Issam Tidjani, Co‑Founder & CEO of Cariqa

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. Europe's public charging infrastructure is a fragmentation nightmare. Over 3,000 operators, each with their own tariff, and the EV driver pays double at the same fast charger, depending on which charging card or app they use. Issam, co-founder and CEO of Karia, knows both sides.

1:02 He learned how to scale marketplaces at eBay, saw at Here Technologies how automakers were desperately searching for charging solutions, and then experienced firsthand how frustrating charging outside the Tesla network is. In 2021, he took the plunge with two former colleagues. Today, Karia is a 14-person team breaking the reseller chain. CPOs stay the merchant of record, set their own prices directly, and the platform charges no onboarding fee, no monthly subscription, just revenue share with those who bring demand. One number stands out.

1:40 The average CPO utilizes their chargers at only 8 to 10%, but break-even sits above 20%. And over 50% of CPO costs have nothing to do with the electricity price. Issam explains why dynamic per-charging, per-hour pricing is the lever, why the mass market only flips at a 10 to 20% TCO advantage, and why he sees public charging hitting 50% of all charged energy by 2035. Let's get charging. Hello Issam, nice that you're here today. How are you? Hi, thanks for having me. I'm very good, just came back from a kind of summer break, so it was nice to be by the beach for a few days.

2:29 Yes, we also need to relax a bit as entrepreneurs. The day-to-day is quite unnerving, or at least we try to, but one does the best that one can. Very good. Yeah, I heard before you need to also check in every day at least, to make sure that things are going well. I can confirm for us it's the same. I have difficulties to completely let go. So before we jump into Karia and the topics around e-mobility, to get an understanding of who we're talking to, I like to always know the background of the guest.

3:04 So maybe you can tell us a bit where you're from and what you did before Karia. Absolutely. At Karia I'm the co-founder and CEO, but my background has been working for large tech organizations for the majority of my career. I started my career back in 2006 at eBay, in consumer marketplaces during their hypergrowth phase. Then I started moving, still in B2C but more on consumer electronics, with Nokia and Microsoft, and then started slowly moving to the B2B world.

3:40 First we did that at Packet Enterprise, getting a good understanding of IoT, edge computing, cloud, which is kind of interesting because it gives you a good perspective on what the.

3:54 Public charging infrastructure is in the end. The last port of call before starting Karia, which is also where I happened to meet my two co-founders Stefan and Tamara, was Here Technologies, which is a company owned by the large German car manufacturers and other large corporations. It's a mapping and location company, and that's where we started seeing the e-mobility transition happening.

4:22 How this was a challenge for car manufacturers that needed to offer charging services to their customers, allowing their customers to complete successful long-distance trips without too much stress, and how to find charging stations. It was also the time when we started driving electric cars ourselves, so we saw the gap and decided to do something about it. That was back in which year? We are talking about 2021, 2022. OK. And what was your interest in technology, or how did you end up on this journey? Were you like an early geek child, or what was the impetus, so to say?

5:05 Yeah, I've always been interested in tech. I guess a lot has to do with my father. My father used to work for Olivetti, which was the Italian Apple of the eighties. So we had personal computers at home for as long as I can remember. I think when I was around 4, we already had a personal computer at home, and it didn't take long for me to understand how to take them apart and put them back together. I was one of the early users of the Internet. I think the first time I got to see the Internet, there were less than.

5:47 A million users worldwide, and I got really fascinated by it in 1994. It was really fascinating for me that you could access information beyond what was on your local hard drive, and that sparked that interest and enthusiasm that convinced me to pursue a career in tech from the early days. Then at some point there was a question: do I want to get a degree in computer science or economics?

6:21 I opted for economics in the end because I figured I could keep the more techie part as a hobby, between brackets, but it was interesting for me to also get a good understanding of how things work from the money side, if you want. Makes sense. And the different roles you had within these large, especially American, companies - what type of projects or responsibilities did you have? I've always been sitting in between marketing and product in a way, because for example at eBay we were the biggest customer of Google by far.

7:00 We were investing hundreds of millions of dollars every year in Google Ads. But back then there was no Martech, no nothing. Everything was manual, and Google had an API, so ultimately the company decided to put up a big project that would allow us to connect the advertising stack to the internal analytics and start really doing some sophisticated bidding, actually using data to optimize the advertising spend in real time to maximize ROI in the end. It was a very complex endeavor because there was a lot of money involved.

7:39 We were operating across a multitude of countries across basically every single category that you could think of, and therefore that resulted in us having to manage portfolios of millions of keywords and allocating budget accordingly. There is no chance that you can do it manually, so.

7:59 And then it progressed because when it came to Nokia and Microsoft, we were at the transition era where digital was becoming more and more important in the consumer journey, but still people would buy the phone or the hardware offline because they wanted to see it, they wanted to ask the sales staff. So for us the challenge there was: how do we match digital signals to retail in-store performance, and build not only models that would rely on correlation but also try to find the causation of events.

8:35 And my career continued like that, with me being a little bit the bridge between what is marketing and how you drive demand, but also on the other side, what the product needs to do to match these needs. That's a good foundation for the founder journey then. Yeah, I would say so. And within that, were there particular projects around mobility that you found quite interesting, maybe worth highlighting?

9:06 Well, when I was there we were starting to get the first data from EV charging points - they took POIs for stations so that we could place them on a map and tell people where they can charge. But it was really the beginning, and there were a lot of conversations around EV routing, which is not exactly the most trivial thing to do because...

9:34 It's not like general petrol car routing, where you don't really worry about consumption. You need to know: this is the fastest route to go there, you will arrive at around this time - and that's kind of good, but there is no consumption involved in the calculation of the route. Whereas EV routing is much more complex because temperature has an effect, road inclination has an effect, road roughness has an effect, wind direction has an effect, and the car itself - every car behaves differently. And then every car charges differently.

10:07 Every car has different peak powers, every car has a different charging curve, and you need to take all of these variables - and I'm naming just a few - to then compute a route that will effectively tell the person: you will arrive by this time, and you need to stop here and here for your journey to be efficient. Wow, quite a lot of correlations. And was this also the impetus for Karia, or how did you then end up deciding that Karia was worthwhile pursuing as an idea? I mean, as with everything, it's a mix of things, right?

10:44 As I mentioned before, I started driving an electric car myself and I was not particularly impressed by what I saw. And which car was it, just out of curiosity? I think it was a Tesla Model Y. And if you wanted to go outside of the Tesla network, that was just not doable, or at least it was not as easy as: you get a Tesla, you plug into the Supercharger and you're good to go.

11:24 Which people feel is magical, but the moment you need a different charger, the picture changes quite quickly. So it was a little bit of that, and you could see that the market was, and is, to be honest, still in its infancy. You could see on the business side that car manufacturers in particular had an increasing need because they really needed to put EVs on the road. These were a very, very hot topic back then.

12:02 You could see that the challenge was real, and at some point - I feel that is when you find that thing where you feel the timing is right, the opportunity is huge, and you know a couple of things about it.

12:17 And it's something that gives you purpose, because ultimately I have two small children and I would like them to have the privilege of not walking around on the streets inhaling against their will all the kind of stuff that comes out of exhaust tailpipes. So it was a bit of a combination of everything, and then at some point it takes a little bit of courage to make the jump and leave a cushy corporate job to make the completely rational choice of starting a company. But that's how it went in the end.

12:49 And what was the initial setup? Were you already having co-founders? Was it from the get-go the three of you - I think that's the founding team - and how did the idea change from back then? No, I started solo for a few months just to kind of get everything put together and get some initial shape of the company in place, but then quickly after, Stefano and Tamara joined, and that's how the core founding team got started.

13:26 To be honest, at the beginning the idea was more to fix the user experience part of the whole thing, which also was not particularly great. But as for every startup, the startup that you start with is not the startup that you end up with - it's a journey, and you need to.

13:46 You need to do a bit of experiments, collect a few failures, and get across a few realizations to eventually end up with what really matters. For us, we were acting as a traditional e-mobility provider - we were buying energy from the charge point operators and then reselling it to the EV driver with a particular spin, because we would say:

14:17 Pay us telco-style a certain amount of money every month, you get a certain amount of energy, and then you don't have to worry where you consume this energy. So it was a pure subscription model - we were not the first ones doing that. We had relatively good success with that model, but ultimately what we realized is that there was a deeper problem in the industry, and actually we were contributing to creating the problem. That sounds interesting, and that's where at some point we.

14:48 Decided to have a good look in the mirror and say: are we really going in the right direction, despite maybe the numbers going up? Are we really making something that is meaningful in the long run? And this is where, speaking to customers on both sides of the value chain - so to EV drivers and to charge point operators - we realized that we were solving not exactly the correct problem. And that's where we realized that the market was starting to edge towards a new phase, because until realistically 2024.

15:28 For 2023, let's say, the name of the game for charge point operators was: deploy, deploy, deploy - grab the good location, grab the grid infrastructure. So it was a land grab. And the trajectory of adoption of EVs was probably dragged a little bit by incentives and scarcity driven by COVID.

16:00 And therefore everybody started building towards that curve - which, of course, we all know what happened in 2024 when the federal government decided to shut down the government incentive overnight. We saw what happened, and we also saw what happened when the residual value of EVs completely hit the ground, and therefore the case for EVs kind of toned down a little bit.

16:26 Thankfully it was a temporary slowdown and not a continued one. But this is where charge point operators then all of a sudden realized: OK, we have a lot of capacity on the ground. At some point the infrastructure deployment was growing faster than the adoption of EVs, and therefore you had more chargers for fewer EVs. And that's also where, because of the whole post-COVID inflation spike that we had, plus interest rates going up as an attempt to curb that inflation.

17:06 Cheap capital was no longer available, and all of a sudden you have capital-intensive companies that need hundreds of millions to deploy and operate this infrastructure - companies that at some point had to face the reality that now it's time to get this infrastructure to make money. And this is where you ask yourself the question: OK, what is it that you can do as a charge point operator once you have selected the location? So it's a real estate business - location matters a lot - but it's a one-off.

17:40 You cannot just say: oops, we got it wrong, let's move everything somewhere else. I mean you can, but it's incredibly expensive. And therefore you need to then try to figure out what else you can do. Ultimately, utilization becomes the name of the game. Despite sometimes people not wanting to think that's the case, the majority of research shows that price always shows up in the top two as one of the key deciding factors on whether to go and charge at one location or another.

18:14 And this is where it becomes the crux of the problem, because up to now a lot of operators were operating in a B2B fashion - they were reselling their energy to the e-mobility provider, and then this e-mobility provider would sell it downstream to the EV driver. The problem with this model is that as a CPO you all of a sudden become a passenger. Why a passenger? Because as a reseller, the e-mobility provider has pricing power. They can decide how much margin to add to the wholesale price provided by the CPO, and then sell it downstream.

18:55 The problem is that this market has been proven to be extremely elastic, and therefore even a few cents on top of the kilowatt hour can make a huge difference in terms of utilization. And this is where you start seeing the limit of the model, because if you are not in control of your own commercial strategy.

19:12 At scale - which means beyond what you can do at the station with a payment terminal, or what you can do in your own app, which requires a lot of energy and marketing dollars to get off the ground, and not all CPOs can afford that because they either don't have the capital or they don't have enough installed infrastructure to justify users downloading yet another app - all of a sudden you see where the problem is going. You are a passenger for 80%, 90% of your demand. And it's a double trap, because on one side you get priced higher than.

19:50 And on the other side, at the moment that these mobility providers are representing a large amount of your demand, it's also the risk of margin extraction, because then the mobility provider can come to you and say, well, I mean, now I represent 20% of your traffic, I want a 30% discount - and what choice do you have at that point? Makes sense. So summarizing, or getting to the core of the problem: you think the mobility service providers could be replaced, and the market would be more efficient if the CPOs were to directly be able to set a price to the EV driver, right?

20:33 Well, in a way, it's not the actor itself that maybe needs replacement - it's more the underlying business model, because that's what we are doing differently, right? These mobility providers were born out of the need for convenience, because in Europe you have more than 3,000 charge point operators, and probably more by now, because I've been using that 3,000 figure for a year. I guess by now the number has grown.

21:01 And therefore it's highly impractical for an end customer to not have an aggregation layer that can bring the infrastructure together. Roaming hubs will always be needed - there is no discussion about that. But then the question is: how do you provide this layer of aggregation? Because historically there was an attempt to mimic two things, taking inspiration from two industries. One is fuel cars and the other one is the telco business, and somehow the industry decided to take the bad traits of both. OK, elaborate on that.

21:41 So ultimately you have a lot of intransparency and rigidity that are endemic of the early days of both models, and somehow, as I said, and I repeat, this is an extremely young industry. I think you can look at it even just by the numbers - the total percentage of cars that are electric or plug-in as a share of the total installed base of cars in Europe - and this number is oscillating, depending on the country, between 3 and 5%.

22:21 So you can see how you cannot expect this to be a mature market where 95% of your customers, at best, are not yet in the market. I would say it's normal that the market needed something, and needed something that worked, that was simple - and therefore you look for specific frames of reference and you took them. And then, of course, you haven't gone through those cycles of sometimes regulations, sometimes just the market adjusting itself, and that's why I say there are still a lot of downsides in the current model.

23:00 But that's exactly to the point, right - is the reseller chain the only model that allows this layer of aggregation? And the answer is really no, because you have a lot of other industries where we have the same problem, and it has been solved by a platform model. Which means that you do not take away the role of merchant of record from the infrastructure provider - so the CPO can stay as the seller, can market their infrastructure freely and independently to the end customer without having somebody interfering in the middle. And you can do it without -

23:46 - getting the end customer to lose the convenience of accessing everything in one single place. And that's what we do, that's what we do differently: for the end customer, nothing changes. You go, you find all your stations on a map wherever you are, and you can start charging like a normal charging app - that doesn't change and shouldn't change. But at the same time, the underlying business model and economics are completely different. And what other industries operate similarly, like the carrier model? Maybe you took inspiration from them?

24:21 Well, I'm coming from marketplaces, right? I worked at eBay. eBay works exactly that way. If you look at Amazon, Amazon has a dual role - you can either buy from Amazon, but Amazon also has a marketplace where prices are decided by the sellers. And the same goes for ride-hailing apps, and the same goes for the hotel industry. The hotel industry was born with OTAs - online travel agencies - and you can imagine the Expedias of the world, where they would buy capacity from hotels or from airlines and then sell it downstream at the price that they wanted.

24:58 But you can clearly see that now this model has become obsolete with the rise of, you know, Booking.com - where the hotel pushes the property at the right price, and that's how the industry works. So as I said, we're not reinventing the wheel here. We are taking proven business models that have proven to be better for industries that are incredibly fragmented and making them work for the EV charging industry. Got it. And what was the moment of realization where you recognized the problem with the old business model?

25:36 It's by talking to customers - talking to customers on both sides of the aisle. Because we haven't spoken yet about the EV driver, but this is not exactly easy for the EV drivers themselves. If you think about it, we always like to make the parallel: the public charging industry today, the way that it's priced, would be the equivalent of you entering your local supermarket today and wanting to buy a kilo of oranges.

26:08 There is no price tag on the shelf, and you get your kilo of oranges and you go to pay, and then at the till the cashier will ask you, OK, how would you intend to pay? Depending on your answer, which could be: I have my Mastercard from N26, I have my Visa from Revolut, I have my Mastercard from Deutsche Bank, I want to pay cash - it doesn't matter. And then depending on your answer, the price that you pay could be 1.5, 2 times more. So how would you feel about it? Not great. It creates anxiety, right?

26:46 And yet this is how the public charging market works today. For the same station, at the same location, same service, same everything, you can have 50 different prices depending on who your charging provider is. And this price - if you are not careful, you can easily pay double. So with Carria, the price is upfront; basically the kilo of oranges is one price.

27:18 We have this philosophy that we believe the base price should be the same for everyone and you should not be penalised by the way that you decide to charge, which in a way kind of aligns with what the European regulators have been attempting to do with AFIR, where they are trying to put in place some pretty strict anti-discrimination rules, saying that any price difference must be justified. Has the regulation solved the problem yet? No, not at all. Will it? To be seen. There is a revision of the regulation coming out later this year.

28:01 We will see what the European Commission has decided to do about it, but clearly the problem solves itself the moment that the seller is always the one that operates the infrastructure and not somebody else in the middle. And roaming platforms - you already mentioned them - what is the role of a roaming platform if the platform itself is provided by Carria? Well, we need to make a distinction between connectivity of EV charging protocols and the underlying business model of how the commercial transaction happens, right?

28:38 So it's two separate tracks. Roaming hubs are really good at offering connectivity, and I think that they are there to stay, because sometimes it doesn't make sense to do a one-on-one connection with everyone. I guess it's fair to say that despite EV charging protocols being a standard and operating under a standard, there are a lot of dialects out there, and doing a direct connection with everyone puts a strain on the tech teams of the respective companies.

29:09 While sometimes a roaming hub that abstracts this complexity into one single place makes perfect sense. But when you say connection between parties - if there are only CPOs and EV drivers, you need to have a layer of aggregation. That's why I said that the EMSP role does not disappear. In the schema of the EV charging connectivity protocols, we act as a mobility provider ourselves. That's why I said that we need to make a separation between

29:41 how the connectivity is established and how you can access the charging infrastructure across Europe in a consistent way, and how the money flows underneath and how billing happens underneath - that is a completely separate topic. You need to separate these two layers, both of which are needed for a charging session to happen, to be priced, and to be billed. But the two things are not tied together today; they are parts of two completely separate protocols. On one side you have the closed-loop EV charging protocols like OCPI or OICP.

30:28 And on the other side you have what are open-loop payments, like Mastercard or Visa, and all the billing, invoicing, and accounting streams that go together with them. So that's why to me roaming hubs are there to stay - they are needed, they are useful, I don't think they are going anywhere. So for these two layers we will need roaming hubs and platforms like Carria that also have this EMSP role, and there will probably be more of them than today, but not necessarily the MSP as we know it today.

31:08 My take is that the EMSP as a reseller is, for multiple reasons, not a business model that I believe will last for a long time. Namely because margins are going to become tighter and tighter. There is very little point in having two financial transactions to complete one charging session - one being the invoice from the CPO to the EMSP and then all the invoicing from the EMSP to the end customer. Why not just do it once? It's simpler, it's faster. On the other side, right now the market is still relatively small, so

31:49 the volumes are still manageable from a credit-risk perspective. When these volumes start becoming tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions, on a monthly basis, the fact that you as an EMSP can have potentially tens of millions of invoices from a CPO puts a CPO

32:15 in a really not so good position when it comes to credit risk, because if the EMSP goes bankrupt in that month, the tens of millions worth of energy that you have already delivered - on which you would have to pay your bills to the grid provider, to the electricity provider - there is no guarantee that you will see that money, because you are an unsecured creditor. And I believe that at some point the financial regulator will also start having a closer look at the industry, because right now it is more manageable, but

32:56 I don't think that this is gonna be the case forever. Is there any other role - this is quite a disruptive view, which is also quite cool to have people looking at that industry and rethinking it completely - is there another role like that, a modus operandi that we know in the e-mobility industry so far, that you think could be different in the future? Well, that's a good question. I would need to think about it more closely, but I feel that in general we know that there are a lot of discussions about what's coming next. So, let's assume that.

33:39 If charging protocols work, payment flows work, reliability gets to a point where the error rates stop being around 14% today and get more into the 0.something percent range - we have a situation where now by law ISO 15118, which enables plug-and-charge and V2G, is mandatory for newly installed stations. That of course opens the realm of new possibilities, both on the authentication side - so plug-and-charge becoming a little bit more accessible and widespread, which should make it easier for the end customer - but then there is a whole discussion on how.

34:21 EV charging becomes more of an active participant in the energy market, and how we can help overall grid stability to become better, and how we can avoid having to deploy too many stationary batteries, because we have a lot of kilowatt-hours that are not moving for 80% of the time and how we can get them to contribute to stabilizing the grid, stabilizing the pricing of electricity throughout the day, because interestingly sometimes there is a bit of a.

34:57 Nice matching between when cars are not used and when energy is most requested. So I guess that's gonna be the next big topic - how EV charging will become part of the overall energy ecosystem in a more integrated way. Yeah, we'll come to that, as you know this podcast is called Smart Charge by RiDERgy. So I definitely can't wait to deep dive into that. But before we do that, just to get a full rounded understanding of Karia, what's the size of the company right now? Things that you can share with us?

35:35 We are growing quite nicely. We are a VC-backed startup, so we operate on milestones. To date we have raised around 5 million across our pre-seed and seed financing rounds. We are a small team and we want to stay a small team for as long as we can. Right now we are a team of 14, distributed across Germany, the UK, and Ukraine, so we are quite a diverse bunch of people. The reason why we want to stay small is because it gives you agility.

36:21 Of course it means there is a lot to do and nobody coming to the rescue if something is not done, but at the same time I feel there is a beauty in having a small, scrappy team that can really react quickly to market needs or customer needs and bring them together. We are very picky about how we hire people and we want to make sure that we have a very cohesive team with diverse perspectives and diverse skill sets.

36:55 But in general, we want to stay as small as possible for as long as we can, until our hands are bleeding, in a way. And you're based here in Berlin, right? The headquarters is here in Berlin, and the operations right now - is it only Germany, or do you have other markets that you already operate in or want to operate in? Historically we have been operating in Germany and Austria. These have been our core markets. We recently opened Italy a couple of weeks ago.

37:28 With the team being heavily Italian, I guess it was just a matter of time. It was for us also a good way of testing a different kind of market, which has a different stage of maturity and different market penetration of EVs, to understand if there are any differences we need to be aware of before we start going pan-European. The plan is to go pan-European by the end of the year, and we have some pretty nice announcements in the pipeline between now and then.

38:08 The platform itself is globally scalable - if we wanted to, we could go to the US tomorrow - but it becomes a matter of focus. That's why we were quite diligent in saying we want to start getting the platform up and running in Germany and Austria, learn, and make sure that we have an extremely robust.

38:33 Platform, and then open up to partners beyond these geographies. Are there any geographies that don't make sense for Karia? For example, the number of CPOs or how the market is structured? Of course the platform makes a ton of sense the more fragmented the market is, but that said, even if you have 10 different CPOs it still makes sense, because.

39:03 You would anyway need a layer of aggregation to support companies like automotive OEMs, rental car companies, or ride-hailing companies that need to offer charging to their fleets - they prefer to have it in one single aggregated layer. So ultimately, unless there is only one or two CPOs, it still makes sense. Makes sense. And when you started the company - you said you worked before in corporates a lot - was there a moment of big shock when you became a founder, compared to those previous corporate roles?

39:41 It's different. I mean, I would be lying to say otherwise. At the same time, for everything there is a trade-off, right? So in your corporate job, your salary comes at the end of the month and you know that you have a support structure and you know that there is always the cavalry around the corner. At the same time, I feel that the learning curve that you get when you found a startup is geometrically

40:19 steeper compared to the learning curve that you have in corporate. I always say that founding a startup is a completely irrational thing to do from an economical perspective because the odds are stacked heavily against you. But at the same time I feel that the journey and the learning is something that has no price, irrespective of the outcome.

40:53 I still believe that Carri is going to be extremely successful, and that it has all the hallmarks of being a very successful company. But at the same time I know that the learning itself and the journey, and the fact that you have to look at so many things that typically would not be your own business in a corporate world, that just pays off for everything else. If you had to mention one key learning that you can already say will stay with you thanks to Carri. In a way, it's

41:33 clarity. In a way it's the ability to find clarity relatively quickly and then act upon it. I think that of course you have the typical reasons why a startup dies, which is typically you run out of money or the founders fall out. But to me there is another one that is maybe less known, which is having too many good ideas and trying to chase everything. At some point you are so deep into it that if everything is important, you have a problem.

42:09 And that's where having the ability to take a step back, despite having to swim for your life in the meanwhile, and having a clear understanding of what you need to do to be successful down the line - it's something that the corporate world would really struggle to teach you the same way. Makes sense. And you said there are three founders. How did you choose your two other founders and how do you split responsibilities? We chose each other, in a way. It's not something - it's not me doing the casting like X Factor.

42:49 It's really that you talk to people and then you share the idea, and then ultimately, if you have worked together, you de-risk a lot of the decision-making process because you already know the other person a little bit - the positive side, the negative side, the biases and everything - and you know that you can work with this person in the long run and you have already proved that you can work with this person, right?

43:25 And the way that we divide the tasks is relatively straightforward because we are basically 100% complementary. We have very little overlap between the three of us - or the four of us if you include Mario, who joined us a year later. We all have different backgrounds. Stefano is highly technical, with a computer science background and an academic profile in artificial intelligence. Tamara is an exceptionally skilled salesperson and people person.

44:04 I am more on the product side, the strategy side, and just trying to find creative solutions to problems. And Mario, if you want, is the one with an investment banking background - very rigorous, very organized - who can keep us running like a Swiss clock. So for us it was very natural not to step on each other's toes. Sounds good. And you likened your Connect API to what Stripe does for payments. Is it a fair comparison, or in which way do you think there are also differences?

44:40 In my opinion it is a fair comparison. I'll let you decide about it. But to bring substance to that claim, you need to imagine going back to the early 2000s when, if you wanted to start your e-commerce website, you had to go to your bank and get an acquiring bank account.

45:09 And then you had to negotiate connections with Visa, with Mastercard, with Amex, and then connect to PayPal, because that's the way the market was structured. Stripe was not the first one to create an abstraction layer that would simplify the whole thing, but the earlier solutions were not exactly developer-friendly and were quite clumsy.

45:36 And that's where, all of a sudden, Stripe decided to build something for developers - something that would have taken three months of work before you could now do in an afternoon, because all the complexity you had to deal with was already taken care of by Stripe, and all you needed was an API that you could connect to your checkout system to process payments, right? That's how Stripe became what it is today.

46:09 And if you look at the EV charging world - if today, let's say, I'm a German car manufacturer, but really any OEM, any car manufacturer around the world, or a fleet solution provider or rental car company, you name it - and I need to offer charging to my customers. Today I have different choices, right? I become an e-mobility provider myself, meaning I need to build all the connectivity with roaming hubs and charge point operators directly where it makes sense. So I need to stand up a team for that.

46:46 You need to stand up a commercial team that negotiates deals with the different charge point operators and with the roaming hubs and so on and so forth. You would need the operations to deal with all the influx of invoices, checking the invoices, checking that they match the charging transactions, and so on and so forth. And all of this, to make it work properly, would take you 9 to 12 months, right? The other option that you have realistically is to buy an API service from one of the established e-mobility providers. But at that point, you pay a SaaS fee.

47:24 To offer charging to your customers, you're not making any money. You probably are going to offer to your customers inflated prices, because these are the prices that the eMSPs need to make a living. It can be any combination, but ultimately what you realize is charging will never be a profit center for you. It's going to be a cost center. So each charging session that happens via these APIs, each user that is using this API is going to be a cost for you. And this is where we come in, right, because I guess you can start seeing the parallel.

48:08 This is where our API is free to use. Or to connect, because it can also be easier than a full-fledged API integration, which is an easy on-ramp solution that is maybe more targeted to mapping providers. But in both cases, there is no cost to use the service. There is no onboarding fee, no monthly fee whatsoever. And actually, we help you monetize your user base when it comes to charging, because one of the beauties of the platform model is that it allows you to make those that have these large fleets that need charging

48:53 become affiliates to the CPO and to us, meaning that we recognize part of our revenue to them in exchange for them bringing the customers to the CPO. And all of a sudden you can see how, making a step back from the Stripe analogy, all of a sudden you have the three key players in the value chain that all of a sudden have aligned incentives, because the CPO can actually and actively promote their own infrastructure on their own terms.

49:28 You have those that have access to these pools of demand that can monetize the user without trying to make money out of the customer. And you have the end customer that has a fair and transparent price that is coming directly from the charge point operator. And this is, in our perspective, the only way that this market can flourish and scale. Interesting. And the apps - to take the analogy of Stripe - Stripe is not providing an app, it's just an API that developers need to integrate within their app.

50:01 So you're suggesting that the fleets and the OEMs would have their own app, right? They already do. It's just that it's a white label built by somebody else or an API built by somebody else, where this somebody else is typically the eMSP. Makes sense. So that's, yeah, I think it's a fair comparison. And the payment methods as well are coming through this API, right? Everything is managed similarly to Stripe. There is literally no complexity for you to offer charging services. Maybe a random question that just comes up: why couldn't Stripe enter the industry

50:41 and do the same? Is it a risk you're considering? I mean, it's the typical question that some VCs ask, and I have to say it's a little bit irritating. "What if Google comes in?" And yeah, sure, but the reality is that there is a lot of complexity in the recharging world, and I don't believe that the market is mature enough for a company like Stripe to come in and build it themselves.

51:16 I think that it's going to be a market that is going to be looked at more and more, but typically this is the situation where it's more of a partnership exercise for these companies rather than entering into the arena themselves. That makes sense. And for the integration that these players need to do with you, who is typically the fastest? Is it more the CPOs or more on the other side, the fleets and OEMs? Well, on the supply side, I guess that by now we have a very well established onboarding process and it can go relatively quickly. And of course it depends sometimes.

51:55 You can't ignore the fact that some of the CPOs are part of ginormous companies that have their own internal processes, and we need to respect that and go with their own timelines. But I'd say that from a lift perspective it's actually quite easy to do, and there is no development needed on their side, therefore things go relatively quickly. On the demand side, it depends. I would say that our experience so far is that mapping providers are the quickest - the likes of HERE, the likes of A Better Route Planner, you name it, Google.

52:35 Not yet. And then I think that the others - we are exploring partnerships right now and we are in pretty advanced discussions - but we know that the moment you start touching a utility application or an automotive product, things become a little bit more complicated and the integration cycles can go to timelines of 6 to 9 months. But that's just the reality. And are the small ones even able to do it, or do they maybe lack development resources, or do they need to just buy it from a third party then?

53:17 No, I think that in general we also see young startups that are implementing our API, so it's really, really easy. I mean, if you want to, in one week you are up and running. The day that we launched the API, we demonstrated how - and this was not staged - we showed up at the charging station. I'm not a coder. I mean, I understand code, but I cannot code, right? And

53:46 On purpose we showed up at the station with absolutely nothing, just the keys for the production environment of the API and Lovable, which is this vibe coding app, and in 15 minutes we built a functioning charging app that allowed me to physically charge at a real working station. So documentation is very well done, it's simple to implement, and I would say that everybody can do it. Yeah, especially now in the age of AI. I'm also quite excited these days about the potential of AI. Is it actually something?

54:24 How do you look at AI development and how does it help Carria, or how does it change the offering in the market? Well, for our internal development, that would be a question for Stefano, to be honest, because I'm not completely involved in that. I know that it's being used, but we are not vibe coding the hell out of everything because it's risky, in particular when it's a mission-critical infrastructure, because it needs to work, right?

54:57 You cannot have something that has been vibe coded on which, oops, doesn't work, and then all of a sudden you have somebody stranded with 2% battery at a charger that doesn't work, right? So we just cannot do that. But of course, can we use it responsibly? Absolutely, and that's what we do.

55:16 We are already using AI for different purposes, like our smart pricing, which is the world's first dynamic pricing engine based on AI that looks at multiple variables that can help determine what is the best price for each and every location of the charge point operator. This is done programmatically, so you don't have to go and change prices at every single station - we do it in an automated fashion. I also see some nice progress when it comes to AI customer support, which is pretty nice.

55:54 I have my own ideas about how this could progress, but that remains to be seen. I think you can see companies like Monta, for example, starting to get into self-healing charging infrastructure where errors are surfaced before a user notices, which is also quite nice. So I think AI definitely has a place in the business, and then of course when we move into the grid part and predicting how the grid is going to behave and how to compensate for that.

56:39 Clearly you need a more real-time, agentic way of doing it rather than having the grid operator at the DSO level saying, "Hey, I need more energy" or something like that. So there is definitely a place for it, definitely. Yeah, there's room for improvement. And talking from - we've already talked with a few - but maybe there's anything we missed in terms of product integration or system architecture. So you have definitely a connectivity towards the CPOs, you have a connectivity towards them.

57:10 The fleets or the OEMs that are having the end customer contact - is there any other interconnection that we have missed in your product? No, I don't think that we need to make it look more complicated than it already is. For us it's really about connecting people, in a way - just to name the motto of the company I used to work for. In a way, for us it's just that we want to create a healthier

57:45 value chain that can scale together with the market. And connecting vehicles - that is part of it. We have been playing with vehicle connectivity for a few years now, but for us it's not necessarily the core of our business for the time being. This might change, that's why we continue playing with it, but it's not something that we are actively using beyond giving the convenience to the end customer to see the state of charge on their own on the app.

58:21 We know that the potential is much bigger than that, and that at some point the question is where this data point is going to come from - is it going to come from the API of the automotive OEM, or is it going to come from the ISO 15118 power line communication? That remains to be seen. But yeah, that's definitely something that, in particular when it comes to V2G and smart charging use cases, is going to be crucial. And coming back to price transparency, you had already touched upon a year

59:03 - do you think it will come as a regulatory push, or will the market decide, or will it be a mix of both in your view? My hope is that it's not going to come through regulation, because my belief is that if a market fails to regulate itself and forces the regulator to intervene, typically the outcome is suboptimal. It creates situations that are not necessarily what the market needs and not what companies need to thrive, because typically regulator-mandated policies, in particular when it comes to pricing, tend to be extremely rigid.

59:47 And they tend to favor certain players more than others. So my hope is that the market will adjust itself and learn how to self-regulate rather than getting into a situation where we force the hand of the regulator to intervene more than they already have. And there is lots of criticism from EV drivers - that I myself have also experienced - and I think you're spot on that the market as it is right now is having some issues with price transparency and high prices, in particular at public chargers.

1:00:21 What do you think we could get if Carria was to be successful in terms of not only price transparency but also price reduction at public charge points? Well, price reduction can only come from one single place, or maybe two. One is something that we can certainly contribute to; the other one a little bit less. So the one where we can contribute less is that.

1:00:42 I believe that the way that the grid fees are structured today is not something that is designed for the EV charging world, where you will have the random day where you reach a peak capacity in terms of what you draw from the grid. But if this is a one-off and then you keep on paying an exorbitant amount for the rest of the time where your station is sitting idle, of course CPOs need to pass this cost to the end customer.

1:01:09 So this is something that - I know there are discussions about making grid fees congestion-based and also a little bit more dynamic - which would definitely contribute to lowering the fixed cost of charge point operators. The other one, realistically, is utilization, because the reality is that more than 50% of the cost of a CPO is coming from something other than the cost of electricity.

1:01:39 And in that situation, the more kilowatt hours are delivered by the plug, the more you can spread those fixed costs that are beyond the dynamic cost of energy, and that's where prices can go down. Then how will this happen? Of course we need to have more EVs per charging point. So I think there has to be a bit more thoughtful deployment of the infrastructure, maximizing what we have where we can, and eventually building where we need.

1:02:12 And that would contribute to improving utilization. Of course we also need to avoid getting ourselves into nightmare scenarios where, on peak traffic days, stations are slammed - and that's not a good experience either. I was hearing stories from fellow EV drivers traveling during the summer where you have certain locations that are completely jammed, where borderline you block the traffic because you have people queuing to charge. Where was that, for example? I saw this myself in Italy.

1:02:55 I got an account from another person this morning in France where actually people had to direct the traffic because the queue was becoming so long that it was also jamming the entrance to the service area for people that just wanted to go to the restaurant. So of course these are exceptions, but at the same time - and this is maybe anecdotal - by driving a few thousand kilometers a year, even long distance with an electric car, this is sometimes also driven by the fact that people tend to stop.

1:03:34 All at the same location. And then sometimes you find yourself with one location in a specific area that is completely jammed, and then you drive one kilometer more and it's a completely free station with full power capacity, meaning that you can also drive away quicker. But this is where I feel that using, among other strategies, price as a way to redistribute the capacity across the infrastructure would allow the infrastructure to be truly optimized. Yeah. Just yesterday, actually - I think it doesn't apply only to EV chargers. I was on a train.

1:04:13 I had to get back to Berlin from the outskirts, and I wanted to take a train at 7 p.m. - prime time, Sunday 7 p.m., regional train back to Berlin - so it was packed and I didn't manage to get on, whereas the train one hour later had so much space. So I guess we also cannot design the whole charging infrastructure for that one moment of the year where it's too jammed, but we do need smarter mechanisms. And that's exactly the problem, right? When you hear those claims - we will need 5 million charging points by 2028.

1:04:54 Sure, for what? For those two days a year where the infrastructure is congested in specific places? I think we are smarter than that, and I think there is going to be a combination of dynamic pricing that would discourage peak times - if you want to travel at peak time and you need to, sure, but eventually you would need to pay more. It's going to become about routing engines in cars and in apps becoming smarter and telling you, well, you know what.

1:05:28 Maybe you should travel a little bit earlier or a little bit later, because you're going to be incurring the risk of congestion, which will extend your journey significantly. Because not only do you have to wait to charge - it's a double whammy - you have to wait, but also when the station is jammed it delivers.

1:05:48 Not the power rating that is on the connector specification, because very few operators have grid connections that can support the rated power for each plug, because grid fees are expensive. And all of a sudden you find yourself charging a big 100 kWh battery at 60 kW - then what? You lose an hour. Yeah, very good point. And talking about grid fees and load management and so on - you're seeing dynamic grid fees. I agree that could be a very good way to especially deal with congestion at the grid level and reduce costs.

1:06:30 Is it a topic that you're following a lot? Do you see it coming already? Do you follow some countries where it's done better? Well, I'm not closely following because I need to pick my battles, but we're keeping an eye on it. I know that there are some good intentions in Germany. I know that the Nordics are already looking at something like that. Typically that's how grid maturity tends to travel, north to south. But to me that has to happen. You cannot have the situations that we have today.

1:07:10 Yeah, and in terms of your AI price forecast, you said it takes into account a variety of factors - how do you weigh those factors? Ultimately it must be quite complicated, especially given the example we just talked about. With drivers in the summertime, you need to consider their needs, you need to consider the grid, you need to consider probably local grids, and so on. So right now the model is not grid-aware because we needed to tackle bigger problems first and we need to have a model that works, because you need to start simple, right?

1:07:48 And what we are looking at right now is that if you look at an average charge point operator - by average I mean with an average utilization rate of their own infrastructure of 8 to 10% - what you will notice is that this 8 to 10% is not evenly distributed. You have 10% max of the infrastructure that is really a workhorse, that really works really well, because the location was spot on, because it's in a hotspot of EV adoption, you name it. It can be everything.

1:08:29 And then you have typically 90% - the long tail of charging infrastructure - that is not exactly being used, with situations where sometimes we see utilization rates of like 1%. And keep in mind that the break-even sweet spot is around 20 to 23%. Really? So we are still far away from a charge point

1:08:55 operator business being profitable outright. And that's why sometimes the claim that CPOs are greedy and want to hoard as much money as possible is a little bit unfair. It's easy to use them as scapegoats, but sometimes if you look realistically at the economics of EV charging, it's a bet on the future. It's not something that you are doing today, but nevertheless, cheap capital is over, so therefore you need to do something to stay afloat.

1:09:24 But then, also going back to the topic: you have 10% that works really well, 90% that could do better. But crucially also, the stations that work well do not work well throughout the day. They have their own peak moments, and typically what you see is that you have the charging point - the charging location - that is in a parking lot of a fast food chain, which would work really well at lunchtime, at dinnertime, and on Sunday afternoon. Makes sense.

1:09:58 And then you have the supermarket that would work really well between 5 p.m. and 7, 8 p.m. So it really varies. And that's what we are optimizing for right now. We're looking at multiple variables that go from historical performance, year over year, 30-day average, plus we layer on top social demographics, market penetration - quite a few variables. Stefano has a better picture of everything.

1:10:32 And that allows us to define what is the optimal pricing profile on an hourly basis, on a daily basis, for every single charging station in your network. Which means that as a CPO you can avoid dropping the price on everything in an attempt to increase utilization - because that also means cannibalizing the profitability of the stations that are working well.

1:10:59 While maybe for the others you could have done more using smart pricing. With our AI-based pricing, you can keep the profitability of the over-utilized stations because the model is going to say there's no need to change price there, but maybe for those that might require a little kick to get more drivers there - and why not also incentivize people who are considering buying an electric car? They can say, "I have some good options to charge conveniently at a fair price, even if I cannot have a wall box at home."

1:11:40 So that's what we're looking at. I think the topic of grid capacity and ultimately spot market pricing is something that we are looking at. We did some experiments with Lichtblick that were largely successful, but it is just a matter of deciding what to prioritize. And will it come? Absolutely. When - that also depends on when charge point operators will

1:12:10 adjust their procurement strategy more towards spot market pricing rather than working on fixed procurement to avoid, for example, the winter spikes in pricing. So they prefer predictability rather than dynamic pricing. Got it. And in which way was it successful with Lichtblick, or what was the scope? So with Lichtblick, at some point - you remember that week, that weekend where prices went down to like €-500 at some point - Lichtblick decided they were going to offer charging for free.

1:12:56 And ultimately, because the prices are negative, you can still make money as a CPO despite giving the product away for free to drivers. And drivers reacted really, really well. Very cool. Yeah, and talking about - I think as you said, a lot of EV drivers feel like CPOs are taking advantage. Taking a more optimistic and realistic look, maybe also based on your data: you said 23% is the utilization needed - what price can we achieve?

1:13:29 So if there's an EV driver, or somebody who is skeptical about EV driving because they see these high prices at public charging - what can we achieve eventually, or where will we get once utilization goes up? Prices that are of course not near household prices, but what is achievable? I think it's not necessarily a target price that we should look at, but it's more of a calculation on what is more convenient, or what is more economically effective.

1:14:04 Because there are multiple factors when it comes to adopting a new technology that would make it successful or not. So right now we need to take as a frame of reference what people use today, which is a petrol car or a diesel car. You need to factor in a comparison because, basically, ultimately it's about the total cost of ownership. Is this total cost of ownership greater or lower than owning a petrol car? If it's lower, people will adopt. If it's greater...

1:14:42 In my economic studies, I have hardly seen a case of a technology that is more expensive for doing the same job taking over. So that's why to me it's not about the price per se of the kilowatt hour. Are cars going to become cheaper than petrol cars? So the initial capex that you put down to buy an EV is going to become lower than a petrol car. Yes, great. What about the residual value?

1:15:13 Am I buying something that's then going to be worth nothing in 4 years, or can I sell it in 4 years and still have a decent residual value? And that's important also for fleet cars and leasing companies. And then, is it going to be cheaper to run it? Of course then you have maintenance, where we know that EVs have lower maintenance costs than petrol cars because there are fewer moving parts, and then you have the cost of energy.

1:15:41 Of course, right now, if you're relying exclusively on public charging, depending on where you live - but not necessarily. I guess that you go on par, considering the oil shock that brought prices from €1.60 to €2 per liter in Germany, just to take a reference. At that point I feel that electric cars are getting lower, so we are somehow at parity right now. But the reality is that you need to factor in also the switching costs, and the perceived advantage needs to be at least 10 to 20% cheaper in terms of TCO perspective for somebody to make the jump.

1:16:25 So what we're looking at is: what is the cost per kilowatt hour that would contribute to this perceived saving of 15–20% that would convince people to make the switch? And this number is going to become lower and lower, because the more people adopt, the more EVs are out there. Pardon me - the more they feel that this is normal, that they are not being guinea pigs, they're not taking a risk, because they're seeing everybody doing it. And therefore you can probably get away with, you know, parity or -5%.

1:16:59 But that's the way you need to look at the problem. Ultimately, for the average person - who is not the typical EV early adopter that tends to be a geek working in IT, who buys an EV for the technology and, in a way, for environmental qualifications - when you go to the mass market, it becomes an economics problem, no longer a tech or an environmental concern problem.

1:17:32 That's why I was willing to pinpoint you to a specific kilowatt hour price where I think it would be attractive enough. Because now, if you talk to the common person, exactly as you say, they will raise the objection: no, it's too expensive for me. But once the capex - and we are imminently there - makes EVs actually cheaper, if the operating costs don't follow... I mean, of course the diesel price goes up, but ideally we would also have a cheaper alternative. There are multiple researchers that point to that.

1:18:01 A price that is considered fair and interesting for the average EV driver today is around 39 cents on AC and 49 cents on DC. That's what is considered an OK price, and people can live with that. But then again, you can have this aspirational price, but of course if your economics as a CPO cannot support it, you cannot realistically ask the CPO to just blindly go for it. It has to be better orchestrated in a way, and that's a good segue to the topic of smart charging and V2G.

1:18:47 You already did a very cool project with Lichtblick. Do you think that we will be able also to have smart charging, V2G, and public charging - thereby even getting lower than that? As you said, you were able to offer something for free. How cool is that? If these types of stories start accumulating, we will definitely get the masses. You can either pay €2 per liter, or you can even drive for free at certain times of the day. How cool is that? Or even get paid.

1:19:24 It depends on the way you look at it, because to me there are a few things that are not completely clear. For example, when it comes to smart charging - and of course now I'm taking a bit more of an eye on public charging, because that's where the problem that we're talking about today lies - the real question is: who is selling smart charging services to the grid? Because you have multiple actors: you have the CPO that could do that, you have the CPMS provider that could do that.

1:20:01 You have the EMP - some EMPs are trying to position themselves to be the ones orchestrating that. And then you have the car manufacturer, because the car manufacturer is the one that has access to the car and can modulate how much energy the car draws, if any. So what I am still not clear on is: how do you make sure that these three, four, five actors can really cooperate for the greater good? And on top of that, you have the end customer that needs to get something out of it. So how do you do that? How do you keep all these players in sync and remunerated?

1:20:43 And how do you make sure that the grid operator doesn't buy the same product twice? To me, is there value in it? Yes, probably more in certain countries than others, because we know that, for example, the Netherlands have a completely overloaded grid and EV charging is a real problem there, because everybody is charging on AC wall boxes on the streets - that's creating the problem. Does the problem have the same magnitude everywhere? Probably not, and then it becomes more of a...

1:21:20 It becomes more of a procurement topic of CPOs that are buying on dynamic pricing, because of course if you can say, look, plug in your car at 8, but then please let me not draw any energy between 6 in the evening and midnight, I will let you keep the car plugged until the morning after and you will get your car full by the time you need to go - then yes, then it makes sense. And the same goes for V2G, right? So the first question is, I think that V2G is gonna...

1:21:59 Become first a trust topic, because we need to convince drivers that yeah, we're gonna draw energy from your car, but don't worry, we're gonna give it back to you. And then you can make a nice arbitrage on the delta, on the transaction. Then whether this is gonna be a use case that is gonna be as attractive on public charging as on home charging is to be seen, because I can see home and office charging as a better use case for V2G, because the car is clearly connected on a...

1:22:49 The entire day nonstop, and you're not hogging a charging facility that somebody might need to use to effectively charge. So we need to consider that aspect as well. Exactly. The utilization that we were just talking about is a bit of a conflict, right? There's an opportunity cost if you have a car plugged in longer than it should just to charge as fast as possible. I think I can see the window between 6 p.m. and 6 a.m. the day after, where you have 12 hours where realistically at night...

1:23:23 You don't have a lot of turnover of cars, so that makes total sense. But during the day I struggle to see how you can fit utilization targets in terms of delivery of energy with the expectation of having somebody leaving the cars there all day with a battery at the service of the grid. I don't think that this is a viable way of doing V2G. And what's your vision towards - like you said, we are around 5% now in absolute numbers of adoption of EVs in the total car fleet or vehicle fleet - once we really get rid of fossil fuels, what's the vision you are working towards?

1:24:08 What do you envision? Well, getting completely rid of fossil fuels is going to take a while. I don't think that there is any point in us taking ourselves for a ride. I believe that it's increasing quite aggressively, and we see the price of new cars dropping, becoming better, charging faster. So by all means we are going in the right direction. I can totally see in 5 years electric cars being like 50% plus of the newly registered cars.

1:24:51 But then the replacement cycles of old cars is going to take a little bit longer, so I don't think that we will achieve a full fleet replacement until probably the late 2030s, 2035, something like that. And do you think it will be mostly public charging - like all these cars that we see in Berlin, for example, in other cities in the street - where will they charge? That's an interesting question, because historically there was always this statement: 80% of charging happens at home.

1:25:30 But to me that was the result of a reverse correlation, which was: as a driver, the question was, can I have a wall box at home? If yes, I would buy an electric car, otherwise I would wait. These times are over, right? And already today, public charging represents around 30% of the overall energy charged.

1:25:52 There are multiple researchers pointing to the fact that this number is gonna become more like 50% in the long run, by 2035 or something like that. And you can see that happening - as you said, you have a lot of people, particularly living in large and densely populated areas like Hamburg, Berlin, large urban centers that...

1:26:19 Cannot park in off-street parking and therefore are naturally disqualified from having access to a private charger, or simply the building does not allow for it for multiple reasons. At that point, of course, you need to make sure that the infrastructure is capable of dealing with this amount of people needing to charge. And of course this is gonna be a nice problem for the different governments of the local municipalities to see what can be done there.

1:27:00 And honestly, the more people gain confidence in traveling long distance - long distance you do it in public, you have no choice - and therefore I am quite bullish that public charging is gonna represent 50% easily of the total amount of energy delivered to electric cars. And will there be more AC or DC within cities, for example? That's a good question. I think that this becomes a bit of an opinion-based conversation because there are different camps.

1:27:35 I see the value of DC, and you could not live without it during long distance trips and so on and so forth. So I guess that's the need that's been demonstrated. I can see a place for these large DC chargers if you really need to charge quickly, for example, in supermarket chains, the parking of supermarket chains, or - pardon me - in petrol stations that are going to be reconverted eventually. But personally, I still see a lot of value in AC charging.

1:28:15 I tend to do all my urban charging on AC chargers, not because I don't have a DC charger nearby, but simply because if I'm not in a rush, I don't care. I'm happy to go plug my car and then pick it up when it's ready, and it's absolutely no problem to me. I have enough options around me where I live, and it just works. And honestly, it puts less of a strain on the grid capacity than the big 400 kW charger we've talked a lot about today. Now, as we are getting to - we're already at the visionary part.

1:28:51 So what is the vision for you for Karia, if you were to think long term? Well, for us, we really want to become this commercial interoperability layer of the industry, and that's what we are focused on. We want to make sure that we create a healthy and vibrant ecosystem where charge point operators can sell their energy directly across wherever their customers are, and they can actively drive their commercial strategy at scale with one single input.

1:29:25 That's what we are looking at, and we know that if you make the parallel - when fuel is going to be phased out and electricity is going to be the main fuel to get around - we see that even without counting China, this is a $1 trillion market. So we don't need to get obsessed about finding new revenue streams or anything. We just need to be focused on making it great for charge point operators to sell their energy.

1:30:00 We need to make it great for the developers on the connect side, to make sure that they have a reliable and robust product. Yeah, I think that's our job. So you arrived here with an EV, and usually you drive EVs - that's good. When you have like 20 minutes on a charger, what do you usually like to spend your time on? I wish I had a lot of choices, but typically that results in getting my kids to the toilet before the car is ready. And fun fact, the car is ready before the family is ready to move on.

1:30:34 So for me, this idea of - yeah, you lose a lot of time driving an EV - I don't see that. Because I can promise you that I always try to be a good citizen and leave the plug when it's 80%. I don't need more. But let's say that realistically it's more like 85%, because it takes longer for the kids to have done their toilet run and stretched their legs and eaten something than for the car to be ready. And you have done long trips to Italy from Berlin as well, all the time. So it's possible - a lot of Germans like to go, and I do it all the time. I'm used to it.

1:31:14 There are plenty of options to charge along the road. Honestly, I've brought it to a point where I also have no problem arriving in turtle mode with like 5 kilometers of range left in the battery, because I know that even if one charger doesn't work, I somehow have an alternative somewhere. I still have this anecdote - it was last summer, I was coming back alone with my two kids on the back seats. When I drive from Italy it's 1,100 kilometers.

1:31:57 I come from near Milan, so from Berlin it's 1,100 kilometers, and I do it in one go. I remember it was like 11 at night, so we were getting closer but still had a couple of hours to go. And I had like 5% and I asked myself: let's hope this charger works. I knew that I had options, but you ask yourself the question - what am I going to do if all of them fail? Nevertheless, I think that right now you can travel way more relaxed, and you can see the evolution. It's crazy.

1:32:46 I did my first long distance trip in 2021, and if you do it today, it's a completely different ball game. Chargers are faster, you are done before you're ready, and you have so many options that range anxiety, in my opinion, is a thing of the past - or a thing of somebody that has never driven an EV. Then it becomes more like charging anxiety, meaning: will I get ripped off, or will the charger work? But that's a different story, and it requires different solutions.

1:33:18 And to be fair, the first EV models - I myself also bought a Nissan Leaf where indeed the kilometer range was very, very limited. Nowadays it's a completely different ball game, and indeed I would say it's maybe legacy thinking. And we're just getting started, even in improving range and improving charging speed. So I think, as you said, solutions like yours and others will keep on improving. And which solution do you use to pay and to navigate? I'll try to make a guess. Very good. Well, Isam, thanks a lot for your time and energy, and best of luck with Karia.

1:33:58 Thanks a lot for having me. It was a pleasure, and best of luck. Thanks a lot. Three things stick from the conversation. First, the price transparency problem won't be solved by regulation alone, but by making the operator the seller again. Karia leaves pricing power with the CPO, charges no fees on the demand side, and instead shares revenue with those who bring drivers - like OEMs and fleets. Second, the economics live or die with utilization: 8 to 10% a day to break even, above 20% to profit. And the lever isn't blanket discounts, but smarter pricing.

1:34:39 I loved the Liftlike example with free charging when there were negative prices in May. So hour by hour, side by side, AI-driven without cannibalization of the profitable chargers. That's smart charging pricing. Third, charging is no longer just an energy business. When prices go negative, charging can be free, and with V2G, you can even get paid with your EV in public chargers, and the operator still makes money by selling grid services. Issam's supermarket without price tag orange analogy hits the mark.

1:35:18 As long as the price depends on which card you pull out, the mass market stays on the sidelines. The platform that changes this doesn't need to reinvent the wheel, just apply proven marketplace models to the charge point. Want to see what that looks like in practice? Watch the Connect API launch, 15 minutes from zero to working charging app at a real charger. Incredible. And if you're ever stuck at a charger in Italy with 2 kids and 5%, just remember the car's usually ready before the family is. See you next time.