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

0:11 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.

0:39 Today I'm joined by Orlin Radev, CEO and founder of AMPECO, 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 2024, bringing total funding to over 42 million, AMPECO has scaled to 180 clients across 60 markets. On its hardware-agnostic CPMS platform, AMPECO's footprint keeps accelerating from 62,000 managed charge points in early 2023 to close to 200,000 today, and marquee utilities like

1:22 E.ON 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, Orlin, 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,

1:55 so it's not far, but still, you have to take the time for the airport as well. And this time I think you made it sometimes with an electric vehicle to Berlin, and this time you came by plane though, right? Yeah, it's much faster with a plane. I've made it with an EV last year - I came for the conference with an EV and it took me... I had to sleep

2:19 at a hotel actually. 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 at a border. It was awful. But from this year, by the way, no such border control as long as I don't go through Serbia, which I went last time. From this year, Bulgaria is now part of the

2:47 Schengen. So as long as I go through Romania - before, it was only for flights. From this year it's the actual physical borders. So if I go through Romania, 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, EVs actually may have a benefit in this case, because you're not spending that much energy just

3:10 standing there. Yeah. I'm not sure if you follow the Electro Trucker a bit or if you know about him. He's been moving throughout Europe with his electric truck, and he went all the way through 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 of waiting between Turkey and... Yeah, these borders really can take some time, especially

3:37 if you're transporting something with a truck, yeah. So anyways, it's not about that today. Before we get into AMPECO and really into the details of the industry and the EV industry, can you share a little bit about yourself? How would you introduce yourself? What's your background, so to say? Well, depending on who's asking, I would like to say I'm an entrepreneur, or I would say I'm a product guy, but maybe I'm more of a product guy that has

4:02 turned entrepreneur. I've been building software products - initially for my own ventures and for other startups and for enterprises - ever since I finished high school. This is how I see myself: as a builder, as someone that solves a business challenge with a software product. Yeah, 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

4:34 ever thought about that? Well, I think this is a very classical story. I started with solving a problem that I experienced firsthand. I was really into games and I wanted to play with my friends, but we didn't have broadband internet, so I started an internet service provider - together with my co-founder and CTO of AMPECO. He was then in college, I was in high school, and we started this company. We sold it in like 9 months,

5:07 mostly because we started it in January and I was in the 11th grade - 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? High school dropout doesn't sound like a great start in life. I mean, college dropouts - this plays out well for some people in Silicon Valley - but high school dropout didn't sound like a

5:32 great start. So we sold the company, but I was hooked on entrepreneurship and quickly after that I found a way to continue doing this. I've co-founded probably around 10 companies before AMPECO. For the longest time, the one I had the longest 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. This has been an exciting journey

6:03 before AMPECO, which is now our focus for the past 7 years - something that we are building of our own. Interesting. So after high school you decided to study something like computer engineering, or what was it? I was studying network engineering, telecommunications, sort of, yeah - networking. But I didn't go far. I mean, I studied this for 2 years and then I decided I'm not doing this. I also tried programming. By that

6:31 Alex, my co-founder, he was working at a software development company, and I went and had an internship with him for 3 months, 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 - I'll not be the one developing things. And eventually I switched my studies to management, and this is what I graduated from college.

7:02 But yeah, I've been excited about building software products, only I don't want to be the one writing the code. But you have the ability to write - did you ever write before, or is it? No, I mean I tried and I decided it's not for me. You know, he's writing the specifications, but someone else is actually building it. And the co-founder that you were working with, he's more of a coder type. Yeah, he's - I

7:29 don't know - the best engineer I know, and a software engineer, so yeah, he's always been building the stuff that I come up with. Nice. Yeah, that's a good person to know. Yeah. And then how did you create this company - the software development one? Was it during the studies or after? It was actually after the studies, and it was both of us, my co-founder and I. We worked at other companies - not together,

7:56 I mean he worked for another company, I worked for another company - but 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 gather the team and we'll be building someone else's ideas until we come up with one. And it took us like 10 years. In 10 years, I mean, we were still building someone else's ideas, and it was amazingly exciting,

8:22 don't get me wrong, and I learned a lot - we both learned a lot - but it went for far too long before we actually ended up deciding, well, we're just building someone else's ideas. At some point we need to decide what we're building in this world. This happened 7 years ago, and Ampeco is the result of that. And just to give a flavor, what type of ideas were you working

8:48 on before Ampeco? Yeah, as I said, it was someone else's ideas, so they were in very different sectors. For example, we've built warehouse management software. One of the exciting things we built was actually an online farmers' market - or at least it looked 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

9:17 customers directly in the city. And it was a lot of work. I got involved in this way more than just the product - at some point I actually managed this company. It was amazing, exciting, and it introduced me to sustainable foods, producing food in a sustainable way, smaller farms and what they struggle with. And yeah, it was very exciting, but again it was someone else's idea, which I got excited

9:51 about and helped to build the product that makes it possible, but eventually it wasn't mine. Yeah, nice. And how did you then discover the market need for Ampeco? How was that inception, so to say? Well, interesting story. I mean, I always thought I was going to build a software product. At some point, after 10 years building someone else's ideas, I said that's enough. Let's put a pause on this and decide what we're going to

10:19 build. And the decision I came up with was actually that I'm going to run a car sharing business - so not software at all, or at least not pure software. I got the idea when I was visiting Munich and got to rent a BMW. I don't know what the service was called then - like Sharen or something? Yeah, but it was before ShareNow. Anyway, I

10:46 liked the idea. It wasn't electric, by the way - it was 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 idle. And so I really liked this and I said, well, this sounds like something that I would do. I mean, our previous endeavor with the farm-to-table thing was kind of in the shared economy

11:11 as well. So yeah, I decided this is a great idea, I researched the topic, and 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 what goes into building a car sharing fleet and running a car sharing business with electric vehicles, I figured I'll be doing this in Sofia, in Bulgaria.

11:38 We didn't have an EV charging network to use, so we'd have to build one. I went to talk to hardware manufacturers and thought I'd be buying EV charging stations so that I can use them with my fleet. 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 - until eventually I stumbled upon a software company from Austria that was actually building EV charging management software. And

12:08 I was like, why do you need EV charging management software? I mean, I have the hardware, I have my car sharing - I should be able to connect the hardware somehow. Well, it turns out EV charging is way more complex than what I thought, and I got to dig deeper into that. More and more I realized it's actually a very underappreciated topic and space which has a lot of complexity. I mean, you have physical devices

12:37 So you have the IoT component, you have the energy management component, you have all these billing and AI operations aspects to it. It's an interesting intersection between transportation and energy, and yeah, the more I got to understand the space, the more I got excited. Eventually I actually pitched to my co-founder the idea: man, we should be doing an EV charging management software. So let's do what we know how to do, build a software product.

13:10 And yeah, with some research we ended up with a thesis of building a platform that others can use to run an EV charging business, and we dropped the car sharing part. Yeah, I didn't get to have a car sharing feed after all, but yeah. Fair, fair. And yeah, the beginning was - this is always and usually in business - a different story than what it is now. So maybe you can also share how it's changed from the initial idea

13:39 to today, or did it at all actually? Yeah, I mean, for us it changed a lot, because it started with: let's start a car sharing business, to: let's build the software platform that would manage EV charging networks. So it was a huge change from one idea to another. But once we settled on the EV charging space and did our research, we had a very specific idea of what we

14:06 are going to be in this space, and to be honest we haven't changed that a lot since then. The way we looked at it was: we tried to imagine how this space would look when there are no more doublings to happen. I'm thinking - this is an emerging market. In an emerging market, until the market settles, until you get to become mainstream, you have multiple doublings to do. So every doubling comes with a change of technology, business cases,

14:37 business models, so things look very different. But once it settles, you want to understand what the market looks like then. We figured it would be a market which would be relatively consolidated. We don't see that there would be thousands of EV charging networks in any given market, but it wouldn't be so consolidated that it's only companies doing fully vertical. Like, if I make a parallel to car sharing, I don't think it would be

15:06 - I think it would be much more consolidated, and this means it makes much more sense to be fully vertically integrated, build your own software, even build your own hardware, and run your car sharing business. I think this is where Tesla is going, this is where probably Waymo is going. But in EV charging, I think there'll be just enough fragmentation to justify a common platform that can be used by the actors in this space.

15:36 So we asked ourselves: what would this platform look like when the market matures, and we worked back from there. If we need to get there in - I mean, we thought it would be 15 years; now I think it's 15 years from now. But if we go back from this point, how do we get there? What are the paths we have to follow? And we started with something

16:03 that's marketable, and we climbed up to the point where we sell to the ICP that we envisioned would be our ideal customer eventually. Got it. And I also read or learned that you were an outsider in the industry and it was hard for you in the beginning to really grasp the basics and understand how the market worked. How did you go about that

16:30 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, at a time where we barely had any EV charging networks there. So I didn't have a chance to base this on my own experience. I had no previous experience in the energy space, transportation space, or infrastructure. I'm coming entirely from the software space with

17:01 zero connections or experience in EV charging, which is great, because I have no baggage or preconceptions. Absolutely - you were a blank slate. Just to be clear, nobody - because you were, I think, 6 co-founders as well? Yeah, we were 6 co-founders. To paint the picture: it's me and my CTO, then another friend of ours who is our Chief Commercial Officer, Kim, he comes from selling enterprise software, and then

17:29 the other 3 are engineers, software engineers. So really no experience in what we're going to be building - other than we know how to build software. That's what we know; we don't know anything about the space we are going to be building this software for. No preconceptions, a blank page that we can fill in only with the right things, if we have the luck to learn the right things. So we had to become

17:55 insiders from outsiders; we had to become insiders. The way we did it - our first year was 2019. We went to all the events we could find. Some actually were quite far-fetched and didn't move us that far. I mean, one of the first events we went to was actually in Dubai. So again, not the place to learn about EV charging, but I mean, it actually, it

18:23 actually helped us paint a picture as well. But yeah, it took a lot of conversations with people that are already doing something in this space, and a lot of critical thinking so that we can filter out someone else's preconceptions. I mean, we've gotten a lot of advice that we didn't follow, and I think we were right not to follow. Do you mind - I'll give you an example. I mean, a friend

18:50 of mine. Early on - I don't know if it was 2019, it was probably 2019 that that happened. We met Thomas Diver, and he had just stepped off as CEO of Hebject. 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 to help us hone our value proposition

19:26 and generally our business model and strategy and so on. But mostly - although again, amazing insights, super generous with his time - he told us: "Guys, you're entering an already crowded space. Very little room for differentiation. Go do something else." Focus on fleets, for example - that was one of the ideas he had, because what you're trying to do, you would have to outcompete people that are doing it already and are doing it

19:56 very well. That was in 2019 - I think it was 2019, yeah. And that was one advice we didn't follow. But if I knew what he knew and I was advising these two guys from Sofia, I'd probably give them the same advice. So again, everything else that we learned from him was so helpful and we incorporated it, but we didn't follow that advice and we

20:24 pushed through. Good example. I like Thomas as well - he was a podcast guest too, for those that want to listen. Very good insights. But indeed, that's a very insightful point: once you're an outsider, you are free to just be naive and also challenge preconceived notions. I think this naivety is a very important aspect of entrepreneurship. Very often it's the naivety - not knowing why something wouldn't work - that makes you

20:53 make it work. With everything I know today, if I go back to 2019 and have to formulate a plan of what we're going to do, I'd be crazy to do exactly what we did and hope that it will work out. But yeah, I didn't know that back then. So - do you remember, on the flip side, something that was given to you as advice that you cherish a lot, that was super useful, that you actually implemented? I don't know, it's

21:22 probably - I mean, there are things that are details, but all of them stuck for sure. I can't pinpoint a specific one, but we learned a lot from talking to people, and that's the only way we could do it. We had to tap into someone else's knowledge and then stitch these things together so that we could formulate our own thesis and plans. And we tried to show progress as soon as

21:49 we had some, even if it was just mockups of something, so that we could get instant feedback - be it from customers or insiders. And this guided us in figuring out how to do it. And the best event that was most useful to you in that time - was it the ICNC that you went back to, or was it - I think there are two events that really made a difference

22:17 for us. One was actually the first industry event that we went to: it was MOVE, in London, in 2019 as well. I think it was in March, so we started the company in October 2018. In March we went to MOVE as a startup - with startup tickets or something. They have this line of 1m booths with a poster there, yeah, exactly. And so what

22:51 we didn't have was any budget to spend. What I had was five more co-founders - so six founders. I made sure we rented an Airbnb and we all six went there. I mean, if you can't show much more than this, just show numbers so that we can have more conversations. In the end, we were still at a phase where we had something to show, but it was mostly mockups and an early version

23:17 of the software, and mostly we needed feedback and we needed to learn. There are only so many conversations a single person can have, so I brought everyone. And it was amazing. This is the event where we met one of our first quite significant customers. We didn't sign them then, but we got them excited then - they were actually an exhibitor and a sponsor. They got excited by what we showed them, and a year

23:43 later at the same event we signed the contract. I mean, it was symbolic - we signed them about a month earlier, but we made it official on paper there. So that was the first one that made a difference. And the second one was the first ICNC that we went to, which really - the value that we got out of it in the form of conversations and insights really accelerated us. Nice, and

24:10 so the first customer was then also the one from the MOVE 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 they helped us develop the platform in a direction that made it suitable for others like them. And usually it's difficult to find the first ones - what was the process

24:35 To convince those that obviously asked the question "Where have you done it before?" - just think about what we are selling. It's at the core of your business. 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 think about how difficult a sale this is.

25:04 We didn't have any traction or proof points, 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 again it's a core platform, business-critical ones, and it's from a company that doesn't have the track record to prove that it's solid and it's

25:36 reliable. And now, taking a step back and getting to the meat of the issue, so to say - I know, talking to investors personally as well, people are not so familiar with the space, and it's a complicated one as you already pointed out. So how do you explain what is the problem you're solving with your company, and what is your company about in simple terms for the listeners that might not be in the weeds of all

26:04 this jargon - CPMS, MSPs, etc.? Yeah, that's a tough one. I mean, by the way, this is probably why we didn't do so well on the first round of financing that we were seeking, because I was never able to explain what we do in simple terms. But I think with core vertical software it's sometimes like this, because you're not doing one thing - you're doing a lot of things that are purposely built for a specific industry, very well

26:33 and they integrate very well together, and the value comes from that. Because many of our early investors that I talked to, they wanted to hear what's the secret sauce - what's the one thing that people are buying our software for, the USP. 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,

26:57 what we're doing is vertical software for EV charging networks. That's the one software they definitely use - and 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 you're really solving with this software for the charge point operator? Let me come

27:26 back to the example of my question: how do I connect your charger to my EV from my car-sharing software? The problem is, you don't - you need a system that has the charger connected; that's this operating system. And the problem is, there's no EV charging network that doesn't have such software, so it's not a problem like "I need to know that my charger is online" - yeah, that's one thing it's solving if done right, but

27:55 that's not the problem you come up with. If you want to run any business in EV charging, you need a software management platform like ours. So that's a great place to be as well, because this is software that you don't throw out - you may switch, but you can't give it up. If you're doing SaaS and it's optional, if you're selling to enterprises something that they can use or they cannot

28:18 use, that's one thing. If they have to replace it because their business doesn't exist without the software, your stickiness is much higher. And just to break it down - you would agree with me, right, that the core problems and the solutions you're bringing are: on the one hand, if you don't have a connected charger or software to manage it, you risk the charger not being usable. You cannot accept payments, you cannot bill as you need to, you cannot manage load. That's

28:48 the problem in reality - that's not even a question of whether to consider if you're going to run a business in EV charging. You have to have the charger connected, because otherwise you don't know if it's online, you can't say who can charge and who cannot, at what price, whether to accept payment - none of this is possible. So it's not so much a question of do I or do I not. It's a matter of what software do I use to manage

29:13 my charging network, right? Just to also give the listeners a bit of an aside - maybe you can fill in. I think you're now at the Series B stage. The latest - last year we raised our Series B round, so this was a $26 million US dollar investment. And previously, in total, we've raised like $43 million - that's quite a lot. And you are a company of how many people right now? We are nearing 200

29:44 people at the moment. And I've seen the latest - 60 countries already, right? You're operating - we're in more than 60 countries, pretty much every continent where there are cars. There's a customer using our software to charge EVs. Our market - I mean, still the biggest concentration is Europe, like 60% is Europe, but we have customers in Australia, New Zealand, or in North America, and even customers in Africa. And yeah, it's not in

30:16 South America as well, so it's quite well spread out and used in a lot of countries, so that's quite impressive. And how would you explain the scaling that you did in these years? What convinced so many people to adopt your solution? Well, one thing is it starts with the strategy. We decided that we are only going to build the software platform that others use on the ground - in specific

30:44 markets to run their business, which meant that we don't have to be in a market in order for our software to be applicable to that market. We just needed to make sure that it works for whoever's doing business in that market. So when we signed - actually one of our first customers was in Taiwan. They came to us around Christmas 2019. They visited us in Sofia and we signed there. We didn't have anyone in Taiwan. We didn't have any

31:12 marketing to this region, but the software was applicable because we made sure that we build a platform that is not tied to specific markets or specific geography. 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

31:42 going to individual site hosts - say a hotel - and you want them to buy charging stations and monetize them through our platform. You have to have at least sales there, but probably some field service and support as well. 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 find the customers that actually then build out the network. To give you some idea about

32:10 the scale: our customers today operate around 200,000 charge points, and this is spread between around 180 customers, so we only had to sell to 180 customers in order to have 200,000 chargers on the platform. Got it. And just to make sure I understood - all these aspects like when a charger failed and so on, that was basically not handled by you, which allowed you to scale faster because that would be handled by somebody else. You don't have

32:38 to have a local presence too much. Exactly. Our job is to make sure that the software will detect this, notify them, and give them ways to troubleshoot. But then the actual service is provided by the charging network. There is also one key aspect that maybe I'm not as knowledgeable about: the billing and payments aspects. I think that also quite highly depends on every geography. Isn't there a hurdle to scaling that fast? Or is that one aspect where you have to

33:05 adapt to geographies and different markets? This is why early on we didn't process payments directly. We make it possible for our customers to process payments. We started very early on with almost 10 different payment processors for different markets, and today we have around 40 different ways to process payments, and we have integrations with invoicing solutions for different markets so that we can cover these aspects. But in the end, the seller - the merchant - is our

33:38 customer. So we make sure that our software makes it easy for them to accept payment, to do the accounting, 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 or pay taxes in a country in order to sell there, because it's our customers selling there. We just have to make sure that the software supports them. And when I say 'just', I mean it's not like

34:02 it's a very easy thing to do, because it 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 the people in different markets and the operations in different markets. So in other words, you made the variables accessible to the merchant, and then he takes care that it complies with the local regulations. We go as far as to make sure that they comply, but it's

34:30 not us actually issuing the invoice. It's our software that issues the invoice, but the name on the invoice is the name of the company that is our customer. We do make sure that it's compliant - we have a team following that. Their job is 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

34:55 doing business in these different markets. Got it. And 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 the founders are there, so - joking aside - in the beginning what played a role was that we have access to talent. At some point, at a certain scale, you actually get limited because on the other hand the market is not that

35:24 big. 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 that talent in a bigger market. For the start it was an advantage, but it's mostly where we started from. It's not something that - if I had to choose where to start a business - I would specifically go and start it in Sofia with what we're doing, but this is where

35:49 We made it for the origin story, yeah. And you don't have the team all there - you have a more distributed team, or how is the company structure and what is your view for the future? Well, when COVID hit and the first lockdown hit, we were 16 people, and two 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

36:19 company in a way that it works remotely. So even though I say a lot of the team is in Bulgaria, they're not really all in Sofia - because in Sofia's office we have like 50 people coming to the office out of 150, 117 in Bulgaria in total. The rest work from home, from other locations in Bulgaria. We have a couple more offices, and we also have people in other places. We have people in the UK, in France, in the

36:47 States, in Netherlands. So yeah, we're not really tied to a single location. The company has been built in a way - also by necessity, because we had no other option - but because we built it that way, this now allows us to hire where we find the talent rather than having to find the talent in a particular location. And how - one key advice when starting a

37:15 company that 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 at least you proved that it can work with scaling very, very fast to so many different geographies. What's your thinking behind that? Well, part of it comes from the fact that we had no other option but to choose a market that is not our local market, because our local market doesn't exist. So

37:43 easy choice, yeah, easy choice. But then 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, two more of significant size, and then some very niche ones. And 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

38:10 one. I 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 when the market matures, and this one would be used in all kinds of markets. So we decided: let's learn from these markets early on so that we don't close off our platform or tailor it too much to a specific market, because especially in emerging technology, sometimes

38:40 the advancements don't come from the markets that are first getting to maturity, or at least to early adoption. I mean, none of the markets in Europe have reached maturity - even in the Nordics, still yet to get there. But a lot of things that early on define the market later get disrupted. Because if I get back to these doubles - when you have multiple doubles to

39:11 do, any new double is a significant increase; it allows for new things to outpace old things. Just to explain the double concept, because I'm not sure - the thing about the doubling is: if your market doubles 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

39:36 model can already outpace you just because the market allows them to grow. So you don't lose business, but you lose market share because the market grows so significantly. So 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 - I mean, if

40:03 we focused from the beginning, say, on Germany or the UK or the Nordics, we'd be missing out on things that may actually define the future of this space, because we are not in these 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 may skip steps, they may not have the same costs, and they may actually advance faster at a later stage, as long

40:32 as there's more growth to happen. You don't want to miss out on these opportunities, and 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 it's much easier to focus on use cases and markets where you already have concentration, and when you put more focus there you're more competitive and

41:00 you get more of the existing business. But in the long term this may actually be the wrong play, and we believe the right approach for our particular business is to go with this more broad, multi-market approach. Yeah, got it. Just maybe for the listeners very quickly - there are different key market players, and I'll explain this so that you can give your view. There's the charge point operator that operates the chargers, then there's the

41:28 MSP - mobility service providers - that have the payment cards or the payment app that they usually use for charging. And then there's the so-called CPMSs; that's what Ampeco would say is a form of positioning, offering software for the charge point operators. And then there are roaming hubs that try to connect them all together, like Hubject and the ICNC that we have been dropping as a name, which ensures that everybody can talk to

41:52 each other somehow. So where do you see the market going? Different markets have a different split in terms of numbers of these different types of market actors, and what's your view on that - you said the ten-year vision? Well, the first thing is that 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

42:25 to build the infrastructure first, but this is very early on. This is why we had Ionity, and this is why a fast-charging network was built by a joint venture by automotive OEMs - because you needed some infrastructure in order to foster EV adoption. But mainstream infrastructure is built to be used, and what is using this infrastructure are electric vehicles. So how fast it is developing, and in what markets, the pace depends on the adoption

42:58 in these markets. So we are looking at infrastructure that works with a lag. When you see a drop in EV adoption - so 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 catch up, because

43:28 infrastructure doesn't react at the same pace as consumers do. But this is what we're looking at: in what markets EVs are being sold, at what pace, and this tells us how infrastructure build-out would look. Europe at the moment has just returned to an accelerated EV adoption this year, so we can expect an acceleration in EV charging infrastructure build-out. The US has seen a steadier growth -

44:07 they're not growing as fast. So you can expect again that infrastructure wouldn't be built out at the same pace as in Europe. And there are other emerging markets - by the way, you have Brazil and Mexico where EVs are being adopted at an amazing pace, mostly because of Chinese brands who are selling there, Australia as well - and then infrastructure build-out follows as well. What we see is that on the infrastructure side, which

44:38 are the CPOs that you mentioned - charge point operators, who manage the networks - there will be consolidation, mostly on the high-power charging side, where this is the kind of business that resembles the petrol station business much more than other aspects of EV charging. Because other EV charging operators, like CPOs, are parking operators - anyone with a parking space. If you can imagine that every car is electric, where does it make sense to charge an electric car? Well, first

45:08 of all, when it's parked - this is the easiest and most convenient. You don't have to go to a specific place to charge. 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 at home - but not everyone has their own parking space. And some of these EVs would be shared; I hope more would be shared. So you look at where do they spend time, and that

45:35 is a place where they will be charging. Obviously when you travel on the Autobahn you'd want to have fast charging, and this is where it's consolidated and it looks like a petrol station. Everywhere else it actually looks more like a parking operator. And it's not just parking operators that are becoming CPOs - it's anyone with a parking space: the retailers, the office buildings, the

46:01 residential buildings. And these don't consolidate EV charging because these are different kinds of businesses. You don't consolidate on the basis of offering EV charging just because one is a retailer, another is a residential building, another is an office building - it doesn't make sense. These are very different businesses. So this means that there will be some level of fragmentation in these segments. As long as the fragmentation is not immense, there's

46:36 no reason to consolidate at all. Maybe you just partner with another CPO and you don't care. But if you manage thousands of parking spaces, or tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of parking spaces, you are a prime candidate to become a CPO. This is why we have, for example, in our portfolio a 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

47:05 million parking spaces - they're French. And there's Cora, for example, who are also a very significant charge point operator. This type of company will eventually in-house EV charging; it's going to be part of their business. The same goes for many retailers, for many real estate businesses as well. So we're looking at them as candidates as customers for our platform. On the EMSP side, which is mentioned

47:37 You have the card, but most of what you have is the user. So how does the user access EV charging? These are the EMSPs. Well, I believe this would be very consolidated. I think there'll be - you wouldn't have a very diverse market there. You would have 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

48:08 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 - Apple, Google. I expect they'll be the biggest EMSPs eventually. And we don't sell to those. I think it's too consolidated for them to have to use someone else's platform. But on the CPO side, this is what makes our market interesting. And I think Germany, if I'm

48:40 not wrong - you might know the numbers better than me - has one of the largest numbers of CPOs in the world, right? It's interesting because here, I mean, there's probably a reason Thomas was advising us against it, because there's also the biggest number of softwares for CPOs as well, because almost every utility has their own charging network and you have too many utilities. So yeah, that's the legacy reason. Yes, but it was also one of

49:10 these early market things where there was 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. I don't think the market would look that fragmented, so I wouldn't be basing my prognosis on the level of fragmentation on Germany. I think actually Germany is a market that is going to see a lot of consolidation on the CPO

49:37 side. Which market do you think it will more be like - like the UK, that has I think a few dozen or so? I would look at France, UK, and Netherlands - Netherlands because of how far ahead they are in terms of the number of charge points, and UK and France because they were a little bit later in the game. But I think they're more telling for the market dynamics of a maturing - not a mature

50:06 market, a maturing market. And what do you make of China, the big elephant in the room? I think in the West we don't touch it too much. Is it one of the 60 countries, or do you think it might be an attractive market for Ampeco as well? Oh, China is just - I mean, it's by far the biggest market. It's bigger than all of the rest in terms of EV charging. I wish we were able to tackle China, but for now we're staying

50:33 away. One thing about China is, obviously, it's a very different market. It's very consolidated, by the way, and much more vertically integrated than what we're seeing in other markets. But also when it comes to SaaS businesses and vertical SaaS in general, it's very difficult to do any vertical SaaS in China from outside China. For one, if you really want to run a SaaS business in China, you have to run it on servers in China. You have to

51:00 give access to the government to your source code, and you can't access it from outside China. So if I was to run what we're running - an Ampeco software - in China, I wouldn't be able to support it from Europe. Technically, I don't have access. I mean, that's how it works, so it's very restrictive to outsiders, especially when it comes to vertical SaaS. Because what if you're doing something mainstream

51:26 like a social media - you can access it, just because the numbers justify it. But when you're doing vertical SaaS like we do, I mean, we'd still have hundreds of customers there. They would be significantly bigger than what we have in other markets, but it would be very difficult for us to justify all these operations in the beginning, and as long as the other markets have sufficient growth in volume, it's much easier to

51:58 stay away from China. That makes sense. And one thing that I also find quite interesting in this industry is the fact that there are also certain developing countries that are leapfrogging as well - that are really boosting their EV adoption - like Brazil, Thailand, Ethiopia, and others. What's your take on developing countries as markets for EVs and for charging businesses? Well, for them, today's leapfrogging is mostly

52:28 accelerated because they've let in the Chinese manufacturers of electric vehicles. And everywhere, as I said, in the end EV charging follows EV adoption, and when people are buying EVs they have to charge them somewhere, and businesses then take on to build the infrastructure that's needed for this. So all these countries with high volumes of citizens - I wouldn't even say cars today, because in many cases EVs can acquire a new type of

53:04 customer that before didn't drive an EV. They may be driving a two-wheeler - still may be an EV, but it's not a four-wheeler. They may be driving a two-wheeler, or maybe they didn't have a car at all, but now the entry barrier is very low, because it's not just the purchasing price of these Chinese EVs, it's also the maintenance cost. And in many of these countries, electric cars are now making it more affordable to own a car in

53:29 general, and they're just expanding the markets for cars in general. So I think a lot of those are going to be leapfrogging, as they actually are, just because they don't have any industry to protect, and because they're also tapping into a new customer base that previously may not have even bought a car or may not have considered buying a car. And so when you try to convince new CPOs to

54:03 work with you, or your sales people rather try to convince them - I'm still doing the convincing, you're doing the same in your day to day - OK, yeah, it's especially, when it's so big, CPOs I guess for the larger accounts you and the CEO take ownership. So what is typically the USP, the killing argument, that's where they decide to go for Umeco? Well, there are a few things that we didn't have before

54:30 which today are very strong selling points. One is we now have the proof points that it is one of, 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 demanding, the regulators are more demanding, everyone's more demanding because they expect this industry to be mature, even though it's still in its teenage years. And you now really need a robust solution because this is the backbone

54:59 of your tech stack, and now we have the proof points that ours actually is the one that excels at this. But then what really sells it is - I'll go back to strategy - and it resonates very well 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 rollout, to be successful in their business. There's no conflict of interest. There is a huge

55:29 alignment, which means that we're putting our resources where it makes sense for them. We are not locking them in, we are enabling them. We are giving them the flexibility where they need it. Maybe they don't want to use our white-label mobile app - that's great. We make it very easy and actually help our customers to build their own app, because this way they'll be more successful. They'll be standing up more charges. They'll be the consolidators, not the ones that get

55:53 acquired. And this level of alignment, which is backed by where we put our focus on the product development side, is what resonates very well with the largest and most ambitious CPOs. Makes sense. And one trend that I think you're also trying to lead on is that the future is not building everything in-house but orchestrating the best specialists in the market to achieve reliability, profitability, and a seamless user experience. Can you elaborate on that? Yeah, absolutely,

56:24 I mean I think this is something that others in other industries have gone through - from building everything to actually focusing on what's your differentiation, what's the core value that you're bringing, instead of just trying to do what everyone else has to do anyway. In EV charging, for example, 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 monetize them.

56:53 These are not things that create differentiation. So you have to figure out where differentiation is created. Maybe it's in 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 player, well, this is again about where are the sites that you've built, how accessible are they, how good is the user experience on the site. Focus on these things, and when

57:22 you put your resources there, this focus really creates an immense driving 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 - you're solving them again, reinventing something that's already invented, maintaining 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 we have, and our platform is the best orchestration platform.

57:52 It solves the common problems. It integrates very well with the best-in-class solutions that you want to use, and it leaves you to focus on the things that are your differentiation. And also, adding to that - you mentioned in one post as well that CPOs are drowning in vendor management, that hardware comes from one supplier, payments from another, EMS from a third, analysis from a fourth, and so on. So the opportunity is

58:19 to have a platform that orchestrates it all into a cohesive ecosystem. Yeah, I mean I think that generally CPOs are drowning in complexity. That doesn't necessarily mean that they should use fewer vendors, 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. For example, we have in our platform features

58:46 that we are very proud of and I think work very well. We have our own built-in energy management, but at the same time we also make sure that our customers can connect other energy management systems that are just better for their use case than our - how to say - more off-the-shelf or universal solution. And it's to their benefit to use more vendors in this case. They would use another vendor for something that's very specialised.

59:15 And that does the job better than something that's for everyone else. I mean, for maybe someone that occasionally would have to comply with something, or just to win a customer, they need to do something in energy management. Well, yeah, our solution is amazing for them. It comes out of the box, use it. But if this is something that's a significant part of your value proposition, use the vendor that's going to give you the best chances

59:41 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 these two aspects and how they are applicable to your customers? Yeah, 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, the API-first approach is like a service that you can peel

1:00:11 off. 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 are usually 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 hopefully have direct connections with EMSPs so that you don't have to download their app, but some

1:00:36 customers would just want to have the app from the CPO. Well, OK, great, and we have a great white label app. I mean, it's under the brand of our customer. We don't stand in between them and their customer. But it's the universal app. It's the one that has to serve the case of a German CPO and a French CPO and a UK CPO. If you really want it to, it has to work for the one that's

1:01:01 working with 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 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

1:01:27 amazingly fits your use case. And is it like a fallacy in my thinking, but many CPOs are like energy companies, usually from that background, and the core DNA is not making software. Is that a challenge for them? Yeah, that's true. I mean, it's not just energy utilities, there are others. Some of our customers are in real estate, some of those are

1:01:55 parking operators. They're not necessarily software companies, so you have to make it easy for them. And 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? 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. Our

1:02:21 role is to solve the common problems and give you a very flexible platform, but it's not tailored. And you don't have to tailor everything, because then you have overhead and maintenance and so on. But there are some parts that are very important - in some cases this may be the user experience, in other cases maybe it's 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, so it's about the asset management. So

1:02:45 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, 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, for whom you're building it, you have to know your business and your

1:03:11 competitive advantage, and then someone else can build it for you. But don't expect that you'll get something, put a logo on it, and then it works perfectly, 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 are so many different standards and integrations. Will there be at some point an easier time where OCPP versions will not

1:03:36 update that often, or ISO 15118 or other things? Well, having started at a time where there were still proprietary protocols for many chargers, I'm happy that there are standards, even though there may seem to be too many. But I think this is a problem that we, 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 for it. So I kind of see this as our role to

1:04:08 solve this problem. Part of it is to solve it with software, part of it is to solve it through the organizations that we are members of and that guide the standard-setting. But in the end, this is something that I think is quite normal when the industry is growing - to have to find the ways that things should work and be wrong sometimes. Because if you're too afraid of being wrong, you may

1:04:40 It may take too much time to perfect when it's too late. 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 doing it perfect but too late. OK, in this podcast called Smart Charge by RiDERgy, so let's talk a little bit about smart charging. What's your view on anything related to smart charging - dynamic prices, for example, or consuming self-consumed solar energy, or bidirectional charging? Yeah,

1:05:10 what's the vision you have and what do you think? I think here, when you talk about smart charging, 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 early majority. These are the people who didn't buy an EV because they care so much about smart charging. I mean, they just think: now is the time, yes. I am

1:05:40 environmentally conscious, but it's not that I will not make compromises for this. It's just another benefit that it's also good for the environment. It's also the cheaper option. It's the more convenient option. These are the expectations that we 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

1:06:04 the scenes and be entirely handled by the provider. Don't expect that the user would be scheduling their charging. Expect that they would want the benefit, but not the hassle. So it has to be made convenient, and this is where I think a lot of the experiments that we've seen and participated in underestimate how important it is to make it convenient for the customer. They go for the maximum, for the most optimal. Well, you can

1:06:34 sacrifice some savings to make it convenient. I'll give you one example with something that we tried out with a couple of customers. It was about destination charging, mostly on-street charging where people also leave their car overnight. The idea was to give people the opportunity to let charging be scheduled for off-peak hours, so you plug in at 7 p.m., but actually we want to charge it after

1:07:06 11 when it's cheaper. So one iteration of this was the user had to choose when they were going to leave and they had to choose whether they wanted cheap or expensive charging, and just no one used it. Then we came up with a simpler approach. I said: let's do an Eco and Boost option. Eco - we decide when the car is going to be charged. So just put a notice:

1:07:34 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 Boost is the regular price, Eco is the low price. You choose it once and it's the same price. So if you choose Eco, you're at the lower price whatever we charge. Boost - you're at the high price, we give you what's available. This was so much easier for the customer and everyone

1:08:02 used it. Not everyone chose Eco - there are people that just wanted to use Boost - but everyone chose an option because it's very simple. You don't have to think about it. OK, I'm flexible, I'll get the low price. I'm not flexible, I'll just charge the regular price. Yeah, and there's also one - Elaway, I saw, that is one of your customers in Norway. They were very excited a couple of months ago, they

1:08:28 were posting about a project. Can you also share a bit more? I think it was the nodes with the grids. Yeah, I think it was with the nodes market. It was something that we did together with Hafsund, a Norwegian utility, and Elaway, and we onboarded a significant number of EVs onto the flexibility market and allowed them mostly to do peak shaving. I

1:09:00 mean, it's flexibility trading, so someone posts a flexibility request and then you comply with the local grids. Was it - no, it was not transmission grids. It was for the distribution - for the distribution network. The premise is simple. I mean, in Elaway's case, these are housing associations. People have their vehicles charging overnight, and usually they

1:09:31 need a couple of hours of charging and they're connected for 8 hours. So when those two hours happen, it doesn't affect the user experience at all, especially when you're offering flexibility - you're trading like 10% of the available flexibility, meaning no vehicle is not charging at any given time. Say, for example, the vehicle is scheduled to charge between 11 and 2 at full power - well, it's full power minus 10% in reality - and

1:10:05 when you aggregate across a large network with many vehicles connected at any given time, it allows you to offer flexibility to the market. Maybe someone was supposed to generate some electricity and they can't do it because the weather changed or they have a technical issue. Instead of paying the fine and the fees, they would pay someone else to actually reduce their consumption, and that's what we can do.

1:10:34 at scale. And it's not fancy, it's not V2G, it's very simple, but it's very underutilized. I think the greatest benefits 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. We still have this uncertainty from the customer: well, what happens when you're discharging my battery? Does this affect the longevity? We are not doing enough in just scheduling in a smart way.

1:11:08 And there's so much potential there, right? And what is the - so you mentioned a couple, but next to the UX and the customer experience and making it simple, and the cost for V2G, is there any other challenges you see, especially to make the scheduling - or the V1G or smart charging - possible at scale, and then also V2G or bidirectional charging at scale? Challenges? I think one thing is there's not enough markets because no one

1:11:38 has onboarded the vehicles in a massive way. Because the market exists when there are 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 a flexibility request, why bother to register it? So I think one thing that has to happen is you have to figure out how we solve this chicken-and-egg problem. Maybe we should just start onboarding all possible use

1:12:06 cases for smart charging, so that on the markets that exist - because this would probably also create new markets and pull in participants that need this flexibility but until now haven't been active on these markets. Because in the end it's about balancing, and you need 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 need would

1:12:37 create the opportunity for other market entrants. OK, and then we're coming to an end here. So looking forward to the vision and your next few years, so to say - you have an ambitious vision to have, I think, 25% market share within the segment of charging backends, right? So what do you foresee as the biggest challenges to get there? Well, first of all, I would say that we only care about market share when the

1:13:01 market settles. So when we're at 50+% of 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 with the market while you stagnate. But what we're looking at is mostly every decision that we're making - we're looking at: does it close the road to this dominant position? And if it

1:13:31 does close the road, we don't do it. It's much more difficult to choose the right path, but it's relatively easy to identify a path that doesn't bring you to where you want to be. And at the same time it's very tempting sometimes to take that path because it can give you shorter-term growth that would otherwise be more difficult to achieve. Like, for example, if we were to enter the market in a

1:13:58 more direct way, especially in markets which are already more dense - well, we can grow faster, but then we'll be in competition with some of our customers. And will we be the dominant platform if we're competing with our customers? Well, we won't be. So we're not doing this, and this is how we gauge every decision. What we intend to do in the next years is we intend to work more with the ecosystem, so that we can bring

1:14:26 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 theme for us in the next two years. Yeah, very interesting. And what are other innovations that excite you that will come in the future of the industry - thinking also of things that seem very far away but are still quite near, like autonomous driving

1:15:00 or other types of - oh, there are two things that I'm very keen to see. One is wireless charging, and it goes hand in hand 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 go out and plug in their vehicle - they don't have to - but if they just park it and it's already connected to the grid, this would really unlock

1:15:25 the opportunities for smart charging. I really want to see this happen, but it's a far-fetched thing and it requires both the automotive OEMs, hardware manufacturers, and infrastructure to work together on common standards and technology. I think it's something that we wouldn't see that soon, but I'm very excited for it to happen and I'll be very happy if I'm wrong and it actually happens sooner. The other thing is in user experience - I really want to see

1:15:54 Plug&Charge be widely adopted. Its current form may not be the perfect one, but it's better than having to use apps or struggle with RFID cards. 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 forward to. One is from the perspective of how much value we can unlock with wireless charging together with smart

1:16:25 charging in vehicle-to-grid integration. The other is just from pure user experience, which I think would benefit EV adoption in general. OK. And is there a last message you would like to leave users, and how can people get in touch with you, for example? Well, I'm on LinkedIn - that's how you can get in touch with me. But my message is mostly to anyone that's hesitant about EVs: to know that things are changing every year, very quickly.

1:16:55 So your preconceptions may already be outdated. Don't wait. Yes, for sure. All right, thanks a lot, Arlene. Thank you. What a fascinating discussion it has been with Orle about his entrepreneurial experiences - from a teenage almost drop-out to starting several companies, in particular working on others' ideas with a partner he has been working with since he was a teenager, and then finally working on e-mobility with his own idea, and not only starting his own idea but also making it a great success.

1:17:34 And this story is just very impressive - from the beginning of being an outsider and working his way through this industry, to being able to bootstrap and then scale with a lot of traction worldwide. And not only in one country or a few countries in a row, but really about 60 countries all over the world, which is even more impressive. His ambitious attitude is really highlighted as well in his vision: to be the dominating player in this very hard market.

1:18:06 Difficult to understand - from CPOs, MSPs, and so on - which he broke down for us, and really showed us what the role of future payments will be and how he positions his company to be very much an open ecosystem, working with specialised players like, for example, RiDERgy. And how he sees fascinating new technologies on the horizon with Plug & Charge and inductive charging, and how these will be game changers. And his view on the smart charging ecosystem, where

1:18:39 I wouldn't disagree that indeed the UX and customer experience just needs to be as simple as possible - like the eco-boost mode 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 EVs, as things are moving so fast and the market size is doubling, as he was adamant in saying. Stay tuned and recommend the episode to whoever you think

1:19:12 will like it, and see you soon.