromise with everything else because I mean again it's a core platform, business critical ones one and it's from an uninst a company that doesn't have the track record to prove that it's uh it's uh solid and it's uh

reliable and now uh taking a step back or or going getting to the meat of the issue, so to say. Um, I know talking to investors personally as well, um, people are not so familiar with the space as, uh, and it's a complicated one as you already pointed out as well. So how do you explain what is the problem you're solving with your company and, and, uh, what is your company about in simple terms for the listeners. That might not be in the deeds of all

this jargon, uh, CPMS MSPs, etc. Yeah, that's, uh, that's a tough one. I mean, by the way, this is why probably we didn't do so well on the first, uh, round of, uh, financing that we were seeking because I never was able to explain what we do in simple terms, but I think it's um. With um core vertical software it's sometimes it's sometimes like this because you're not doing one thing you're doing a lot of things, uh, that are purposely built for specific industry very well

and very well integrates together and the value comes from that because otherwise I mean and many of our early investors they were, um, that, that I talked to, they wanted they, they, they wanted to hear what's the secret sauce, what's the one thing that people are buying our software for the USB and that's the thing. They're not buying it for one thing, they're buying it because it's a lot of things. That work very well together and that fit their use case but in essence I mean

it what we're doing it's a vertical software for EV charging networks that's the software, the one software they, they definitely use and that they may use others, but this is what connects their chargers, their users, their partners, their billing. This is their operations. This is the operating system of an EV charging network. That's what we are, that's what we're doing. And just making it simpler, what is the problem really and that you're solving with this software that the that the charge point operator. Let me come

back to, to, to the example of, uh, my question to how do I connect your charger to my EV um from my car sharing software. The problem is you don't. You need a system that has the charger connected that this operating system. And the problem is, I mean there's no EV charging network that doesn't have such software, so it's not uh a problem like I mean I need to know that my charger is online. Yeah, that's one thing it's solving if um if done right, but

I mean that's not the problem you come up. I mean if you want to run any business in EV charging, you need a software management platform like ours. So that's, that's a great place to be as well because I mean this is, this is a software that you don't throw out you may switch. But you can't, you don't give it up like I mean if you're doing SAS and uh it's optional. I mean if you're selling to enterprises something that they can use or they cannot

use, that's one thing. If they have to replace it because their business doesn't exist without the software, your stickiness is, uh, is much higher and just to break it down, you would agree with me, right, that the core problems and, and the solutions you're bringing is. On the one hand, if you don't have a connected charger or software to manage, you risk the charger not to be usable. You cannot accept payments, uh, you cannot bill, uh, as you need to. You cannot manage a load. That's

the problem in reality, that's not even a question to, to whether to consider if you're going to run a business in heavy charging, you have to have the charger connected because otherwise again. There's, you don't know if it's online, you don't, you can't say who can charge, who cannot charge on what price to accept this payment, so none of this is possible. So it's not so much of a question do I or do I not? It's a matter of what software do I use to manage

my charging network, right? So just to also give a bit of the listeners, uh, aside, maybe you can compliment. So I think you're now at the Series B, uh, stage, the latest last, last year we raised our Series B around, so this was a $26 million US dollars investment. Uh, and previously we've raised, in total we've raised like, um, I think 40. 243 million, that's quite a lot, yeah, and, and you, you are, um, a company of how many people right now? We are nearing 200

people at the moment and I've seen like the latest 60 in 60 countries already, right? You're operating we're in, we're in, yeah, we're in more than 60 countries, pretty much every continent when where there are cars, um, um, there's a customer using car software to charge EVs, um, our market is. I mean, still the biggest concentration is Europe, like 60% is Europe, but we have customers in Australia, New Zealand, um, or, or in North America. But even customers in Africa and um yeah it's not in

South America as well so it's well quite well spread out and used um in uh in a lot of in a lot of countries so that's quite impressive and how would you explain as well the the scaling that you did in these years what convinced so many people to adopt your solution? What was the. Well, 11 thing is it starts with the strategy we decided that we are only going to build the software platform that others use in the on the ground, I mean in specific

markets to, to run their business, which meant that we don't have to be in this market in order for our software to be applicable to this market. We just needed to make sure that it works for whoever's doing business in this market. So, when we signed, actually one of our first customers was in Taiwan. It was, they, they came to us in, uh, it was around Christmas 2019. They visited us in Sofia and we signed there. We didn't have anyone in Taiwan. We didn't have any

marketing to, to this region, but the software was applicable because we made sure that we are the plat we build a platform that. Is not tied to specific markets or specific geography, and this means that we just need to find the companies that would use our software to run an EV charging business in these markets, which makes it easier compared to having to actually be present in a market like building your own network there or even if you're providing more of a service like if you're

going to individual site hosts, so like a hotel and you want them to well buy charging stations and uh let's monetize them through our platform. You have to have at least sales there but probably some field service and support and so on. We don't go there. We sell to whoever's going to sell to the hotel and with this strategy it was easier for us to, um, to find the customers that actually then build out the network. So we, to give you some, some, some idea about

about the scale, our customers today operate around 200,000 charge points. But this is spread between around 180 customers, so we only had to sell to 180 customers. Uh, in order to have 200,000 chargers on the platform, got it, yeah, and the, so just also to make sure I understood, so all these aspects with when a charger failed and so on, that was basically not handled by you that allowed you as well to scale faster because that would be handled by somebody else if you don't have

to have a local presence too much. Exactly our job is make sure that the software will detect this and to notify them and give them ways to troubleshoot. But then the actual service is provided by the charging network. But then there is also one key aspect that maybe I'm not as knowledgeable, um, is, is the, the billing uh and payments aspects. I think that also quite highly depends on every geography isn't there a hurdle to scale that fast or that's one aspect where you have to

adapt to geographies and to different markets. This is why early on we didn't. We, we are not processing the payments directly. We are making it possible for our customers to process payments. We started with, uh, very early on we had like almost 10 different payment processors for different markets, and today we have around 40 different ways to process payments, and we have integrations with, uh, invoicing solutions for different markets. So that we can cover these aspects, but in the end the seller, the merchant is our

customer, so we make sure that our software makes it easy for them to accept the payment, to, to do the accounting, uh, payouts and so on when payouts are involved, but we are not the party doing this, so we don't have to be registered in a country and pay taxes in a country in order to sell there because it's our customers selling there. We just make we have to make sure that the software supports them. And I say we we just I mean it's not like

it's a very easy thing to do because it's really increases the complexity when you have to do it for so many markets but. It's easier for us to scale the software than to scale, uh, the people in different markets and the operations in different markets. So in other words, you, you made the variables accessible to the one to the merchant, and then he takes care that it complies with the local uh regulations. We, we go as far as to make sure that they comply, but it's

uh it's not us actually, uh, issuing the invoice. It's our software that issues the invoice, but the name on the invoice is the name of the company that's our customer. But we do make sure that it's compliant. We have to, we have a team that's following. I mean, they're just their their job is to, uh, to study regulations and how they apply to the businesses of our customers so that we can build it into the software. But in the end it's our customer that's the one

doing business in these different markets got it and you, you're based out of Bulgaria. Do you see a strategic advantage of being based there or coming from there? Yeah, the most strategic advantage is that uh the founders are there, so I mean yeah, yeah, joking aside, um, it's, um, in the beginning this uh what played a role was that we have access to talent, uh, and. At some point at a certain scale, you actually get limited because on the other hand, the market is not that

big, so I mean you have access to talent when you need 10 people, but when you need 100 people with a particular skill set, then you're better off seeking them, seeking for this talent in a bigger market. Uh, but for the start it was, uh, it was an advantage, but, uh, it's mostly where we started from. It's not something that if I had to choose where to start a business, I wouldn't specifically go and start it in Sofia with what we're doing, but this is where

we were and we made it for the origin story, yeah, and you, you don't have the team all there. You have more distributed team or, or, or how is the, the company structure and, and what you also your view for the future is? Well, you know, when COVID hit and the first lockdown hit, we were 16 people and um. 2 years later we were 40 something people, so between the different Times of lockdowns we had to grow the team fully distributed, so we built the whole

company in a way that it works uh remotely so even though I say a lot of the team is in Bulgaria, they're not really in Sofia because in Sofia's office we have like 50 people coming to the office. Um, out of 150, 117 in Bulgaria in total, the rest, uh, work from home, from other locations in Bulgaria. We have a couple more offices, and we also have people in other, in other places. We have, uh, we have people in, in the UK, in France, in the

States. In Netherlands, um. So yeah, I mean we are, we're not really tied to a land location. The company has been built in a way and also by necessity because again, we built it that way because we had no other option. Uh, but because we build it that way, this now allows us to, to hire where we, where we find the talent rather than have to find the talent in a particular location. And, and how, how do you make of one key advice when starting a

company that, uh, one gets is focus on a specific market, a specific region, a specific use case, but it seems like you didn't follow that advice or you at least, um. Prove that it can work with uh even scaling very, very fast to so many different geographies. What's your thinking behind that? Well, part, part of it comes from the fact that we had, we had no other option but to choose a market that is not our local market because our local market doesn't exist. So, um

easy choice, yeah, easy choice. But then the, the second part is we were looking again at how does this market that we're entering look when it matures? How many of these platforms would there be? And I don't think there'll be that many. I think there'll be probably one dominant, 2 more that's a significant size, and then some very niche ones. And my, my job is to figure out how do we get to be the one dominant one, and I don't think it would be a local

one. I don't don't think it would be one that's built for Germany or one that's built for the UK market. So from the start we had to build the platform that would be. The one dominant platform for this uh when the market matures and this one would be used in, um, all kind of markets so we decided let's learn from these markets early on so that we don't close off uh our platform or tailor it too much to specific market because especially in emerging technology. Sometimes

the advancements don't come from the most uh from the markets that are first uh getting to maturity or at least I mean to to to to early adoption because I mean none of the markets in Europe have been have reached maturity even even in the Nordics still yet to. Uh, to get there, but a lot of things that, um, early on. Um, define the market. Later get disrupted because I mean um if I get back to these doubles I mean when you have multiple doubles to

do any new double this is uh this is a significant increase it allows for new things to outpace old things just so the double concept because I'm not sure the thing about the double interest is if your market doubles in it doubles in size the market double in size when the market doubles in size, this means that if you hold a certain market share with a certain type of business model. And the market doubles in size. Someone else who has just started with a disruptive business

model, they can already outpace you just because the market allows them to grow. So you don't lose market share, you don't lose some, uh, you don't lose business, but you lose market share because the market grows so significantly. So when, when you have this rapid increase of the market. You have to be nimble and you have to be able to adapt because it's still not settled, it's still not clear what's working. And we thought there'd be markets that may not be, I mean if you, if

we focused from the beginning, say on Germany or UK or or or the Nordics, we'll be missing out on things that may actually define the future of this space because we are not in these uh emerging core markets which may skip steps. It has happened in communications. It has happened in pretty much every other technology markets that are. Later to start they may skip steps they may not have the the the the same cost and they may actually advance faster at the later stage as long

as uh as long as there's more growth to happen. You don't want to miss out on these opportunities and this is, this is what formed our thinking and this is why we started from the beginning and continue to be quite spread out in terms of where we sell and it's not an easy thing to do because I mean it's much easier to focus on, on, on use cases and markets where you already have concentration and. When you put more focus there, you're more competitive and so

you get more of the existing business, but in the long term this may actually uh be the wrong play and we believe the right place for our particular business. Um, is to, is to go this more broad, multi, multi multi-market approach, yeah, got it, yeah, just maybe for the listeners very quickly, so there's like different key market players and I, and then I, I, I explained this so that you can give your view. So there's the charge point operator that operates the chargers, then there's the

MSP mobility service providers that has the payment cards that, uh, they use usually or the payment app. They are used to to be um charging there and then there's the so-called CPMSs that's what Ampeco would say is a form of positioning is that is offering software for the charge point operators and then they see uh roaming hubs that try to connect them all together like Hubject and the ICNC that we have been dropping as a name that uh um ensures that every everybody can talk to

each other somehow, um. So where do you see the market going and now there's some different markets have different split in terms of numbers of these uh different type of market actors and uh and where do you, like you said the 10 year vision or and what's your view on, on that? Well, the, the first thing is that in EV charging infrastructure follows EV adoption. You don't build the infrastructure way in advance. You kind of follow the EV adoption in some early developments you may have

to build the infrastructure first, but this is very early on. So this is why we had Ionity and this is why like a, a, a fast charging networks that was built by, um, a joint venture by uh Automotive OES because you needed some. Infrastructure in order to foster EV adoption, but mainstream infrastructure is built to be used and what is using is uh using this infrastructure are electric vehicles. So how fast it is developing and in what markets, um, um, the pace depends on the adoption

in these markets. Um, so we are looking at infrastructure works with, with a lag. So when you see, uh, a drop in EV adoption, so what you, what, what this means is you're looking at new car sales, how many of those are electric, and when in a market there is a drop or slowdown, you can expect that infrastructure build out will slow down as well. When there is an increase, you can expect that infrastructure will follow. It may take a year. To, to catch up because

infrastructure, it doesn't react at the same pace like consume like consumer consumers do with uh with the yeah. But this is what we're looking at. We are looking at in what markets EVs are being sold. At what pace and this tells us how infrastructure build out would uh would look like and Europe at the moment we are just back to an accelerated TV adoption this year um so we can expect an acceleration in EV charging infrastructure build out. US has seen. A steadier, um, growth, I

mean they're not, they're not growing as fast. Um, so you can expect again infrastructure wouldn't be built out at the same, uh, at the same pace like in Europe. So this is, and there's other emerging market, by the way, you have Brazil and Mexico where EVs are being adopted at an amazing pace, mostly because of Chinese brands who are, who are selling there, Australia as well, uh, and then infrastructure, um, build out follows as well. What we see is that in in the infrastructure side which

are the CPOs that you mentioned, these are charge point operators, so these are who manage the networks. There will be consolidation mostly on the high power charging where this this is the kind of business that resembles the petrol station business much more than. Than other aspects of EV charging because other EV charging operators like CPOs are parking operators, anyone with a parking space, because when, if you can imagine that every, every car is electric. Where does it make sense to charge an electric car? Well, first

of all, when it's parked, this is the easiest and most convenient. You don't have to go to a place to charge. Like I mean, if you have to charge your petrol car, you have to specifically go to a place to charge it. With EVs, you're already parking somewhere, so ideally your home, but not everyone has a, has their own parking space. Plus I mean some of these EVs would be, would be shut, I hope more would be shut. So you look at where do we, where

do they spend time, and this is, this is, this is a place where they will be charging. Obviously when you travel on the on the autobahn you would uh you'd want to have, uh, you don't have, but this is where it's consolidated and it looks like a petrol station everywhere else is actually looks more like a parking operator, um. And it's not just the parking operators that are becoming uh CPOs, it's anyone with a parking space, it's the retailers, it's, uh, it's the office buildings, it's

the residential buildings, and these don't consolidate freebie charging because these are different kinds of businesses. You, you don't, because you don't, uh, um, consolidate, uh, on the basis that we are offering QV charging just because one is a retail, another is a residential, another is an office building doesn't make sense. It's a very different uh businesses, so this means that there'll be some level of fragmentation in this, um, segments. Uh, and where, as long as the fragmentation is not immense, where there's no need, there, there's

no reason to, to at all, I mean, maybe you just partner with another CPO and you don't care, but I mean if you, if you manage thousands of parking spaces or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of parking spaces. You may, you are prime candidate to become a CPO. This is why we have, for example, in our portfolio company called Indigo, which is the biggest parking operator in the world with 1.4 million parking spaces under management. And just in France they have like half a

million parking spaces. They're French. They're French. And Uh, there's a core, for example. They also are a very significant charge point operator. Um, these com this type of companies, eventually they're, they're going to in-house the EV char is going to be part of their business, but same goes for many retailers, for many, uh, for many real estate, uh, businesses as well. So we're looking at them as the candidates to, to, for a customer for, for our, for our platform. On the EMSP side, which is mentioned

you have the card, but most of what you have is the user. So how does the user access, uh, um, UV charging? These are, these are the EMSPs. Well, I believe this would be very consolidated. I think there'll be. You wouldn't have a very diverse, um, diverse market there you would have some. Some, uh, some players that are oriented towards businesses, so they work with fleets and there'll be more fragmentation there, but for the mainstream consumer, you're probably going to be using something that you're already

using for something else, either your navigation app or your payment app. So eventually I see this. Going towards some of the bigger fintechs and also the big tech, it's Apple, Google, I expect they'll be the biggest TMSPs eventually, um, and we don't sell to those. I mean this, I think it's too consolidated for, for, for, for them to, to have to use someone else platform, but on the CPM on the CPO side. This is what our market is interesting, yeah, and I think Germany, if I'm

not wrong, you might know the numbers better than me, has one of the largest number of CPOs in the world, uh, right, so it's this, uh. It's interesting because here I mean there's probably a reason Thomas was advising us against it because also there's also the biggest number of uh softwares for CPOs as well because almost every utility has their own charging network and so you have too many utilities so yeah that's the legacy reason uh yes but I mean um it was also one of

these early market things where there was a lot of um there's a lot of activity early on which doesn't follow the rules of a mature market. So I expect there'll be a lot of consolidation happening in Germany on the CPO side as well so it would, I, I don't think the market would look that fragmented, um, so I wouldn't be basing my prognosis on the level of fragmentation on Germany. I think actually Germany's a market. Is going to see a lot of consolidation on the CPO

side. which market do you think it will, um, like more be like, like the UK that has, I think a few dozen or so, uh, yeah, I, I would look at France, UK, Netherlands as Netherlands because of the, um, how, how far ahead they are in terms of the number of charge points, um, UK and France because they were a little bit later in the game. Uh, but I think they're more tellings for the, for the, for the market dynamics of a maturing, not a mature

market, maturing market. And what do you make of China, the big, uh, elephant in the room? I think in the West we, we don't touch too much. Is it one of the 60 countries or do you think it might be a good attractive market for Meco as well? Oh, China is just, I mean, it's the by far the biggest market. It's, it's bigger than all of the rest in terms of EV charging, um. I wish we were able to tackle China, but for now we're staying

away. One thing about China is, uh, obviously it's uh, it's a very different market. It's, it's very consolidated, by the way, uh, and much more vertical integration there than what we're seeing in other markets. But also when it comes in general about SAS businesses and vertical SAS, it's very difficult to, to do any vertical SAS in China from outside China. For once, if you really want to run an, uh, a SAS business in China, you have to run it on servers in China. You have to

give access to the government to your source code, and you can't access it from outside China. So if I was, if I was to run what we're running, uh, uh, an Ampeco software in China. I wouldn't be able to support it from from Europe. I'll have to only, uh, technically I don't have access. I mean that's, that's, that's how, how it works, so it's very restrictive to outsiders when it's especially when it comes to vertical stars because I mean it's. What if you're doing something mainstream

like, um, I don't know, a social media. You can, you can access just because the numbers justified, but when you're doing vertical size like we do, I mean, we still would have like hundreds of customers there Toran. They would be significantly bigger than what we have in other markets, but it would be, um, it would be very difficult for us to justify all these operations in the beginning, uh, and, um, as long as the other markets have, uh, sufficient growth in volume. It's much easier to

stay away from China that makes sense. And one thing that I also find quite interesting in this, uh, industry is the fact that, uh, there are also certain countries in developing, um, countries that are leapfrogging as well that are really, uh, boosting their EV adoption like Brazil, Thailand, Ethiopia, uh, and, and others like how do you, what do you, uh, what's your take on the developing countries as a as markets for EVs and and for yeah charging businesses? Well for them. Today's, um, leapfrogging is mostly

uh, accelerated because they've let in the Chinese manufacturers, uh, of, uh, um, yeah, of electric vehicles, um, and everywhere, yeah, and as I said in the end EV charging follows EV adoption and when you have EVs when people are buying EVs they have to charge them somewhere and uh businesses then take on to build the infrastructure that's needed for this. So all these countries with high volume. Of citizens, I wouldn't say cars even today because in many cases EVs, um, can, can acquire new type of

customer that before didn't drive an EV. They may be driving a two wheeler. I mean still may be an EV but it's not a, not a four wheeler. Um they may be driving a two lever or maybe they didn't have a car, but now the the entry barrier is very low because it's not just the purchasing price of these Chinese EVs, it's also the maintenance cost of this. And in many of these countries, electric cars now are making it more affordable to own a car in

general, and they're just expanding the markets uh that uh for for for cars in general. Um, so yeah, I think a lot of those are going to be, um, leapfrogging as they are actually just because they don't have any, um, industry to protect, uh, or the industry to protect and because also they're tapping into new customer base that previously may not have even bought a car or may not have considered to to buy a car. And so when you try to convince uh new CPOs to

work with you uh or your sales people rather try to convince them, oh, I'm still doing a convincing you're doing the same sales in your day to day, OK, yeah, it's uh, it's uh especially, but when it's so big, uh, CPOs I guess for the larger accounts you and the CEO takes, uh, ownership. So what is the typically the USP or the uh the, the killing argue killing argument that's where they decide to go for umeco. Well, there's a few things that we didn't have before

which today are very, uh, strong, uh, selling point. One is we now have the proof points that it is one if not the most robust and dependable platform on the market, which is of huge importance, especially now in a more mature market where the customers are more than I'm, uh, demanding, the regulators are more demanding, everyone's more demanding because they expect this industry to be mature even though it's still in teenage years, uh, and. You now really need a robust solution because this is the backbone

of your, of your technical of your tech stack, and now we have the proof points that ours actually is the one that excels at uh at this but then what really sells it's that. It's I'll go back to strategy and it resonates very well with with our customer base we are. Only successful if they're successful. We are purely the software platform. We need them to be successful, to do their roll out, to be successful in their business. There's no conflict of interest. There is a huge

alignment, which means that we're putting our resources where it makes sense for them. We are not locking them, we are enabling them. We are giving them the flexibility where they need, whether they need to, maybe they don't want to use our white label mobile app. That's great. We make it very easy and actually help it, help our customers to build their own app because this way they'll be more successful. They'll be standing more charges. They'll be the consolidators, not the, not the ones that get, get

acquired. And this level of alignment which is backed by the where we put our focus on the product development side, this is what resonates very well with the largest uh and uh most ambitious CPOs makes sense and one trend I think that you're also trying to lead at is um that the, the future is not building everything in-house but orchestrating the best specialists in the market to achieve this reliability and profitability and the seamless uh user experience. Can you elaborate on that? Um, yeah, yeah, absolutely

I mean, I think this is something that um. Others in other industries have, have gone through, um, from building everything to actually focusing on what's your differentiation, what's, what's the core value that you're bringing instead of just trying to do what everyone else has to do anyway in our, in the EV charging, the, for example, well, everyone has to be able to manage chargers from different brands to be able to monitor them, to be able to set the price, to be able to, to monetize them

These are not things that create differentiation. So you have to figure out where is the differentiation created from and maybe it's in my site selection if you're a parking operator, it's about the seamless experience between parking and charging and the locations that you have if you're an infrastructure, uh, a player, well this is about again where are the sites that, uh, that's, uh, that I built, how, how, uh, accessible are they? How, how good is user experience on the site. Focus on these things and when

you when you put your resources there. This focus really creates uh an immense pushing force. Instead, if you have to build everything else that others have to build as well, you're distracted and you're wasting your resources on things that are already solved, but then you're solving them again, reinventing something that's already invented, updating the standard and so on. So orchestrate the best solutions and build only the thing that really is your differentiation. This is the message that. Have and our platform is the best orchestration platform

It solves the common. It integrates very well with the best in class solutions that you want to want to use and it leaves you to focus on the things that are your differentiation and, and, uh, also, um, I think adding on that you mentioned, um, uh, on one post as well that the CPOs are drowning in the vendor management and, uh, that, uh, hardware comes from one supplier payments, uh, EMS from a third. Analysis from a 4th and so on. So that's, uh, the opportunities is

to have a platform that orchestrates it also in a cohesive ecosystem, yeah, yeah, I mean I think that generally CPOs are drowning in complexity, uh, doesn't necessarily mean that uh they should use fewer vendors, uh, but they shouldn't be forced to use a specific vendor just because they have a gap. They have to be able to choose the best in class that actually gives them an advantage. And I think this is what we're trying to do. I mean, for example, we have in our platform features

that we are very proud of and I think work very well like we have our own built in energy management, but at the same time we also make sure that our customers can connect other main energy management systems that are just better for their use case than our, how to say more um off the shelf or uh universal universal solution and it's to their benefit. To use in this case more vendors, I mean they would, yeah, they would use another vendor for something that's very specialized

and that does the job better than something that for everyone else, I mean for maybe for someone that occasionally would have to comply with something called to just win a customer they need to do some something in energy management. Well yeah, our solution is amazing for them. It comes out of the box, use it, but if you, if this is something that you're, um, is a strong part of a significant part of your value proposition. Use the vendor that's going to give you the best chances

to to win so it makes sense, yeah, and you also talk a lot about the API first approach versus white label. Can you also elaborate on, on these two aspects and what how they are applicable to to your customers? Yeah, um, early on when we started we were very strong on the white label marketing messaging just because this was what the customers. Related to in the beginning, but in reality it's the API first approach is. It's like um, it's like a service that you can peel

off, like you, you start with what gets you ahead in the beginning, but then when you're ready, when it makes sense, you can peel off parts of it. Like for example with our EMSP app, as I mentioned, our customers usually as the CPOs, but a CPO, a ChargePoint operator, they still often have to have a mobile app for their customers to be able to access their network. They may have hopefully. Uh, direct connections with EMSPs so that you don't have to download their app, but some

customers would just want to have, uh, the app from the, uh, from the CPO. Well, OK, great, and we have a great white label app. I mean, it's under the brand of our, of our customer. We don't stand in between them and their and their customer. But it's the universal app. It's the one that has to seduce case of a German CPO and a French CPO and a UK CPO. If you really want to, it has to work for the, for the one that's, uh, uh

working, uh, with, uh, high power charging and the one that's working with destination charging. But if you really want to tailor the user experience to your specific use case and your more narrow customer base, you have to build your own. So then you can just use our API since uh we made sure that it's not just possible, it's as easy as possible to do this so that you can peel off this part of the product, throw it away. And build your really tailored solution that's uh

that's amazingly fits your your use case and is it like uh maybe a fallacy in thinking of myself, but CPOs are many are like energy companies, uh, from, um, usually from a background and they're not the, the, the, the core DNA is not, uh, making software is that than a, uh, a challenge for them? Yeah, that's, that's true. I mean it's, uh, it's not just energy utilities, there's others, there's others. I mean some of our customers are in, uh. Uh, real estate, some of those are

parking operators, they're not necessarily software companies, uh, so they have to, you have to make it easy for them, and yeah, when it eventually, I mean if you want to create any differentiation with software you would have to learn to do it. Why not do it very well with vendors because I mean you don't have to build it entirely in-house, but you have to have someone build it tailored for you. We are not going to build it tailored for them. I mean our, our, our, um

Role is to solve the common and give you a very flexible platform but it's not tailored and you don't have to tailor everything because then you have an overhead and maintenance and so on but there's some parts that are very important in some cases this may be the user experience in other cases maybe this is how you integrate with the grid. Maybe this is the secret sauce you have as a company. Maybe it's how you manage the locations and so it's about the asset management. So

there are different aspects that for different types of businesses that offer EV charging are the secret sauce are their main competitive advantage, and this is where they have to find a way to also through software to create a competitive advantage. And they don't have to be a software company. I mean, companies have built great software without being a software company just because they've outsourced it, but you have to know what you're building can for whom you're building can you have to know your business and your

competitive advantage, and then someone else can build it for you. But don't expect that you'll get something, put a log on it, and then, uh, then it's, uh, it's works perfect because how do you differentiate from your competitor who can take the same. Makes sense. And how do you look at the complexity behind the standards that this industry is facing? There's so many different standards and integrations that, uh, will be at some point arrive to a more an easier time where um OCPP versions will not

update that often or, or ISO 15118 or. Uh, other stuff, well, um, having started at a time, uh, where there were still proprietary protocols to many charges, um, I'm happy that there are standards, uh, even though they may seem too many, but I think this is a problem that. Us the software vendors have to solve and the CPOs should be the beneficiary of this solution being already in place rather than having to care, care for it so I kind of see this as our role to

solve this problem, uh, and part of it is solve it with software part of it is solve it through the organizations that we uh that we are members of and, uh, that guide the that is the standard, the yeah, the standard setting but in the end this is, this is something that's. I think it's quite normal when the industry is growing. To have to find the ways that things should work and be wrong sometimes um otherwise if you're too afraid not to be wrong you may

it may take too much time to to perfect when it's too late for I mean the market doesn't wait for you so I would much rather have some standards that are imperfect but are in place rather than uh doing it perfect but uh too late OK in this podcast called smart charging uh so let's talk a little bit smart charging what's your view on. Like anything related to smart charging, so dynamic prices, for example, or, uh, consuming self-consumed uh solar energy or bidirectional charging and yeah

what's the vision you have and what do you think? I think here when you talk about smart charging we have to, we have to consider that we are not just entering the phase when the consumer is becoming this is the mainstream consumer so these are the, these are the. Early majority, these are the people who. Didn't buy an EV because they care so much about the, the smart charging like I mean they, they're, they just, uh, think I mean now is the time yes I am

environmentally conscious, but I mean it's not my it's not that I will not make compromises for this it's just uh another benefit that it's also good for, for, for the environment. It's also the cheaper option. It's more convenient option. These are the expectations that we have to, uh, have to work with and this means that we shouldn't expect customers to go out of their way. To do smart charging, so everything when you're talking about smart charging, it has to be smart, it has to happen behind

the scenes and be entirely handled by the by the provider so. Don't expect that the user would be scheduling that charging. Expect that, uh, expect that they would want the benefit, but not the hassle, so it has to be made convenient and this is, this is where I think a lot of the. Experiments that we've seen and uh we've participated in. They underestimate how important it is to make it convenient for the customer, and they go for the maximum for the most optimal. Well, you can

sacrifice, uh, yeah, the savings, some savings to make it, uh, to make it, uh, convenient. I'll give you one example with something that we, that we try out with, with a couple of customers. It was about destination charging, mostly, uh, on-street charging where people, one of the use cases, people also leave their card overnight. And The idea was to give people the opportunity to let charging be scheduled for off-peak charging, so you plug it in at 7 p.m., but actually we want to charge it after

after 11 when it's uh when it's cheaper. So one iteration of this was the user had to choose when they're going to leave and they had to choose whether they wanted to do cheap or they wanted to do expensive and it was just no one used it. And then we came up with, let, I said we said let's do it simpler. Let's do um echo and boost option. Echo, we let's, we decide when when the car is going to be charged. So just put a notice

there your charging will happen with whatever power is available and makes sense. Boost whatever's available, we give it to you and you either pay a high price per kilowatt, so the boost is the regular price, the echo is the low price. The price you choose it once and it's the same price. So if you choose Echo, you're at the lower price whatever we charge. The boost you're at the high price, we give you what's what's available. This was so much easier for the customer and everyone

used it. Not everyone chose Echo. I mean there are people that just wanted to use Boost, but all, everyone choose, choose, choose an option because it's very simple. It's very simple, and you don't, you don't have to think about it. OK, I'm flexible. I'll get the, the low price. I'm not flexible. I'll just charge the regular price, right? Yeah, and there's also one, Ela way I saw, um, that is, uh, one of your customers in Norway. They were very excited a couple of months ago they

were like posting about uh uh one project and can you also share a bit more about I think it was the nodes with the grids. Yeah, I think it was, it was with the nodes market, but I mean it's, uh, it's, uh, it was something that's, uh, that's uh we did together with uh Hafsund, uh, Norwegian utility and, uh, Away, and, uh, we onboarded, uh, um. A significant number of LOAs, uh, uh, network, um, to the flexibility market and allowed mostly to do be shaving. I

mean it was, it was, it's, it's your training flexibility so someone posts uh a flexibility request and then you, um, then you comply with the local grids, right? Was it, it was no it was transmission grids, uh, it was for, no it was not for transmission grids, it's for, um, um, the distribution for the for the distribution. Uh, but the premise is simple. I mean, people have, in, in LSU's case, these are housing associations, people that have their vehicles, uh, over charged overnight, and usually they

need a couple of hours of charging and they're connected for 8 hours. So when these two hours happen it's uh uh doesn't doesn't reflect the user experience at all, especially that you when you're offering flexibility you're trading like 10% of the available flexibility, meaning that no one is not charging at any given time but say for example the vehicle is scheduled to charge uh between uh 11 and 2. At full power, well, it's full power minus 10% is what's uh what's what's done in reality and

this when you aggregate across a huge, uh, network with uh many vehicles connected at any given time allows you to offer flexibility to the market well maybe someone. Uh, was, um, uh, supposed to generate some electricity and they can't do it because they, the weather changed or they have a technical issue. Well, they instead of paying the fine and the, the, the fees, they would, uh, they would pay someone else to actually reduce the, um, the consumption, and that's, that's what's, that's what we can do

at scale and it's not, not fancy, it's not V2G, it's very simple, but it's very underutilized. I think the greatest benefits to. To be achieved are in smart charging in terms of scheduling rather than V2G. I think V2G is still too expensive in terms of hardware, in terms of onboarding, even we still have this uncertainty from the customer. Well, what happens when you're discharging my battery? I mean, does this affect the longevity? We are not doing enough in just scheduling in a in a smart way

and there's so much, uh, so much potential there, right? And, and what is the, uh, so you mentioned a couple, but so, um, next to the UX and the customer experience and make it simple. Uh, and the cost for, uh, V2G, is there any other challenges you see, especially to make the scheduling or the, the, the V1G or smart charging, uh, possible at scale, and then also V2G or be bidirectional charging at scale challenges? I think 11 thing is. There's not enough markets because no one

has on boarded the the. The vehicles in a massive way because I mean the market exists when there's the the both sides to trade so in flexibility you need to know that you can trade flexibility. I mean if there was no one to fulfill flexibility why bother to register your flexibility request so I think one thing that that has to be you have to figure out how. We solve this, uh, chicken and egg problem. Maybe we should just start on boarding, um, uh, all possible use

cases for, for smart charging, uh, so that on the markets that exist because uh this would probably also create new markets and also pulling participants that need this flexibility but until now they haven't been active on these markets. Because in the end it's about it's about balancing and you need the two, the two parties we have the vehicles we are not really exposing them as a resource that can be managed in that way. If we do, I think the, the need would, uh, this, this, this

would create the opportunity for other market entrants, OK, and then. We're coming to an end here, so looking forward in the vision and your next few years, so to say you have an ambitious, I think, uh, vision to be having, I think, 25% of, uh, market share within the segment of, uh, charging back ends, right? So what, what do you foresee as the biggest challenges, uh, to get there? Well, first of all, I would say that I mean we only care about market share when the

market settles. So when, when we're at 50+% of EV charging EV charging infrastructure build out, this is where you count the market share because until then you can get to a market share and then just be stuck there and be outpaced by someone growing, uh, uh, with the market while you stagnate. Uh, but what we're looking at is mostly we're looking at every decision that you're making, we're looking at. Does it close the road to to this uh to this uh dominant position and if this

if it doesn't close the, if it does close the road, we don't do it. Uh, it's much more difficult to choose the right path, but it's relatively easy to, to identify a path that doesn't bring you to where you want to be. And at the same time it's very tempting some sometimes to take this path because it can give you in the shorter term growth that otherwise, uh, would be more difficult to achieve. Like for example if we are to enter the market in, uh. More

direct way, especially in markets which are more, uh, already, uh, more dense, well, we can grow faster, but then we'll be in competition with some of our customers and we will be the dominant platform if you're competing with your customers? Well, you won't be, so we're not doing this and this is how we, how we gauge every, every, uh, decision. What we intend to do in the next, uh, in the next years is we intend to work more with the ecosystem. So that we can bring

more value to our customers by being better integrated, working better with the other vendors and providers that can help our customers foster and achieve their goals. This is going to be the leading um. Uh, yeah, team for us in the next two years. Yeah, very interesting, yeah, and, um, what are other innovations that excite you that will come in the future of the industry that you're looking into thinking also things that are very much, uh, uh, seem far but are still quite near like autonomous driving

or, or I don't know, uh, other types of, um, oh, there's two things that I'm very, um, keen to see, uh, one is wireless charging and it goes with smart charging because I think this would. Really unlock smart charging because if you can tap into the vehicle when it's parked people don't have don't don't go out and plug in their vehicle they don't have to charge it but if they just park it there and it's uh it's already connected to the grid this really would unlock

the opportunities for smart charging so. I really want to see this happen, but it's a far-fetched thing, and it requires both, um, the automotive OEMs, hardware manufacturers, and, um, infrastructure to work together on common standards and technology, and I think it's something that we wouldn't see that uh that soon, but I'm very excited for it to happen, and I'll be, I'll be very happy if I was, if I'm wrong and it actually happens sooner. The other thing is in user experience, I really want to see

plug-in charge be, uh, widely adopted. Its current form may not be the perfect one, but I mean it's better than having to do apps or. Struggle with, uh, I did with our credit cards. Uh, I really want to see some seamless experience where you choose your subscription and then you just go to a charger and plug in. So these are two things that I'm really looking for. One is, uh, from the. Perspective of how much value we can unlock with the wireless charging together with smart

charging in a vehicle to grid integration. The other is just from pure user experience which I think would benefit the EV adoption in general. OK. And is there a last, uh, message you would like to leave users and how people can get in touch with you, for example? Well, I'm, I'm on LinkedIn on how you can get in touch with me, but, uh, my message is mostly to anyone that's, uh, hesitant about, uh, about EVs to, to know that things are changing every year very quickly

so your preconceptions may be all outdated already. Don't wait. Yes, for sure. All right, thanks a lot, Arlene. Thank you. What a fascinating discussion has been with Orle about his entrepreneurial experiences from a teenage almost drop out to um starting several companies in particular working on others' ideas with a partner that he has been working on since he has been a teenager and then finally working on immobility on his own idea and not only starting. In his own idea but also making it a great success

and this story is just very impressive from the beginning of being an outsider and just working his way through this industry to then uh being able to bootstrap and scaling then with a lot of traction worldwide and that not only in one country, in a few countries and in a row, but really about 60 countries all over the world, which is more impressive. His ambitious attitude is really highlighted as well in his vision. We want to to be the dominating player in this very hard market

um, difficult to understand from CPOs, MSPs, and so on that he broke down for us and really showed us as well what the role of the future payments will be and how he positions his companies to be very much an open ecosystem working with specialized players like for example yourself and Raje. And um yeah, how he sees fascinating uh new technologies on the horizon with plug-in charge and inductive charging and how these will be game changers and his view on the smart charging ecosystem uh where

I wouldn't uh disagree that indeed the UX and customer experience just needs to be as simple as possible, like eco boost mode mode that he was describing, but also starting with V1G before going to V2G which is indeed still very expensive. To operate unfortunately in most cases. So, as he said, don't stay stuck with old fashioned views of the EVs as things are moving so fast and doubling the market size, as he was adamant in saying. Stay tuned and recommend the episode to whoever you think

will like it and see you soon.

Ep. 28: Orlin Radev, CEO of Ampeco, on Scaling a Global CPMS, Smart Charging and the Future of EV Network

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