Episode 8: Thomas Daiber - EV Transition, OEM Innovations, Charging Solutions, and Strategic Consulting

Transcript

Cleaned up from a machine transcript. Translations are machine-generated and may contain errors.

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.
Alright, thanks for making it today, Thomas. How are you? Thanks for having me, great. Really, really sunny day here in Berlin, so that's quite rare these days, I would say. Yeah, I love Berlin, starting from now. Exactly, exactly. So, for the listeners who don't know you - we know each other since a longer time - maybe feel free to reach back in time as you want, or take the question as you feel to.
Who are you and what makes you who you are? Oh wow, that's quite a big question for the start. So yeah, my name is Thomas. I've been working in electrification, EV charging, and new mobility now for about 17 years. Started in a classic way as a southern German engineer in 2008, working for a German car manufacturer, Mercedes, focusing on both electric cars and hydrogen cars, which was quite unusual back at the time where
everything was around ICE. So in 2008, you were one of the few exotic people to do that. But it was fun. I learned a lot on how to replace the ICE powertrain with an electric powertrain or hydrogen powertrain. And then I moved on to learn more about energy and the question of where energy comes from, as a product manager at EnBW for a few years, which was quite fun back at the time where you had maybe a
few thousand electric cars in Germany, 2010 to 2012, fooling around with charging infrastructure - commercialisation, quote unquote, right? First charging cards, first back-ends. And yeah, back then I figured out that the most important part of the value chain is neither energy nor the vehicle, but software - the brain, the intelligence behind charging infrastructure, behind the future of energy and the future of
mobility, right? And yeah, that brought me to finally supporting the creation of a roaming hub called Hubject in Berlin in 2013.
No, it was separate. So I had a little intermezzo working for Porsche, mostly as a consultant in the field of fleet electrification. I wasn't really happy with my job and, to be fair, back then I had no clue about founders and venture capital and where all the money comes from. But yeah, I was a little bit disillusioned with the corporate world, and still I thought, well, I had followed
the whole founding phase at EnBW of Hubject, and I thought it was an interesting one. I thought it could be cool to experience ramping up a startup from scratch, even though it was a corporate startup, right? So the funny thing was I was hired in 2013 as a head of R&D. Most people know me as a CEO and as one of the guys that ramped it up as a CEO, but I actually started as a head
of R&D at Hubject - nothing to do with EnBW, just an independent application. And yeah, quite soon after I was asked to become CEO of the company. Yeah. Probably for the ones that don't know, Hubject is quite a strange animal. Nowadays you would call it a roaming hub, or e-roaming hub, or charging infrastructure hub. The idea behind the company was actually to connect charging infrastructure networks, mainly in Germany. That means if you wanted to charge
your electric car back in 2013, you would have needed around 70 or 80 charging cards just to charge your car in Germany. That was seen as a problem by the first shareholders - quite a wide group of both car manufacturers, with BMW and Mercedes-Daimler back then, two electricity companies with RWE and EnBW, and two tech companies with Siemens and Bosch - who figured out, well, we need to solve this, but we can only solve it together and we need to kind
of create a balance of interests. So yeah, the idea was to do the job in Germany, but we failed completely to do it in Germany at the beginning. Germany was not ready, or not interested in our solution to connect charging infrastructure networks, to unify the charging experience, making it possible to charge an electric car with one charging card. And so this became an international thing. We were quite more successful in our neighbouring countries first, before
we experienced - well, not the Netherlands actually. The Netherlands came after Germany, because the Netherlands were quite advanced already in roaming and they were also not really in favour of what we were doing, because they already had their own roaming schemes back then. So Austria was actually number one. Switzerland came quite early, then Finland, the Nordics - that was my first target market - and Denmark. And later Germany. But it was textbook development,
being laughed at for two to three years, and then at some point experiencing the network effect. From that point onwards, sales cycles became quite fast and much more straightforward compared to the beginning. But yeah, it was an interesting journey and I really enjoyed doing it for over six years. To finally create my own company after six years - we had created this player that was doing good in
Europe, and the 2nd geographical area was Japan. And finally further companies in the US and China. After 6 years, I asked myself: OK, I'm now CEO of this company that has done quite a good job. In most of the markets we had, we were more or less a monopolist because our competitors were quite weak. And so I asked myself,
OK, should I extend this journey? I had a quite nice offer on the table from the shareholders for 5 more years, and I thought this was really flattering. We had a quite strong bond and it was a really respectful relationship with the shareholders, but I finally decided to do something by myself. I come from an entrepreneurial family, and I think the entrepreneurial DNA - the question: do you want to be a hired CEO for the rest
of your life, or do you want to do something by yourself? - was stronger. So finally that led to the creation of Cosmic Hat Group, which brought me here today. Alright, now I have plenty of questions. Let me see where to start. So maybe let's start with the beginning. You started with a vehicle OEM and moved into the energy space, and then basically went to the
intersection of both. So what was the motivation for leaving the OEM? There are people who, if they are within OEMs, they stay there. I think at that time it was not that common - not at all, right? Yeah, it's a great question. So I have to mention that before my first position as a project manager at Mercedes for electric cars and hydrogen cars, during my studies I worked for
Fraunhofer Institute for 4 years. This is the biggest solar power institute in Freiburg. I worked there more or less throughout all of my studies, so I always had a connection to renewable energies. In parallel I did internships, already working for car manufacturers. So that intersection was always interesting to me. The link to renewable energy and energy production was always stronger than vehicles. I was never really a vehicle guy at all,
I don't own a vehicle today. So that was always there, but in the end of the day it was possible - I joined Mercedes back then also together with an MBA scholarship that was basically financed by Mercedes, so it was also just an opportunity to start there. And for me the journey just started with understanding how an electric car works, what the components are. I was responsible for error management, in particular
for the hydrogen B-Class, and there were - I can tell you - a lot of errors and problems back then with that car. So it was quite fun to really understand the vehicle as a whole. And then, you asked about the transition - to be very concrete, fun story: when I told my boss back then that I wanted to join the other side of the force, meaning energy, he kind of laughed at me and told me that, well, you're now working
for probably the sexiest car manufacturer in the world, and you now want to join a half-publicly-owned utility that is super unsexy. And that was back then the connotation of energy providers - I think to a certain extent it still is, right? So that was completely unpopular. For Swabian car manufacturers back at the time, it was very common to work there your whole life. For instance, my oldest brother -
he's 12 years older - he's been working for Mercedes for over 25 years, and I think that's quite a cool thing. So that was the norm back then. Yeah, but I'm very happy with the decision because it gave me the freedom to really experience much more. Mercedes back then was already a huge corporate animal, and EnBW, to my surprise, wasn't so much. So we are talking about corporates - that's one point you
made - and then the startup DNA that is in your family. Maybe you can elaborate on why you think you're not the typical corporate person, and how the family DNA shaped you. Yeah, sure, of course. Well, I wouldn't say that I have an issue with the corporate world or that I didn't fit in. I think what I can say today is
that I feel pretty comfortable working with the corporate world, but also in the startup and scale-up world. Originally my family comes from making all different kinds of things with wood. I come from a carpenter family, 4th generation. My brother took over probably 15–20 years ago. I have 3 older brothers, and the second oldest took over, which was clear already when he was, I don't know, 15
or something. So there was no real argument among the 4 brothers about who was going to do it. My great-great-grandfather started the whole thing a very long time ago, and since then it's just been a small village carpentry - but definitely something that shaped me in a way that, yeah, if you grow up in a family where there's no real separation between what's going on in the
fabric in the house, so it's kind of more or less one thing. This really shapes you, I guess. And I think on the long term it was always clear for me to become an entrepreneur or do something by myself, but this was also not really a thing growing up in a region, you know, where the world is still OK. This is one of the places, one of the richest places in Germany, one of the places where there's no unemployment.
There's a lot of Mittelstand industry, big companies like Boehringer Ingelheim or Leipa, so. It's not a real thing to start your own business there, I guess, at least not definitely not as a software entrepreneur. So yeah, that was not given that I would start that right from scratch. So I more went down the boring classic way, I guess, working for big
car manufacturers and utility companies before doing something by myself.
What are your key learnings - the things that you keep in mind, that you consider the highlights? Stories maybe as well? Well, I probably could write a book about it. And I mean, first of all, I'm incredibly thankful for that phase, even though it was a lot of blood, sweat and tears. Working 24/7 for 6 years and ramping up a company that's now still active on
three different continents, doing good, and finally making money, which is still rare in EV charging software. So, being appointed CEO at an age of 31 was something really special, and the learnings I can take from this phase are still something that has helped me a lot. Where to start? I mean, I guess the thing that I
mentioned at the very beginning - the courage and, to a certain extent, also the naivety, even though being a corporate child - to spread the word in other geographies, in other regions, at quite an early stage, and really believe in that network effect. I think that was something that was a risk we took, we believed in, but also, as said, with a certain extent of naivety. So I'll give you an example. Back then, when I was working in
sales quite a lot in the Nordics, I had a board meeting and shareholders asked me, like, who are the new clients, what is the latest development in sales. And I was like, yeah, I'm quite happy, I closed my first deal in Finland with a small player, a two-person company. Like, what are you doing in Finland? You know, you should do your job in Germany. That back-then two-person company is now called
Virta and is now one of the biggest players in Europe. And I think they benefited from the network effect, and we did too. So it wasn't really too necessary at the very beginning because it was a numbers game about coverage and how many charge points you had on the platform, and that of course also the quality and the technical, legal and business framework you basically needed to connect the charging infrastructure. So every charge point in every country
helped to at some point create enough leverage for a network effect, and that was a huge learning. Because of course you can read about it - there's a lot of stuff in the academic world about network effects and different models to generate them. But if you experience it, it's a different thing. And I would also say, if you look at what has been happening over the last years, it's the big dying of former legends in charging infrastructure.
Most of them had positioned themselves as vertical players. EV Box, for instance, Landis+Gyr lately - the list is long. New Motion - some of them have been acquired, mostly by oil companies or car manufacturers. But most of them had positioned themselves as vertical players. So what does that mean? They believed in providing end-to-end solutions including hardware, software and service. And Hubject was quite the opposite for us.
It was always clear that we only wanted to position ourselves as a marketplace and B2B layer. Which was sometimes tough, because it could have been easy to just flip the switch and become an EMSP - an e-mobility service provider - sell charging cards, turn the B2B business into a B2C or B2B2C business, provide charging cards and charging apps, and then of course own the end consumer. But I think for us it was always clear that this
will never be the path, and to this day Hubject is a pure B2B play, a pure marketplace ecosystem. And I think that was a wise decision, because with that strategy we could remain lean, we could just focus on our core where we were really strong, and not get lost in all the competitive fights - both on a back-end level, on a charging back-end level, on an EMSP level. So I think that
was after all the right strategy, even though over the years some of the other players were much more successful in the short term. But not on the long term, because I think concentrating your efforts on all of those battles was quite tough for a lot of players. So one thing I'm very interested in, especially just maybe for the listeners - these roaming platforms, they are, as you said, the key essential to get the charge point operators
And the so-called charge cards, MSPs, or the apps that you use to activate the charging sessions - to connect those in a leaner way. Now, how did you take inspiration from the telco industry when you started Hubject? Do you remember how the setup was? So from a historical standpoint, or from an analogous standpoint, what can you learn from the telco or other industries that have similar setups, especially nowadays where there is lots of criticism as well
on the current setup, in the sense that it might be too costly for the long run? And maybe you also have ideas on how we could make it better, or what would be a better setup than we currently have. Yeah, totally, it's a great question. And to start with, and to be fair, even though I think it's quite popular that corporate people call themselves co-founders or founders, Hubject was never a company that was founded
by entrepreneurs. It was founded by six heavyweights from the German industry. And it derived - nowadays a lot of people don't know that anymore - but it actually derived from a funded research project called Green Emotion. Back then, IBM was the main driver of the project, which later became something like a competitor, but not too successful. The German car manufacturers were also participating in this project, and they developed the idea already of a roaming platform that was more or
less inspired by the telco industry, but they were not allowed to commercialize it. So this was the point where they decided, well, can we bring this to a commercial level outside of the funding of the research project? And that led to the co-creation of Hubject back then. There are in fact a lot of analogies to telco - in particular, the separation of the networks, the grids. I think we nowadays have three telco grids, or three telco networks, if
I remember correctly, in Germany. But we have hundreds of mobile phone service providers - you know, you can get it in a supermarket, you get AliTalk or Lidl in Germany. These are all virtual providers that don't own any network. And so the idea was to come up with something similar, of course also driven by the strategic interests of the car manufacturers - to own the EV driver, or to provide a good answer for the customers on: hey, where
can I charge my electric car, and how - do I need an app? Do I just need to plug in and everything happens automatically? That answer back then wasn't there, and also, if you did mystery shopping on the first electric cars, it was horrible. You didn't get a proper answer. Sometimes even people at the dealers would lie to you about how to charge an electric car. And so finally they created
Hubject, and Hubject was positioned - and is still positioned mainly, and that's different to the telco industry, I'll tell you why in a second - mainly as a connectivity player. What Hubject basically does at its core is just making sure that you can find the next charging station: aggregating point-of-interest data, static and dynamic data for charging stations - first, finding the stations or leading you to the right point, providing the data, then getting access,
and getting access always means providing interoperability in the sense that if you use an EBW charging card, you can charge at an E.ON charging station, for instance. So this is a core use case - making it happen between different charging entities: so-called eMobility service providers on the end-consumer side, providing charging cards and charging apps, and so-called CPOs, charge point operators, on the infrastructure side. And finally making sure that all the data that is needed to open the
charging station and authorize the consumer, the EV driver, and then exchanging this transaction information with all parties - that was and still is the core job of a roaming platform and Hubject. Of course, meanwhile you can dig deeper, talking about financial services, clearing, billing, settlement, reconciliation, debt collection - all of this. So I think it was a very cool and wise step of Hubject to create an entity with a BaFin license, now called
Hubject Financial Services. I think that was always a plan, and I think the timing was also not perfect to dig a little deeper into the financial transaction world. But to go back to the telco comparison: clearing houses in telco mainly only take care of the financial transaction, whereas Hubject only took care of the connectivity service, and now they're extending their footprint to financial services. But we learned a lot from the telcos, and also it
was quite fun at the beginning if you talked to Vodafone or Telekom, which were also players back then, because in the early days a lot of telco providers tried their luck as eMobility service providers. And they were like, well, please do a better job than we did at the beginning, because the idea of the clearing house also making it happen as a connectivity layer didn't work out for the telcos, as far as I
understand, which led to a lot of chaos of bilateral connections and different service qualities, and, you know, the
The telco industry? Yeah, there are a few - as far as I learned, there are a few clearing houses in the telco industry. With one we also work together. It's a company from Israel. Unfortunately I forgot the name, I have to admit. But there are only two similar to EV Romi; there are only a few players that are doing the job, so handling multi-millions of transactions and clearing
clearing these transactions, but only mainly as a financial layer. Yeah, I guess also the financial industry, and there might be analogies in different industries. But without getting too much into detail there - and then, yeah, this is maybe a very industry-specific question, but still it's relevant in this context: there's this new startup called IAI that I think is trying to revolutionize the way this communication layer, connectivity layer works. What's your view on, especially how it compares to
object and the relevance of such a new startup? Sure, yeah, yeah, I think it'd be super interesting and I think every new player who brings a breeze of fresh air into the roaming world is good for the EV charging ecosystem, and I would say exactly that also for IAI. I think they also did a great job in fundraising to start with. I mean, we've seen quite a lot of players in EV
charging struggling, and so raising, I think, about 10 million is quite an achievement. So congrats on that. What's interesting about this company is that it basically plays a little bit, I guess, with the market narrative that the established and leading roaming players - and there are only three of them: Hubject, as mentioned; Gireve, which is the French version if you want; and eCleaning.net from Benelux. In Germany, right? Gireve would be mainly France and Western Europe,
yeah, but mainly France. So the common narrative - and to a certain extent I think it's also correct - about the leading roaming platforms is that they are quite expensive and they wanted to create a certain tech lock-in. That's basically coming from charging a flat fee per vehicle per year independent from the amount of transactions. And IAI positions exactly at that point by saying we want to democratize connectivity and we want to basically grow a network by providing this for free
and then later charge clients voluntarily on the - if you want - cooler stuff like the financial clearing, smart charging, and all the cool services you can put on top. I think it's a great idea, and I think also, like, if you look at how a lot of networks - I mean, I guess we all know about the Facebook example - grew, it was that the service was free for years and at some point they figured out how to make money with it, and
I think this is more or less the same strategy. So I think it's exciting, I think it's cool, and I think it will also help the main roaming platforms to move a little faster - they are also now big companies, right? - to sharpen their focus and be a little bit more agile. At the same time, of course, I think in three to four years we will know a little bit more on how this will work
out, also with EApi and a few other players that position quite the same. Because I guess at the point where you then flip the switch on really commercializing it, you also become a middleware, right? So this is the roaming fight - the roaming argument has always been between centralized roaming hubs, a centralized approach - you know, a winner-takes-all model with centralized hubs that aggregate, and the more they aggregate and the better the quality of the aggregation,
the more negotiation power they gain, right? Now, we have seen OCPI - a lot of abbreviations, I'm sorry for that, but this is EV charging, so we'll provide a glossary for the podcast. But with the rise of OCPI - for the listeners, this is a protocol that enables roaming on a peer-to-peer level that basically cuts out the middleman; the middleman is Hubject in this case - with the rise of OCPI, it has always
been the question: do you still need the roaming platform? Do you need the middleman, or do you want to do this bilaterally, cutting out the middleman? I'm a little bit biased, having worked for Hubject for quite a while, but I think there's a lot of beauty in having a middleman that in particular takes care of quality assurance and provides a consistent set of services. But we can dig
deeper on that one - it's quite technical. But of course there is a right to play for peer-to-peer players as well. So this has always been the big question: are you on the peer-to-peer side or are you on the hub side? I think for me it's not an either-or. I think both ways have some benefits, but I do think that in particular for smaller players like Stadtwerke or German utilities
or in France, the smaller utility players - you need an aggregator for them. It doesn't make sense to connect on a bilateral level. But my point is that as soon as you want to flip the switch to basically make money as a centralized hub - be it on financial transactions, be it on smart charging - you become the middleware that, once you become the middleware, maybe doesn't have the positive connotation anymore, and you also
control and you also create some kind of lock-in naturally, right? And I think this will be the interesting point also for players like IApi. First of all, to aggregate enough critical mass, but I think from what I've seen they've done a great job, and also quite smart founders, intelligent people. They have done a good job on it, but critical mass is important, and then of course also executing on the roaming services and then making sure that
the fate of the current dominating roaming hubs is not their fate - being the middleware that everyone wants to cut out. Anyway, thanks for that. So switching gears to Cosmicat: you said that you did that a few years ago, and I understand you have been running quite a few types of services and projects. Maybe you can just share a bit of the essence behind Cosmicat - the why, what you want to achieve
with it, what you have achieved with it, and share a few stories or projects that you are particularly proud of or that you think are worth highlighting. Yeah, of course. Cosmicat is basically a small group of friends that met mainly at Hubject or around Hubject, and still friends and still working together - this is now 12 years ago. The idea behind Cosmicat was to create a strategy boutique for new mobility and new energy services. That means, with Hubject
connecting hundreds of players to the hub and connecting thousands of charging stations to the hub, we have seen quite a lot in the realm of electricity generation, utilities, car manufacturers, software players, CPOs, EMSPs, and so on. And of course the network that we managed to create - because sales cycles were quite grueling at Hubject, in particular at the beginning - was quite tempting to basically expand our footprint a little bit and not only talk about
charging but create a strategy house for what you would call the future of mobility and energy. The idea was to do more than only EV charging and more than only electrification, also focusing on digitization of fleets, on the vehicle as a mobile computer and all the cool stuff you can do with it, considering mobility rather as a service than just a hardware-sales-driven business - and this is still our playground. So the core bread-and-
butter business of Cosmicat Group is providing strategic support, in particular for organizations that want to start something new, something from scratch, in the intersection of mobility and energy. And this has led to quite an interesting group of clients and partners - of course starting with the most obvious ones, the car manufacturers, which is where we were coming from. But also energy players. I guess the main target group nowadays is actually scale-ups of either family-owned
businesses or founder-led organizations that are about to expand their footprints - expand geographically or expand their service portfolio. So this is what we do on a daily basis as a bread-and-butter business. I myself have also been digging deeper into where the money comes from. I mentioned it: with Hubject we had 6 founding shareholders, all strategic shareholders, all huge companies. Then number 7 was Volkswagen in 2016, number
8 was Enel in 2018/2019. So I wanted to learn, with Cosmicat - my idea was also to learn a little bit more about venture capital and private equity. And this has become a kind of second pillar to what we're doing right now: all about M&A, fundraising, due diligence - both for investors, meaning venture capital firms and private equity firms, but also supporting founders to find the right fit, to find the right investors. But only
focusing again on what we're good at - on mobility and energy. We do think that this is the future of both advisory and M&A business. I don't believe in the generic service providers, in particular when we talk about early-stage companies. So this is what we're doing. Cool, very clear. Maybe to make it even more tangible, can you give - for each of the two pillars - one story or one
specific problem? Maybe even if you can name the companies, even better. Yeah, of course, there are a lot of examples.
So maybe what's interesting for the listeners right now is that we have been working with players in logistics to electrify their fleets. And maybe to the surprise of some listeners, the electrification of trucks or long-haul vehicles has been quite interesting and is picking up. So what we are doing for these players is a different thing. It starts with the question of how to charge an electric truck. If you drive an electric truck
and want to use it - drive it - most of the time, you can get up to 500 MWh of electricity consumption a year. That's around 125 households. What's also different to passenger cars is that all these business cases are quite plannable: you know where these trucks go, you can calculate the routes. But if you want to calculate the routes, you need some parameters - like how heavy is the truck, you know
What are the KPIs of the powertrain of the truck, weather conditions, and of course you want to make sure that you can charge the truck at the depot of your destination or somewhere around. And so this has been quite an interesting field for us, coming from passenger cars, in particular private passenger cars, where all of these use cases are quite diverse and hard to plan to a certain extent. Because if you talk to your friends about electric cars, it has been all about
like, "I'm not sure if I should buy it, because once a year I want to drive to Italy, 800 kilometers." But mostly you use it to commute and drive usually up to 40 kilometers a day, right? So this is different with trucks. Everything is calculable - every kilowatt hour is calculable, every route is calculable - and so business cases are quite transparent. So what we are doing right now is helping these companies
to be more precise on overall TCO for the vehicles over the whole life cycle, but in particular also helping them to support ramping up charging infrastructure. And usually, different to the classic passenger car endeavors, you already have quite complex electricity systems up and running. That means if you talk to big logistics companies at their depots, most of them have huge facilities - they have solar power on top of these fabrics, these
depots. Some of them have even wind power parks. A lot of them have local battery storage, because these are already quite energy-heavy businesses - a lot of cooling systems, for instance, in place. And we come in to support them, thinking about what is the right size, looking at charging parks, where do you put these chargers, what kind of service providers do you need. We help them in particular to vet service providers, which is pretty tough for
companies that have never done so, because from the outside, in particular software companies, they all look the same nowadays, right? They haven't done a great job on differentiation over the last years. And so we support them to find the right players, the right strategic partners, starting with planning and installation - digging a hole, connecting wiring - the charging hardware for HPC but also AC charging. Software is still, I guess, the most critical part of it all, and also
energy management, smart charging, and hopefully soon vehicle-to-grid services. Very interesting. So, to understand you correctly, you really have a broad scope - from the strategic decision-making of big corporates, that would be one scope if I understand correctly, and then very much more operationally, how to better plan a depot, what other factors to consider, and the service providers to vet, etc. Exactly. I mean, if you have the luxury to really start strategic - but a lot
of players in the logistics field, and I really love that, are quite hands-on. So for them the word strategy is quite close to execution, which is cool. But if you want to talk strategy, you would usually ask: what's the role of electrification for your fleet? What's the percentage of your fleet driving electric, let's say in 2030, and how do you want to get there? And we help you to get there, calculating what kind of impact
this has for your business - and not only looking at the vehicle. As you know, a long-haul truck is 3 to 4 times the price of an ICE truck. But in particular also looking at electricity and charging infrastructure. And of course, what's cool about it is that a few years ago the common narrative in the market was that electrification is cool for last-mile delivery, for light electric vehicles, for electric vans - but long haul will be far out in the future, and
everyone's talking about hydrogen for long haul. And now this is completely changing. I can tell you, if you manage to control the electricity price, you can create a positive TCO already on pretty short notice. That means we have clients that are aiming at electrifying their truck fleet as soon as possible
and are super progressive about it. And this is something I hadn't seen coming like 3 to 5 years ago, I have to be honest.
Well, of course subsidies still play a role - carbon credits - and of course now with hopefully the foundation of the new government, that's hopefully sooner rather than later. People and industries are hoping for new subsidies, but in the long term the main trigger will be to really control the price of electricity. Some say, if you believe in studies, the critical landmark is about being below 35 cents per kilowatt hour, and
some will be TCO positive maybe in 2 to 3 years already, others in 5 to 10 years - it really depends on how good you are at getting it right with charging infrastructure and electricity trading. But to do so, you have to increase your knowledge in charging, you have to increase your knowledge in the whole value chain of charging and electricity, and I think this is where everyone is
Now stepping up their game in the logistics sector. Yeah, well, especially if we're talking about logistics, one thing that I find interesting is that the value chain is not straightforward - it's hard to understand who is responsible for what. I'll also be curious to hear your view on this. Especially the single-truck owners, companies that own very few trucks - these people might have more difficulties to really make the switch, or get the time to plan the switch to electric mobility. I'm assuming you're talking more with SMEs that are a bit larger, or even the very big
companies like DHL that are able to cope and plan for the transition, right? Yeah, so usually when we talk about charging, truck charging, and where the electricity comes from, when we come in as strategy advisors it's more or less always the same story. Logistics players - and I'm not judging on that - they
go for the quick wins by partnering with end-to-end players for EV charging. That means players that control everything from planning and installation to hardware, software, services, transactions, charging cards - everything. Of course the beauty of it is that if they do a good job, it's easy for you as a client because you get everything from one player, one stop shop, everything out of the box. But at the same time, it's a black box for you. So the learning
curve is quite questionable if you do so. You lose a lot of control over what you're doing, in particular if you're a bigger logistics company where this will become a critical factor. Therefore, usually what we do is at the very beginning focus on knowledge transfer: what are the different roles in the value chain, what do they add to the value creation - talking about software back-ends, for instance, comparing hardware solutions, what's the difference between an
Alpitronic and a Kempower or Energetica charger, for instance. And making sure that we will find an organisation in a few months that really can do a deep dive on technology, on cost drivers, on revenue drivers, and then take it from there to really vet the right service providers for every particular client and make sure there is the right fit for their respective size. Of course, if you are a logistics company with two trucks, it wouldn't make sense to
separate everything and then do a separate contract with a back-end and a hardware manufacturer and so on. There is of course a beauty in an end-to-end offer. But for the big players, our strategy is mostly to separate those parts of the value chain and then, together with the client, make a decision on what's the right strategy to achieve our goals and who are the right partners to do so. And in most cases
there are a lot of stranded assets, to be fair with you. There are a lot of stranded assets because wrong decisions have been made, there's a lack of control both on the technological side and contractually - and this is something we want to change with our clients. In the best case, not only seeing charging infrastructure as something they have to do, but something they want to do, and turning a cost centre into a profit centre. So this is the
idea. Considering we've talked a bit about the roles and how you try to provide this granularity compared to the black-box approach - given your history in the industry, is there any trend you see for the upcoming years in how the different market players and solution providers relevant for fleets are going to develop? Yeah, totally - great question. Here's the bad news: it will become even more complex than it
is already. Why is that? If you talk to venture capital companies or investors and introduce them to the wonders of EV charging and all the roles we've just started to discuss - the CPO, the back-end, the roaming hub, the EMSP, all these abbreviations - I think the setup as we see it nowadays, in particular for logistics use cases, is not sufficient yet. That means if you talk to classic software
providers coming from charging about logistics use cases and fleet use cases, you will not get sufficient answers for a lot of the needs that logistics players already have. I'll give you one very easy example: booking and reservation. Talk to big EMSPs in Europe and they will tell you reservation is not really helpful, because they all come from passenger cars. They all think about ICE cars blocking the station, and then you provide a bad
customer experience because the EV driver is confronted with an ICE car blocking the charging station. Of course, for privately owned depots that are secured 24/7, there are no blocking ICE cars at truck charging stations on privately owned grounds, right? So it is urgently needed to have a booking solution to make sure that
a driver with their e-truck - where every second counts and every kWh counts - can be 100% sure that the charging session will take place at a particular time. This is a critical feature, but it's just one out of many. We are currently also talking about the overall efficiency and readiness of the value chain. We are currently at about 85% success rate on average if you look at charging sessions - that means, on average, 15% of charging sessions fail.
or have an issue. 15, which is a crazy number, right? And this has even been worse a few years ago, quite a few popular examples, and it's been even worse in the US compared to Europe actually. But this is of course the job of the whole industry, starting from hardware manufacturers but also all the other layers, to make this more reliable, and in particular talking about commercial use cases like logistics use cases.
This is mission critical. I mean, we can't deal with that situation any longer. And yeah, this is the job of everyone in the market, but in particular the hardware and software players. If you want to look at a more macro perspective on what will happen, my personal take on it is that we will see two worlds merge that are currently completely disconnected from each other. This is the world of charging infrastructure, meaning charging
data, OCPP, OCPI, and so on, and the world of vehicle data and dispatching logistics data flows, so routing systems, TMS and so on. Currently they're disconnected, so for asset management of vehicles you might use a company like Webfleet, or you know, telematics solutions like Geotab. This is one side of the equation; for charging infrastructure you might use a backend like Monta or Virta or Driivz, and I think those two worlds will meet and to a certain extent
also compete. And then we'll see new services that are critical in particular for the logistics sector, but this will also help private users. If you have the vehicle data like SoC, the kilometres that you've already driven in your car, battery health, you name it - so many cool things you can basically do with this data, and at the end of the day it
will be 1 + 1 equals 3, right? And this is, I guess, the next level for software players that will take care of this. Yeah, interesting. And there's also a debate in the industry right now on whether eMobility service providers as a role might disappear and more direct payments taking over. Do you have an opinion on that one? Yes, I do. Same here. You know, we have seen quite a lot of religious discussions in EV charging -
one I mentioned, the one about peer-to-peer versus roaming hubs. I think both are wrong, so we will have peer-to-peer solutions and roaming hubs - it's not either/or. And I think it's the same for smart energy and smart charging solutions, but also for payment and access. A lot of people bet on ad hoc charging as a substitute for EMSP players, for charging card providers. For the listeners, I think it's helpful to know that the
European Union has come up with a directive called the AFIR Directive that basically mandates, in particular, DC charge point infrastructure players to provide direct access without any kind of virtual provider or charging card provider being required to access and charge a charging station. And so this has led to the hypothesis that EMSPs are not needed anymore. If you look at the statistics, it's quite the opposite. So for Europe, where we have a functioning ecosystem of EMSPs and CPOs, the majority of users are still using EMSP
solutions, but of course there will be a coexistence with ad hoc direct payment solutions, because not everyone necessarily needs a registration with an EMSP if you only use it once or twice a year, and the rest of the time you charge your car at home or at your employer - you don't need to rely on an EMSP. What a lot of people get wrong in the industry though is that the user journey doesn't start with access and
payment. Access and payment is the tiniest part of the user experience. Also technically, this is not so complicated. We are currently struggling with other things. We're struggling with correct point-of-interest data - the correct data on where can I find the charger. This sounds very simple, but sometimes if you drive an electric car it can be quite messy, quite challenging. And even more so, of course, talking about commercial vehicles - you want to make sure that you find the
charging station and you get routed to the charging station precisely. And then we talk about access, authorisation, authentication, payment. And I think this is where eMobility service providers really help, because this is part of what they provide to the end consumer. But also later on, if you want to talk about aggregation of vehicles to create something like a virtual power plant or to work with flexibility services, this is your ball game.
Yeah, it's the same thing here. You can tackle it from the infrastructure side, being a CPO or owning the meter, or you can tackle it from the vehicle side and consumer side, aggregating EV drivers as an EMSP. Same here - my take on it is that we will see both and they will coexist, and it will not be a winner-takes-all thing for the next 10 years.
Yeah, the opportunities with smart charging or bidirectional charging or virtual power plants, aggregators - different ways of talking about how to make sure that we can leverage the potential inside these vehicles of deferring the charging process or changing the charging process in a way that is not charging as fast as possible from the moment you plug in, so influencing it in a certain way. What is in your view the biggest potential? Is it in - but we
You can take it from different angles, be it from the energy market or energy use case, or more from a fleet or charging use case. I think, to maybe consciously oversimplify - also for the listeners, at least for the start - I always separate everything you can do to locally optimize a charging curve from all the grid services, DSO services, TSO services. Because optimizing a charging curve by peak cutting, or just doing something with
the load curve - for instance, to pay less for your peaks, or to make sure that all your electric vehicles at one location are charged at the right time, that everyone gets the right amount of energy at the right time - this is the number one priority. And already with so-called unidirectional charging, that means we only charge the electric vehicle but we don't feed anything back to either the grid, a local battery, or a local facility, you can
do great things. Unfortunately, what we see in the market is that all those services - and you know this better than I do - all those services for local optimization, for local smart charging, have already been mixed up. For the consumer it's quite hard to differentiate, and in particular on a B2B level: what do I really get when I book a smart charging service from a CPMS -
a charge point management system, a backend system, or an end-to-end service provider for charging? What's inside the box? This is quite hard to differentiate, and it gets even messier when talking about the end game - talking about playing around with grid services, TSO and DSO services, and at some point, of course, making vehicle-to-grid bidirectional charging a thing. So for me, the magic - and it sounds quite trivial - lies in the productization of these services, and this is
where the industry is currently lacking. What do I get as a logistics player - talking about logistics again? What do I get as a private household, as the owner of a house, as the owner of a flat? What do I get if I live in a multi-dwelling house and I'm just a tenant? When we talk about local optimization and smart charging, what's the gain? Does it do any good to
my electricity bill, or what do I get and what do I pay for it? I think, starting with local optimization and smart charging, I want to see a concrete value proposition from service providers - functionally and commercially - and the same then for the more complex use cases around bidirectional charging. Yeah, this brings me to a thought that has been on my mind as well lately,
which is that it's definitely very difficult - as we are unpacking this complexity - to have someone who is not in the day-to-day of handling this complexity necessarily understand it. There are services like, maybe you've heard of Octopus Energy, they have basically a smart charging tariff where you have a flat fee per kilowatt hour and it's a black box of what's happening within that smart charging service. And if you want
to boost charge, then you have a much higher kilowatt-hour price. Then the question is: does Octopus do a better job than a third party? Will there eventually be a benchmark - like the AI benchmarks you see all around now, where DeepSeek is better than OpenAI's latest model? I was thinking maybe something like that will come up eventually, where if people claim they have the best energy management or smart charging service,
you'd have to prove it in a benchmark. Or there needs to be some kind of certification of the service, because it's easy to claim - and then you may have a very narrow product compared to the variety of features inside other products, all the features required to perform well. Yeah, totally. The way I tackle it - my favorite example always comes from supporting venture
capital firms looking into startups that are active in smart charging - is when I talk to founders, my question is quite simple: what are the unit economics for your product? I want to see those unit economics per service, per country. Which service do you provide in which country, how much money do you make, or how much potential to save money do you guarantee your client, and how do you productize it? Unfortunately, I would say 95% of the startups
have a quite vague answer, and the reason for that is quite obvious: energy markets are complex. The way to do it in the Nordics, where almost 100% of households are equipped with smart meters, is just different to how you would do it in Germany, and the marketplaces are quite complex and different. No pun intended, but this needs to be answered. If you really want to productize it to an
extent that you want to sell this to a client and have traction, you need to productize it, make it digestible, and make it understandable what the concrete gain is for the client. To be concrete - if you believe studies, and fortunately, as you mentioned, there are players out there who already have success stories around smart charging - for the listeners, most experts talk about 1,000 to
€3,000 per vehicle per year as a potential revenue stream. When we talk about smart charging and vehicle-to-grid, this might lead to the fact that in 10 years you can make more money with your car than the cost of the car itself, which is pretty cool actually. I guess we are currently more on the €1,000 side of things with what we see nowadays, but talking about verticalization, I think it will be super interesting to see who
will be the winners of this game. You mentioned Octopus. We see quite a few players that bundle the intelligence for smart charging, which is mainly a software and trading game, with providing the electricity tariff. This is a way of verticalization. It seems to prove successful if you look at a few players, but there are also players that only do this as a pure software SaaS approach, to not interfere with the interests of their own clients, which
might be utilities, which might be energy companies, right? I think also, like with EV charging over the last 10 years, we have seen that fight in EV charging of verticalization versus horizontalization. I think we will see exactly the same now in smart charging, which will be super interesting. And I think there will be winners on, again unfortunately not the easy answer, but you will see winners on both ends. So maybe it's linked to what we just discussed. You mentioned
that you're also a startup advisor, and not only for startups but also scale-ups and bigger corporates. Maybe, yeah, for that topic but also broader, from a strategy or mindset perspective, what would you say it takes - what you've seen successful companies or founders do compared to others, what you would recommend to do? Well, I guess, taking the venture
capital perspective here, it all starts with the quality of the team, with the people. And from my experience, if you have skin in the game - if you are a founder yourself, or, as I mentioned, we currently also work with quite a lot of family-owned businesses - my experience is that the skin in the game really helps to drive things, and this is a competitive advantage compared to big corporations where obviously it's more about politics.
Agility is harder the bigger the organization and the less skin you have in the game - it gets really hard to drive something, be fast, and really focus on what you want to achieve. But I think that's common sense, right? If we look into EV charging and smart energy, I think it's again really important to understand where you want to be really good at and which battles you want to fight
and which battles you want to leave out - choosing the right niche, choosing where you want to focus, hyper-focusing on these things, because talking about the marriage of the EV charging ecosystem and the fleet SaaS asset management ecosystem, you can get lost so easily by doing everything a little bit. So, nothing new here: being really sharp on your value proposition and then execution, I think, is key. There are so many cool ideas out
there, both in the corporate world but also looking at the startup ecosystem here in Europe or in the US and China. But successful founders are great at building teams that can execute really fast, and that obviously are also happy to fail fast, learn, stand up, and do it again and again. Yeah, one thing that caught my attention that I wanted to ask you, which is related - we had Mike Johans as
a guest previously, with Deaf Power, and he had been working at corporates with Allianz, etc. He's from Belgium originally but worked a lot in Germany, and the bottom line was, yes, indeed startups are able to move faster and have the impact, but also Germany as a country - he seemed to be a bit frustrated - saying maybe some other countries are
moving faster, and it might make sense, especially for the smart charging topic, to try it out in other countries. Do you have a similar view, or do you actually think Germany, even though the fundamentals like smart meters are still very much behind compared to other countries, will be front runners in some of these topics? Well, I think the thing is, looking at readiness for all
of these cool services that we just briefly discussed, Germany is definitely lagging behind - it's one of the last places in the European charts. But at the same time it's the biggest economy in Europe, so it will have a role for sure. You can already do a lot of cool things without having smart meters in place, but the smart meter rollout has now been decided on and there's a clear roadmap - you know it better than I do on when we will see a certain coverage of smart meters to do more on this. But I think
there's also no news there. Most of the cool stuff, the cool services, the trailblazers in smart charging and smart energy are rather coming from the Nordics or Benelux - the Netherlands - where the level of regulation is a little bit more liberal, where we see higher-density coverage of smart meters, and a stronger appetite also, I guess, to innovate.
In this context, I think it's unstoppable, right? This will happen all over Europe, and we've seen it also in EV charging. I mean, everyone's talking about Norway when it comes to the saturation of electric cars and sales rates, which are now close to 100%, which is super cool and definitely the number one pilot region in the world. But if you really want to position yourself as the, let's say, ultimate winner for the midterm,
you have to focus on the core economies, and so this is the UK, this is Germany, this is France. If you only are successful in a fraction of smaller countries, like the Nordics, this will not be enough, I guess, right? And in talking about countries, this is one of the last chapters for today - as we record this, it is the so-called Liberation Day, which I find ironic. So,
where President Trump apparently sees Europe as taking advantage of the US, which, yeah, we can see a question mark behind that. He has claimed EVs and renewables are a green scam, and then we see efforts - for example, support to build charging infrastructure or support for buying EVs - now being removed. How is your view on the US market development in the upcoming near-term, midterm
future? Well, I would love to start by talking about the long-term future. I do think the question of where we will move towards in the long term, looking at both the energy and the mobility world, is quite obvious. The good news is that these decisions will be made in the biggest economy of the world, and this is China - looking at where we have both the most vehicles
but also see the biggest growth rates. China has already made that decision, moving into electric cars and also into renewable energy. I think this is different to the US - there is a clear strategy in China, and that's good for the whole market in general. If you look at what drives the market, the easiest answer is also price and convenience. Looking at price in the long term, renewable energy will be cheaper all around the world
compared to fossil fuels - not even talking about the environmental questions, which should be much more considered already nowadays, right? But if you really talk about only the business aspects, the ultimate source of electricity must be renewable just because of price, and this will drive the market. So I hope that this will rather be just a short-term episode in our history - to basically pull back on this in the biggest economy
of the world - and then, you know, making reasonable decisions again. But it's not a trend, and it's not something you can even change with a right-wing populist political strategy. It's something that will be decided regardless. And that's good, on an economical level, looking at what is the price per kilowatt hour for electricity and then of course for the well-to-wheel value chain. Looking at electric cars, we are already
there, right? The tipping point is already there. Electric cars will be cheaper, they will be cleaner, and they will be more fun to drive - or they are more fun to drive. So I think we can hope that this will only be an episode - hopefully a short episode - in the further development of electrification and renewable energies. Alright, yeah, same here. Ethiopia is one very strange animal in the sense that people here, or listeners, might not have
top of mind that it is actually the first country in the world that has banned the sale of internal combustion vehicles. Is there any other example - if you just move away from the typical hot spots being discussed - that you think in the EV industry is being overlooked? Another country in the world that you think is worth highlighting. Hm, good question. I mean, it's probably a common example, but what I think is striking is if you look
at Norway. If the incentives are right - and of course the Norwegian incentives, looking at luxury taxes and so on, the way they did it to promote electric cars, they are different and you cannot copy them one-to-one for other countries - but what was interesting, and is still interesting, is how smooth this transition was for everyone, for all parts of society, to move to electric cars. And I mean, I think
this is a great example for everyone who is still afraid - you know, my mother, my grandmother should be able to drive electric and might have any issues with it. I think getting people in touch with the technology, getting people in touch with and experiencing electric cars - and I mean, we now talk about electric cars, but ultimately we should get rid of cars, right? Ultimately we should come up with a smarter ecosystem for mobility and energy.
But I think if the incentives are right - and this can of course be funding schemes, this can be tax incentives - try to lower the barrier and get people in touch with the technology and the product as soon as possible. And this is not only for people like us who work in the realm of technology, but also everyone in society.
I think this is super critical and we should have much more courage on that one, because for the German economy it's obvious: if we will not be successful making this transition, we'll have a huge issue. And so I'm also really doubting the strategy to pull back on the 2035 banning of ICE cars. I think the German car manufacturers, the
European car manufacturers will on the long term benefit a lot by, to some point, being forced into electrification. And also mentioning they've done a pretty bad job over the last 10 years - it was not a thing where you needed to have a magical view into the crystal ball to know that this is coming. And so I'm really in favor of strong regulation on that one, because otherwise we'll just be eaten up by Chinese car manufacturers in the first place. And
you know, this decision again cannot be made by a separate country. Germany is way too small to only focus, as a car manufacturer or as a service provider, on Germany to be successful. You have to consider the world as a whole, and these decisions will mainly be made in China and maybe second in the US. So, before we end, maybe you want to tell listeners how they can get in touch
with you, or follow you, or something you would like to highlight. Yeah, for sure. It's easy to get in touch with us - probably the easiest way is to search for us on LinkedIn and just write us a message. Yeah, we are interested in everything, in all projects where you want to ramp up something from scratch. This can be a new business unit, this can be a new company, this can be a partnership with
a strategic ally, or a client which you want to enable to do something new. So usually when it's about a blank page where you think about, OK, what could we do next in the realm of mobility and energy - this is where we enjoy talking to stakeholders in the industry. And yeah, the focus is quite broad, I would say. So we have political entities amongst our customers. So we work
also for the German government when it comes to questions regarding charging infrastructure. We've done projects for the Indian Ministry of Economy on roaming, car manufacturers, utilities, but mostly scale-ups in the field of services and software as a service. So yeah, this is what we enjoy, and we're quite approachable. So always feel free to reach out to my team or me. Cool. Thank you, Thomas, and yeah, talk to you soon. Thank you so much, Claudio. It
was great being here and talking to you about mobility and energy. Amazing what Thomas shared with us today. I was particularly impressed by his very early engagement in the EV and energy transition back in the 2000s, and how he is probably very uniquely placed to understand the space in such detail - having worked with a large OEM on the first EVs, then transitioning to the first charger business models and testing with EnBW, one of the largest utilities, and then being the
manager and co-creator basically of one of the largest players interconnecting everyone, and then afterwards focusing on consulting in the space, strategically and operationally. So the scope of what he needs to understand - and you could see it from the jargon he shared with us: CPMS, OCPI, OCPP, roaming, MSP, etc. - and then his view on business models, innovation, startups, investments. Well, I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. And as usual, don't forget to share the word and
like the episode, and ask comments or questions on LinkedIn or wherever. And stay tuned for the next episode.

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