Ep. 28: Orlin Radev, CEO of Ampeco, on Scaling a Global CPMS, Smart Charging and the Future of EV Network
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由机器转录整理而成。译文为机器翻译,可能存在错误。
欢迎来到由RiDERgy推出的Smart Charge播客。我是RiDERgy的创始人兼首席执行官Claudio Geyken。这是你的节目,了解电动汽车和车队能源管理及智能充电创新的所有相关内容。
今天我邀请到的嘉宾是AMPECO的首席执行官兼创始人Orlin Radev。AMPECO是一个电动汽车充电平台、后端系统,或者你也可以叫它充电点管理系统(CPMS),为全球大规模充电网络提供支持。自2024年11月宣布获得2600万美元B轮融资以来,总融资额超过4200万美元,AMPECO已扩展到60个市场的180个客户。在其硬件无关的CPMS平台上,AMPECO的规模不断加速,从2023年初的62,000个托管充电点增长到今天的接近200,000个,像
E.ON这样的大型公用事业公司在该平台上运营跨越11个欧洲国家的业务。我们将与Orlin讨论他的连续创业经验、他如何实现快速扩展、他对电动汽车市场未来的看法、是什么让这款软件独一无二,以及智能充电的下一步发展方向。让我们开始吧。好的,Orlin,很高兴你来这里。我想你刚到柏林吧?是的,我刚飞过来,到达后立即就来这里见你。从索菲亚飞到柏林要多长时间?2小时,
所以距离不远,但还是得花时间在机场。有时候我听说你也坐过电动汽车来柏林,不过这次你坐飞机过来了,对吧?是的,飞机快得多。去年我开电动汽车来过一次,我为了参加会议开电动汽车来的,花了我...我其实不得不在一家酒店
睡了一晚。按照我的计划方式,我本来会在晚上10点左右到达那里,但我在边境花了大约8小时。那真是太糟糕了。不过从今年开始,只要我不经过塞尔维亚就不会有边境检查,而我上次就是经过塞尔维亚的。从今年开始,保加利亚现在属于
申根区。所以只要我经过罗马尼亚,以前这只适用于航班。从今年开始,实际的物理边境也适用了。所以如果我经过罗马尼亚,就不会在边境等待8小时了。那很不错,是的,对任何电动汽车驾驶者来说都是个好消息。是的,顺便说一下,在这种情况下,电动汽车实际上可能有优势,因为你不会只是
停在那里就消耗那么多能量。是的。我不知道你是否关注Electro Trucker,或者你是否了解他。他一直在欧洲驾驶电动卡车,他从德国一直开到罗马尼亚再到土耳其,他也展示了边境检查,特别是如果你需要运输东西,在土耳其和...之间几乎要等待一整天。是的,这些边境检查确实要花不少时间,特别是
如果你用卡车运输东西的话,是的。好吧,反正今天不是讲这个的。在我们深入AMPECO和行业以及电动汽车行业的细节之前,你能分享一点关于你自己的信息吗?你会如何介绍自己?你的背景是什么?嗯,取决于谁在问我,我想说我是一个企业家,或者我会说我是一个产品人,但也许我更像是一个转变成企业家的产品人。自从我高中毕业以来,我一直在为我自己的创业公司、其他初创公司和企业开发软件产品,
从那时起。这就是我看待自己的方式:一个建造者,一个用软件产品解决商业难题的人。是的,我听说你在高中时就已经做过一些东西了,所以你真正的开始是怎样的?你有没有想过这个?嗯,我认为这是一个非常经典的故事。我是从解决自己亲身经历的问题开始的。我非常喜欢游戏,想和朋友一起玩,但我们没有宽带网络,所以我创办了一个互联网服务提供商,和我的联合创始人、AMPECO的首席技术官一起。他那时在大学,我在高中,我们创办了这家公司。我们在大约9个月内把它卖掉了,
主要是因为我们在1月份创办的,那时我在11年级,不是最后一年,而是倒数第二年。到了9月,我不得不做一个决定:我是继续做生意呢,还是要完成高中学业?高中辍学似乎不是一个很好的人生开始。我是说,大学辍学,这对硅谷的一些人来说效果很好,但高中辍学似乎不是一个
很好的开始。所以我们卖掉了公司,但我对创业上了瘾,之后不久我找到了继续做这件事的方法。在AMPECO之前,我大概共同创办了大约10家公司。持续最久的一家是一家软件开发公司,我们主要为其他初创公司开发产品,通过与他们合作,我们成为了其中一些公司的联合创始人。这是AMPECO之前令人兴奋的一段历程,AMPECO是我们过去7年的专注所在,我们正在建设的自己的东西。
有意思。那么高中毕业后你决定学习计算机工程或类似的专业吗?是什么?我学的是网络工程、电信,或者说,是的,网络专业。但我没学太久。我是说,我学了2年然后就决定不继续了。我也试过编程。那时候
我的联合创始人Alex在一家软件开发公司工作,我去跟他实习了3个月,试图成为一名开发人员,但我发现我不会成为开发人员。我是说,我喜欢开发人员所做的工作,但我想让他们替我去做,我不会是那个开发东西的人。最后我改修了管理专业,这就是我大学毕业的专业。
很有意思。所以高中毕业后你决定学习计算机工程或类似的专业吗?是什么?我学的是网络工程、电信,或者说,是的,网络专业。但我没学太久。我是说,我学了2年然后就决定不继续了。我也试过编程。那时候我的联合创始人Alex在一家软件开发公司工作,我去跟他实习了3个月,试图成为一名开发人员,但我发现我不会成为开发人员。我是说,我喜欢开发人员所做的工作,但我想让他们替我去做,我不会是那个开发东西的人。最后我改修了管理专业,这就是我大学毕业的专业。
但是,是的,我一直对开发软件产品充满热情,只是我不想成为写代码的人。但你有写代码的能力,你以前写过吗,还是说?不,我是说我试过,然后决定这不适合我。你知道,他写规范,但实际上由别人来开发。而你一起工作的联合创始人,他更多是编码类型的人。是的,他是,我
不知道,我认识的最好的工程师,一个软件工程师,所以是的,他一直在构建我想到的东西。很好。是的,那很好。是的。那么你是如何创建这家公司的,那个软件开发公司?是在学习期间还是之后?实际上是在学完之后,是我和我的联合创始人两个人。我们在其他公司工作过,不是一起,
我是说他在一家公司工作,我在另一家公司工作,但我们开办这家公司是因为我们真的想建立一家软件公司,开发我们自己的软件产品。不过我们没有想到这个想法,所以我们认为我们会聚集团队,为别人的想法构建产品,直到我们想到一个。这花了我们大约10年。在10年中,我是说,我们仍在构建别人的想法,这非常令人兴奋,
别误会我,我学到了很多,我们都学到了很多,但这持续的时间太长了,直到我们最终决定,好吧,我们只是在构建别人的想法。在某个时刻,我们需要决定我们在这个世界上要构建什么。这发生在7年前,Ampeco就是这个决定的结果。我想问一下,在Ampeco之前你在做什么类型的想法
是的,如我所说,这是别人的想法,所以它们涉及很多不同的领域。例如,我们构建了仓库管理软件。我们构建的一件令人兴奋的事情实际上是在线农民市场,或者至少在最终消费者看来是在线农民市场,但它实际上是一个物流平台,使得从非常小的农场采购农产品并将其直接送到
城市的客户成为可能。这需要大量工作。我的参与程度远不止是产品,在某个时刻我实际上管理过这家公司。这很了不起,令人兴奋,它让我了解到可持续食物、以可持续的方式生产食物、小农场以及他们面临的困难。是的,这非常令人兴奋,但同样它是别人的想法,我对此感到兴奋
并帮助构建了使其成为可能的产品,但最终它不是我的。是的,很好。那么你是如何发现Ampeco的市场需求的?那么这是如何开始的呢?嗯,有趣的故事。我是说,我一直认为我要开发一个软件产品。在10年构建别人的想法之后,有一次我说够了。让我们暂停一下,决定一下我们要
构建什么。而我想到的决定实际上是我要开办一个汽车共享业务,所以根本不是软件,或者至少不是纯软件。当我访问慕尼黑并租了一辆宝马时,我想到了这个主意。我不知道那时那项服务叫什么,像Sharen这样的东西?是的,但那是在ShareNow之前。无论如何,我
喜欢这个想法。顺便说一下,它不是电动的,只是一个关于共享经济的想法,你不拥有车辆,你可以使用它,它被多个人使用,它不会闲置。所以我真的很喜欢这个,我说,好吧,这听起来像是我会做的事情。我是说,我们之前的农场到餐桌的尝试也有点像是共享经济
的一部分。所以是的,我决定这是一个好主意,我对这个话题进行了研究,并决定这是我要做的。我认为这些车应该是电动的。我认为在某个时刻它们会是自动驾驶的,但至少从一开始它们会是电动的。所以在研究建立汽车共享车队和运营配备电动车的汽车共享业务的过程中,我决定在保加利亚的索菲亚做这件事。
我们没有可以使用的电动汽车充电网络,所以我们必须建立一个。我去与硬件制造商谈话,并认为我会购买电动汽车充电站,以便与我的车队一起使用。当我问他们我如何将充电器连接到我的汽车共享软件时,我没有得到很好的答案,直到最终我发现了一家来自奥地利的软件公司,它实际上在构建电动汽车充电管理软件。而且
我想,为什么你需要电动汽车充电管理软件?我是说,我有硬件,我有我的汽车共享,我应该能够以某种方式连接硬件。好吧,事实证明电动汽车充电的复杂性远超我的想象,我不得不更深入地研究这个话题。我越来越意识到这实际上是一个非常被忽视的话题和领域,具有很多复杂性。我是说,你有物理设备
所以你有物联网组件,你有能源管理组件,你有所有这些计费和人工智能运营方面。这是运输和能源之间的有趣交集,是的,我越来越了解这个领域,我越来越兴奋。最终我实际上向我的联合创始人推销了这个想法:伙计,我们应该做电动汽车充电管理软件。所以让我们做我们知道怎么做的事情,开发一个软件产品。
是的,通过一些研究,我们最终想到了一个论点,构建一个平台,让其他人可以用它来运营电动汽车充电业务,我们放弃了汽车共享部分。是的,我最终没有得到一个汽车共享车队,但是是的。公平,公平。是的,开始的时候,这在生意中总是通常如此,与现在的情况是一个不同的故事。所以也许你也可以分享它是如何从最初的想法改变的
到今天,或者根本没有改变?是的,我的意思是,对我们来说改变很大,因为一开始是:让我们开始一个汽车共享业务,然后变成了:让我们建立一个管理电动汽车充电网络的软件平台。所以这是从一个想法到另一个想法的巨大转变。但一旦我们在电动汽车充电领域落脚并进行了研究,我们对自己在这个领域要做什么有了非常具体的想法,说实话,从那以后我们没有改变太多。我们看待它的方式是:我们试图想象当市场没有更多增长倍数可翻倍时,这个领域会是什么样子。我的意思是,这是一个新兴市场。在新兴市场中,在市场稳定下来之前,在你成为主流之前,你必须经历多次翻倍增长。所以每一次翻倍都伴随着技术、商业案例的变化,
商业模式的变化,所以情况看起来非常不同。但一旦它稳定下来,你想了解那时市场会是什么样子。我们认为这将是一个相对整合的市场。我们认为不会有成千上万的电动汽车充电网络在任何特定的市场中,但它也不会那么整合,以至于只有公司进行完全的垂直整合。例如,如果我与汽车共享做个类比,我不认为这会是,我认为它会更加整合得多,这意味着进行完全的垂直整合、建立自己的软件,甚至建立自己的硬件,并运营你的汽车共享业务会更有意义得多。我认为这是特斯拉正在做的方向,这也许是Waymo正在做的方向。但在电动汽车充电方面,我认为会有足够的碎片化来证明一个通用平台的合理性,这个平台可以被这个领域的参与者使用。
所以我们问自己:当市场成熟时,这个平台会是什么样子,我们从那里反向推导。如果我们需要在,我的意思是,我们当时认为需要15年;现在我认为从现在起也是15年。但如果我们从这个时间点反向推导,我们如何到达那里?我们需要遵循哪些路径?我们开始时做了一些
有市场的东西,我们一直上升到向我们最终设想的理想客户群体销售的点。明白了。我也读到或学到了你在这个行业中是个局外人,一开始真正掌握基础知识并理解市场如何运作对你来说很困难。你是如何做到这一点的,以便真正了解市场?
是的,我们绝对是局外人。我的意思是,想想吧,我是从索非亚启动这个项目的,那时那里几乎没有任何电动汽车充电网络。所以我没有机会基于我自己的经验来做这个。我在能源空间、运输空间或基础设施方面没有以前的经验。我完全来自软件领域,拥有
相关的技能。但我们做了大量的研究。我读了很多关于这个主题的内容。我们进行了大量的访谈,我认为这是关键的一部分。我们访谈了运营商、能源公司、汽车制造商等等。这帮助我们真正理解了这个市场。
而且,我认为作为局外人也有优势。你没有固有的偏见。你问天真的问题。有时候这些天真的问题会导致一些真正有趣的见解。所以我会说做你的研究,进行访谈,不要害怕问愚蠢的问题。这对我们很有帮助。
零经验和零联系,这很好,因为我没有任何包袱或先入之见。完全同意,你就像一张白纸。只是想澄清一下,没有人,因为你们好像有6位联合创始人?是的,我们有6位联合创始人。为了说清楚情况:有我和我的CTO,还有我们的另一个朋友,他是我们的首席商务官Kim,他有销售企业软件的经验,然后
另外三个是工程师,软件工程师。所以除了知道如何开发软件之外,我们在这个领域没有任何经验。这就是我们懂的;我们对即将要为其构建软件的这个领域一无所知。没有先入之见,是一张白纸,我们可以只用正确的东西来填充,如果我们幸运的话能够学到正确的东西。所以我们必须
从局外人变成局内人;我们必须成为这个行业的内部人士。我们是这样做的,我们的第一年是2019年。我们参加了所有能找到的活动。有些实际上相当离谱,没有让我们获得太多帮助。我是说,我们去的第一批活动之一实际上是在迪拜。所以说,这不是学习电动汽车充电的地方,但我是说,它实际上也
帮助我们了解了全貌。但是,是的,这需要与已经在这个领域做某些事情的人进行大量对话,以及大量的批判性思维,这样我们才能筛选出别人的先入之见。我是说,我们得到了很多我们没有采纳的建议,我认为我们的选择是正确的。你介意吗,我会给你一个例子。我是说,一个
我的朋友。很早的时候,我不知道是不是2019年,可能就是2019年那会儿。我们见到了Thomas Diver,他刚刚从Hebject的CEO职位上卸任。他给了我们非常深刻的见解,真正深刻的见解。他对我们的时间非常慷慨。他邀请我们去柏林,用整整一天的时间与我们一起进行研讨会,帮助我们磨练我们的价值主张
以及总体上我们的商业模式和战略等。但主要是,虽然再次强调,他的见解非常深刻,对时间也很慷慨,他告诉我们:"伙计们,你们要进入一个已经很拥挤的领域。差异化的空间很小。去做别的事情吧。"例如专注于车队,这是他提出的一个想法,因为你们想做的事情,你们必须超越已经在这样做并且做得非常好的人。那是在2019年,我认为就是2019年,是的。那是我们没有采纳的建议之一。但如果我知道他知道的东西,我在给这两个来自索菲亚的家伙提建议的话,我可能也会给他们同样的建议。所以再次强调,我们从他那里学到的其他一切都非常有帮助,我们采纳了,但我们没有采纳那个建议,我们
坚持下来了。很好的例子。我也很喜欢Thomas,他也是播客的嘉宾,想听的人可以去听。非常有见地。但确实,这是一个非常有洞察力的观点:一旦你是局外人,你就可以天真地挑战既定观念。我认为这种天真是创业精神的一个非常重要的方面。很多时候,正是这种天真,不知道为什么某件事行不通,让你
能够做成那件事。好的见解。我也很喜欢Thomas,他也是播客嘉宾,有兴趣的可以去听。见解非常深刻。但确实,这是个非常有洞察力的观点:一旦你是个局外人,你就有自由去天真地挑战预先存在的观念。我认为这种天真对创业精神来说是一个非常重要的方面。很多时候,正是这种天真,不知道为什么某件事行不通,才能使你
让它工作。以我今天掌握的所有知识,如果我回到2019年,必须制定一个计划说明我们要做什么,我会疯狂到完全按照我们当时的做法去做,并希望它能成功。但是是的,我当时不知道这些。那么,你还记得吗,反过来说,有人给过你一些建议,你很珍视它,它超级有用,你实际上实施了?我不知道,那是
可能,我是说,有些是细节问题,但所有这些建议肯定都留下了印象。我无法指出具体是哪一个,但我们通过与人交谈学到了很多东西,这是我们唯一的方式。我们必须利用别人的知识,然后把这些东西拼凑在一起,这样我们就能制定自己的论点和计划。我们试图尽快展示进展,即使只是
某些东西的模型,这样我们就能得到即时反馈,无论是来自客户还是业内人士。这帮助我们弄清楚如何去做。对你来说最有用的最好的活动,是你回去参加的ICNC,还是,我认为有两个活动对我们确实产生了很大的差异
其中一个实际上是我们去参加的第一个行业活动:它是MOVE,在伦敦,也在2019年。我认为那是在3月份,所以我们在2018年10月启动了公司。在3月份,我们以一家初创公司的身份去参加MOVE,用初创公司门票之类的。他们有一排1米宽的展位,上面有海报,是的,完全正确。所以我们
没有的是任何可以花费的预算。我拥有的是五个共同创始人,所以六个创始人。我确保我们租了一个Airbnb,我们六个人一起去了。我是说,如果你不能展示更多东西,就展示数字,这样我们就能进行更多对话。最后,我们仍然处于有东西可以展示的阶段,但主要是模型和早期版本
的软件,主要是我们需要反馈,需要学习。一个人只能进行这么多对话,所以我把每个人都带来了。这太棒了。正是在这个活动中,我们认识了一个我们最早的相当重要的客户。我们当时没有签署合同,但我们让他们兴奋了,他们实际上是参展商和赞助商。他们对我们展示给他们的东西感到兴奋,一年
后在同一个活动中我们签署了合同。我是说,这具有象征意义,我们大约一个月前就签署了他们,但我们在那里正式签署了文件。所以这是第一个产生了差异的活动。第二个是我们去参加的第一个ICNC,这真的,我们以对话和见解的形式从中获得的价值真的加快了我们的速度。很好,那么
第一个客户也是来自MOVE活动的那个吗?是的,他们不是我们的第一个客户,因为同时我们签署了其他一些客户,但他们是英国第一个具有相当规模的客户,他们帮助我们开发了该平台,使其适合于其他类似的客户。通常很难找到最初的那些,说服那些显然提出"你之前在哪里做过?"这个问题的人的过程是什么
,想想我们正在销售什么。这是你业务的核心。它是那件不能失败的东西,也是你将所有其他东西连接到的那件东西,而你是从一家来自保加利亚的初创公司购买它的。所以想象一下这笔销售有多么困难。
我们没有任何牵引力或证明点,所以我们必须用价值来弥补。这是关于它对于你需要解决的用例有多好。我们只是试图确保它好得多,以至于你必须在其他所有方面做出妥协,因为再次说,这是一个核心平台、业务关键平台,它来自一家没有证明其坚实和可靠的历史记录的公司。现在,退一步,深入问题的实质,我知道,与投资者个人交谈时,人们对这个领域并不是那么熟悉,正如你已经指出的,这是一个复杂的领域。所以你如何用简单的术语向可能不深入了解所有这些
术语的听众解释你的公司解决什么问题,你的公司是关于什么的,CPMS、MSP等?是的,这是个难题。顺便说一下,这可能是我们在寻求融资的第一轮中表现不佳的原因,因为我从来无法用简单的术语解释我们的工作。但我认为在核心垂直软件中,有时会是这样,因为你不是只做一件事,你做的是很多特意为特定行业构建的东西,做得非常好
它们彼此集成得非常好,价值来自于此。因为我们许多早期投资者我谈过,他们想听到什么是秘诀,人们购买我们软件的唯一东西是什么,USP是什么。问题就在这里:他们不是为了一件事而购买它,他们购买它是因为许多东西协同工作得非常好,适合他们的用例。但本质上,
我们所做的是为电动汽车充电网络提供垂直软件。这是他们肯定会使用的一个软件,他们可能会使用其他软件,但这是连接他们的充电器、用户、合作伙伴、计费的软件。这是他们的运营。这是电动汽车充电网络的操作系统。这就是我们,这就是我们在做的。为了简化,你真正为充电点运营商解决的问题是什么?让我回到
我问题的例子:我如何将你的充电器从我的汽车共享软件连接到我的电动汽车?问题是,你不能,你需要一个连接了充电器的系统;这就是这个操作系统。问题是,没有一个电动汽车充电网络没有这样的软件,所以这不是一个问题,比如"我需要知道我的充电器是否在线",是的,如果做得正确,那是它解决的一件事,但
让我回到我问题的例子:我如何从我的汽车共享软件将你的充电器连接到我的电动汽车?问题是,你做不到,你需要一个连接了充电器的系统;这就是这个操作系统。问题是,没有一个电动汽车充电网络没有这样的软件,所以这不是一个问题,像"我需要知道我的充电器是否在线",是的,如果做得正确,那是它解决的一件事,但
这不是你能解决的问题。如果你想在电动汽车充电业务中运营任何企业,你需要像我们一样的软件管理平台。所以这也是个很好的位置,因为这是你不会扔掉的软件,你可能会切换,但你放不了手。如果你在做SaaS,而且它是可选的,如果你向企业销售他们可以使用或不使用的东西
那是一回事。如果他们必须更换它,因为他们的业务离不开该软件,那么你的粘性就会高得多。让我来说明一下,你同意我的看法吧,你带来的核心问题和解决方案是:一方面,如果你没有连接的充电器或软件来管理它,你就冒着充电器无法使用的风险。你无法接受付款,无法按需要计费,无法管理负载。这是
现实中的问题,这甚至不是你是否考虑在电动汽车充电业务中运营的问题。你必须有连接的充电器,否则你不知道它是否在线,你无法说谁可以充电,谁不可以,价格是多少,是否接受付款,这些都不可能。所以这不太是你做还是不做的问题。这是关于我使用什么软件来管理
我的充电网络,对吧?为了也给听众一点旁注,也许你可以补充。我认为你现在处于B轮融资阶段。最新的,去年我们完成了B轮融资,这是2600万美元的投资。之前,总共我们筹集了约4300万美元,那相当多。你的公司现在有多少人?我们现在接近200
人。我看到最新的,已经在60个国家,对吧?你们在运营,我们在60多个国家,几乎每个有汽车的大陆都有。有客户在使用我们的软件充电。我们的市场,我是说,最大的集中仍然是欧洲,比如说欧洲占60%,但我们在澳大利亚、新西兰或北美有客户,甚至在非洲也有客户。是的,南美洲也没有,所以分布得相当广,在很多国家都有使用,所以这相当令人印象深刻。你在这些年里如何解释你所取得的规模扩展?是什么说服这么多人采纳你的解决方案?嗯,一件事是它从战略开始。我们决定只构建供其他人在地面上使用的软件平台,在特定的
市场中运营他们的业务,这意味着我们不必在一个市场中就能让我们的软件适用于那个市场。我们只需要确保它适用于在那个市场中做生意的任何人。所以当我们签约时,实际上我们最早的客户之一是在台湾。他们在2019年圣诞节前后来找我们。他们访问了我们在索菲亚的办公室,我们在那里签约。我们在台湾没有任何人。我们对这个地区没有任何
营销,但该软件是适用的,因为我们确保构建了一个不与特定市场或特定地理位置相关的平台。这意味着我们只需要找到那些将使用我们的软件在这些市场中运营电动汽车充电业务的公司,这与必须实际在市场中存在相比更容易,比如在那里建立自己的网络,或者即使你提供更多的服务,比如如果你去个别场地主持人,比如一家酒店,你想让他们购买充电站并通过我们的平台将其货币化。你至少必须在那里有销售,但可能还需要一些现场服务和支持。我们不去那里。我们向那些将向酒店销售的人销售,用这种策略,我们更容易找到那些实际上会建立网络的客户。为了让你了解一些关于
规模的情况:我们的客户今天运营大约200,000个充电点,这分布在大约180个客户中,所以我们只需要销售给180个客户就能在平台上拥有200,000个充电器。明白了。只是为了确保我理解了,所有这些方面,比如当充电器故障等等,基本上不是由你处理的,这让你能够更快地扩展,因为那将由其他人处理。你不必有太多的本地存在。确切地。我们的工作是确保软件会检测到这一点,通知他们,并为他们提供故障排除的方法。但实际的服务是由充电网络提供的。还有一个关键方面,也许我不太了解:计费和支付方面。我认为这也很大程度上取决于每个地理位置。这不是快速扩展的障碍吗?或者这是你必须适应地理位置和不同市场的一个方面?
这就是为什么早期我们不直接处理付款。我们让我们的客户能够处理付款。我们很早就开始与几乎10个不同的支付处理商合作不同的市场,如今我们有大约40种不同的付款方式,我们与不同市场的发票解决方案进行了整合,这样我们就可以涵盖这些方面。但最终,销售者,商人,是我们的
客户。所以我们确保我们的软件让他们可以轻松接受付款、进行会计核算、支付等等,当涉及支付时,但我们不是进行这些的一方。所以我们不必在一个国家注册或在一个国家缴税才能在那里销售,因为是我们的客户在那里销售。我们只需要确保软件支持他们。当我说"只需要"时,我的意思是这不像是
一个小任务,但它意味着我们可以专注于一件事,即我们的核心竞争力:建立一个能够为我们的客户支持这一切的平台,无论他们在哪个国家。通过这样做,我们能够向任何地方的客户销售,即使我们在那个国家没有实际存在。
这真的是关键的缩放能力。是的,完全同意。我想也许我们可以稍微改变话题。你提到了一些我们早期与支付处理商的工作。今天,如果我没记错的话,smart charging和load management,我想这些是你们最近添加的功能,这些在不同国家的工作方式是否不同?或者这更多是一个通用的软件解决方案,你能在世界任何地方应用?
这是个很好的问题。实际上,smart charging和load management,它们实际上是相当通用的概念。smart charging的想法是:如果一个网络有多个充电器,我想确保我不会在任何给定时间超过我的电力连接的容量。例如,如果我的连接允许100安培,我想确保所有充电器加在一起永远不会超过那个。
这是一件非常容易做的事,因为当你必须为这么多市场做这件事时,它确实会增加复杂性。但对我们来说,扩展软件比在不同市场扩展人员和运营要容易。换句话说,你让商人可以访问这些变量,然后他负责确保它符合当地法规。我们的做法是确保他们符合规定,但这
不是我们实际发票。是我们的软件发票,但发票上的名称是我们客户公司的名称。我们确实会确保它符合规定,我们有一个团队在跟进这个。他们的工作是研究法规以及它们如何适用于我们客户的业务,这样我们就可以将其构建到软件中。但最终,进行这些不同市场业务的是我们的客户。
明白了。你们总部在保加利亚,你看到了基于那里或来自那里的战略优势吗?是的,最大的战略优势是创始人在那里,所以,开个玩笑,一开始起作用的是我们可以获得人才。在某个时刻,当达到一定规模时,你其实会受到限制,因为另一方面市场不是那么
大。当你需要10个人时,你有机会获得人才,但当你需要100个具有特定技能的人时,那么在更大的市场中寻求人才会更好。对于开始阶段,这是一个优势,但这主要是我们开始的地方。这不是说,如果我必须选择在哪里开始一项业务,我会特别选择在索非亚做我们现在做的事情,但这是
我们起源故事的地方。你们不是所有团队都在那里,你们有一个分布式团队,还是公司结构如何?你对未来的看法如何?好吧,当COVID来袭,第一次封锁发生时,我们有16个人,两年后我们有40多个人。所以在不同的封锁期间,我们必须完全分布式地增长团队,所以我们以一种
远程工作方式构建了整个公司。所以虽然我说很多团队在保加利亚,但他们并不是都在索非亚,因为在索非亚办公室,我们有大约50个人来办公,总共150人中有117人在保加利亚。其余的在家工作,在保加利亚的其他地方。我们有更多的办公室,我们也有人在其他地方。我们在英国、法国、
美国、荷兰都有人。所以是的,我们并没有被限制在一个特定的地点。公司以这样的方式建立,也出于必要,因为我们没有其他选择,但因为我们以这种方式构建它,这现在允许我们在找到人才的地方招聘,而不是必须在特定地点找到人才。那么,创办公司时一个关键的建议是
专注于特定市场、特定地区、特定用例。但似乎你没有遵循这个建议,或者至少你证明了它可以非常快速地扩展到这么多不同的地区。你的想法是什么?好吧,部分原因是我们别无选择,只能选择一个不是我们本地市场的市场,因为我们的本地市场根本不存在。所以
很容易的选择,是吧,很容易的选择。但然后第二部分是我们再次看这个我们进入的市场在成熟时会是什么样子。会有多少这样的平台?我认为不会有那么多。我认为可能会有一个占主导地位的,再加上两个规模不小的,然后还有一些非常小众的。我的工作是弄清楚我们如何成为那个主导地位的平台,我不认为它会是一个本地的
平台。我不认为它会是为德国建立的或为英国市场建立的平台。所以从一开始,我们就必须构建一个在市场成熟时成为主导平台的平台,这个平台会被用于各种市场。所以我们决定:让我们尽早从这些市场学习,这样我们就不会关闭我们的平台或为特定市场过度定制,因为特别是在新兴技术中,有时
进步并不来自于首先达到成熟或至少早期采用的市场。我是说,欧洲没有任何市场达到成熟,即使是北欧地区,仍然需要达到那里。但很多最初定义市场的东西后来会被打破。因为如果我回到这些翻倍,当你有多个翻倍要
做时,任何新的翻倍都是显著的增长;它允许新事物超越旧事物。只是为了解释翻倍的概念,因为我不确定,翻倍的事是这样的:如果你的市场规模翻倍,当市场翻倍时,这意味着如果你以某种商业模式持有一定的市场份额,而市场翻倍时,另一个刚刚开始采用颠覆性商业模式的人已经可以超越你,仅仅因为市场允许他们增长。所以你不会失去业务,但你会失去市场份额,因为市场增长如此之快。所以当你有市场的快速增长时,你必须灵活,你必须能够适应,因为它仍然没有定下来,仍然不清楚什么有效。我们认为会有市场,我是说,如果
我们从一开始就专注于,比如说,德国、英国或北欧,我们会错过一些可能实际上定义这个领域未来的东西,因为我们不在这些可能跳过步骤的新兴核心市场。这在通信中发生过,在几乎所有其他技术中也发生过。晚些开始的市场可能会跳过步骤,他们可能没有相同的成本,他们实际上可能在后期阶段增长得更快,只要
这样的话就不会那么昂贵,可能会加速发展。这在通讯中发生过,在几乎所有其他技术中也发生过。市场启动较晚,可能会跳过一些步骤,可能没有相同的成本,实际上可能在后期阶段发展更快,只要
因为还有更多的增长机会。你不想错过这些机会,这就是我们的想法的形成过程,也是我们从一开始就决定在销售地点上保持相当分散的原因。这并不容易做到,因为专注于你已经有集中度的用例和市场要容易得多,当你在那里投入更多精力时,你会更具竞争力,
你会获得更多现有业务。但从长期来看,这实际上可能是错误的策略,我们相信对我们特定业务的正确做法是采取这种更广泛的多市场方法。好的,明白了。也许对听众们快速解释一下,有不同的关键市场参与者,我会解释一下,这样你就可以给出你的看法。有充电点运营商运营充电器,然后还有
MSP,移动服务提供商,他们拥有支付卡或通常用于充电的支付应用程序。然后是所谓的CPMS;这是Ampeco会说的一种定位方式,为充电点运营商提供软件。然后还有漫游中心,试图把他们所有人连接在一起,比如Hubject和我们一直提到的ICNC,它确保每个人都能以某种方式相互通信。
那么你认为市场将向何处发展?不同市场在这些不同类型市场参与者的数量方面有不同的分布,你对此有什么看法,你说的是十年愿景?首先,电动汽车充电基础设施遵循电动汽车采用率。你不会提前很久就建设基础设施;你是跟随电动汽车的采用。在一些早期发展阶段,你可能
必须首先建设基础设施,但这是非常早期的。这就是我们有Ionity的原因,也是为什么快速充电网络是由汽车制造商的合资企业建设的,因为你需要一些基础设施来促进电动汽车的采用。但主流基础设施是为了被使用而建设的,使用这个基础设施的是电动汽车。所以它发展得有多快,以及在哪些市场,速度取决于这些市场的采用
在这些市场中的采用率。所以我们看的是滞后发展的基础设施。当你看到电动汽车采用率下降时,这意味着你看的是新车销售,其中有多少是电动车,当市场中出现下降或放缓时,你可以预期基础设施建设也会放缓。当出现增长时,你可以预期基础设施也会跟随。可能需要一年才能赶上,因为
基础设施对消费者需求的反应速度没有消费者那么快。但这就是我们关注的:电动汽车在哪些市场销售,速度有多快,这告诉我们基础设施建设会是什么样子。欧洲目前在今年刚刚恢复了电动汽车采用率的加速,所以我们可以预期电动汽车充电基础设施建设会加速。美国的增长一直比较稳定,
他们增长得不那么快。所以你可以预期基础设施的建设速度也不会像欧洲那样快。还有其他新兴市场,顺便说一下,巴西和墨西哥的电动汽车采用速度惊人,主要是因为中国品牌在那里销售,澳大利亚也是如此,然后基础设施建设也会随之而来。我们看到的是在基础设施方面,即你提到的CPO,充电点运营商,他们管理网络,会有整合,主要是在高功率充电方面,因为这种业务更像汽油站业务,而不是电动汽车充电的其他方面。因为其他电动汽车充电运营商,比如CPO,是停车场运营商,任何有停车位的人。如果你想象每辆汽车都是电动的,在哪里给电动汽车充电比较合理?首先,
当它停泊时,这是最容易和最方便的。你不必专门去某个地方充电。如果你要给汽油车充电,你必须专门去某个地方充电。对于电动汽车,你已经停泊在某个地方了,所以最好是在家,但不是每个人都有自己的停车位。有些电动汽车可能是共享的;我希望更多会被共享。所以你看的是他们花时间在哪里,那
就是他们会充电的地方。显然,当你在高速公路上行驶时,你会想要快速充电,这就是整合发生的地方,看起来像一个汽油站。其他地方实际上更像是停车场运营商。成为CPO的不仅仅是停车场运营商,还有任何有停车位的人:零售商、办公楼、
住宅楼。这些不会因为电动汽车充电而进行整合,因为这些是不同类型的业务。你不会因为一个是零售商,另一个是住宅楼,还有一个是办公楼而仅因为提供电动汽车充电就进行整合,这没有意义。这些是完全不同的业务。所以这意味着在这些细分市场中会存在某种程度的碎片化。只要碎片化不是非常严重,就没有
根本理由进行整合。也许你只是与另一个CPO合作,你不用在乎。但如果你管理数千个停车位,或数万个,或数十万个停车位,你就是成为CPO的主要候选人。这就是为什么我们的投资组合中有一家名叫Indigo的公司,它是世界上最大的停车运营商,管理着140万个停车位。仅在法国,他们就有大约一半的
停车位。
几百万个停车位,它们是法国的。还有比如Cora,他们也是一个非常重要的充电运营商。这类公司最终会内部化电动汽车充电服务;它将成为他们业务的一部分。许多零售商和许多房地产企业也是如此。所以我们把他们视为我们平台的潜在客户。在EMSP方面,这是提到的
你有卡,但你大部分拥有的是用户。那用户是如何访问电动汽车充电的呢?这些就是EMSPs。好吧,我相信这个市场最终会非常集中。我认为,你不会有一个非常多样化的市场。会有一些专注于商业的参与者,他们与车队合作,那里会有更多的碎片化。但对于主流消费者来说,你可能会使用你已经在使用的东西
用于其他用途的东西,要么是你的导航应用,要么是你的支付应用。所以最终我看到这会朝着一些更大的金融科技公司以及大科技公司,苹果、谷歌的方向发展。我预期他们最终会成为最大的EMSPs。而我们不向他们出售。我认为对于他们来说市场太集中了,他们没必要使用别人的平台。但在CPO方面,这就是让我们的市场有趣的地方。我认为德国,如果我没记错的话,你可能比我更了解这些数字,拥有全球最多的CPOs之一,对吧?这很有趣,因为这里,我是说,可能有一个原因Thomas建议我们不要这么做,因为这里也有最多的CPO软件,因为几乎每个公用事业公司都有自己的充电网络,你有太多的公用事业公司。所以是的,那是遗留的原因。是的,但这也是
这些早期市场的事情之一,早期有很多活动,这不遵循成熟市场的规则。所以我预期德国的CPO方面也会发生很多整合。我不认为市场会看起来那么碎片化,所以我不会基于德国的碎片化程度来做我的预测。我认为实际上德国是一个将在CPO方面看到很多整合的市场
方面。你认为它会更像哪个市场,比如英国,我认为那里有几十个左右?我会看法国、英国和荷兰,荷兰是因为他们在充电点数量方面领先的程度,英国和法国是因为他们在这个游戏中进入得稍晚一些。但我认为他们对成熟中的市场,不是成熟的市场
市场,成熟中的市场的市场动态更有说明性。你对中国的看法如何,房间里那只大象?我认为在西方我们不太涉及它。它是60个国家之一吗,还是你认为它可能也是Ampeco的一个有吸引力的市场?哦,中国就是,我是说,它绝对是最大的市场。就电动汽车充电而言,它比其他所有市场都要大。我希望我们能够应对中国,但现在我们正在远离它。关于中国的一件事是,显然,它是一个非常不同的市场。顺便说一下,它是高度集中的,而且比我们在其他市场看到的要更加纵向整合。但当涉及到SaaS业务和一般的垂直SaaS时,从中国外部在中国做任何垂直SaaS是非常困难的。首先,如果你真的想在中国运营SaaS业务,你必须在中国的服务器上运营它。你必须
给政府访问你源代码的权限,你无法从中国外部访问它。所以如果我要运营我们正在运营的,Ampeco软件,在中国,我将无法从欧洲支持它。从技术上讲,我没有访问权限。我是说,这就是它的工作方式,所以对外来者来说是非常受限的,特别是当涉及到垂直SaaS时。因为如果你在做像社交媒体这样的主流东西,你可以访问它,只是因为数字证明了这是值得的。但当你像我们一样做垂直SaaS时,我是说,我们在那里仍然会有数百个客户。他们会比我们在其他市场拥有的显著更大,但对我们来说,证明一开始所有这些运营是非常困难的,而且只要其他市场的销量有足够的增长,待在
远离中国要容易得多。这是有道理的。我还发现这个行业中有趣的一件事是,还有某些发展中国家也在弯道超车,他们真的在推动他们的电动汽车采用,比如巴西、泰国、埃塞俄比亚和其他国家。你对发展中国家作为电动汽车和充电业务市场的看法如何?好吧,对他们来说,今天的弯道超车主要是因为
他们引进了中国电动汽车制造商而加速的。无论到哪里,正如我所说,最终电动汽车充电跟随电动汽车采用,当人们购买电动汽车时,他们必须在某处为其充电,然后企业就会着手建设所需的基础设施。所以所有这些拥有大量公民的国家,我甚至不会说今天的汽车,因为在许多情况下,电动汽车可以获得一个新型的
以前没有驾驶过电动汽车的客户。他们可能在驾驶三轮车,仍然可能是电动的,但它不是四轮车。他们可能在驾驶三轮车,或者可能他们根本没有车,但现在进入壁垒很低,因为这不仅仅是这些中国电动汽车的购买价格,还有维护成本。在许多这些国家,电动汽车现在使拥有汽车更便宜,而且
总的来说,他们只是在扩大汽车市场。所以我认为很多这些国家将会弯道超车,正如他们实际上正在做的那样,仅仅是因为他们没有任何行业要保护,也因为他们也在开发一个以前可能甚至没有买过车或可能没有考虑过买车的新客户群。所以当你试图说服新的CPOs
远离中国要容易得多。这是有道理的。我还发现这个行业中有趣的一件事是,还有某些发展中国家也在弯道超车,他们真的在推动他们的电动汽车采用,比如巴西、泰国、埃塞俄比亚和其他国家。你对发展中国家作为电动汽车和充电业务市场的看法如何?好吧,对他们来说,今天的弯道超车主要是
他们引进了中国电动汽车制造商而加速的。无论到哪里,正如我所说,最终电动汽车充电跟随电动汽车采用,当人们购买电动汽车时,他们必须在某处为其充电,然后企业就会着手建设所需的基础设施。所以所有这些拥有大量公民的国家,我甚至不会说今天的汽车,因为在许多情况下,电动汽车可以获得一个新型的
以前没有驾驶过电动汽车的客户。他们可能在驾驶三轮车,仍然可能是电动的,但它不是四轮车。他们可能在驾驶三轮车,或者可能他们根本没有车,但现在进入壁垒很低,因为这不仅仅是这些中国电动汽车的购买价格,还有维护成本。在许多这些国家,电动汽车现在使拥有汽车对于
与你合作,或者说你的销售人员试图说服他们,我仍在做说服工作,你在日常工作中也在做同样的事,好的,是的,特别是当涉及这么大的事情时,我想对于更大的账户,你和首席执行官会拥有所有权。那么通常的独特卖点是什么,决定性的论据是什么,让他们选择Umeco?嗯,有几件事是我们以前没有的
但今天这些是非常强大的销售卖点。一个是我们现在有了证明,它是市场上最稳健和最可靠的平台之一,如果不是最好的话,这是非常重要的,特别是现在在一个更成熟的市场中,客户要求更高,监管机构要求更高,每个人都要求更高,因为他们期望这个行业是成熟的,尽管它还处于十几岁的阶段。现在你真的需要一个稳健的解决方案,因为这是你技术栈的基础
而现在我们有证明表明我们的确实是在这方面表现卓越的。但真正让它畅销的是,我要回到战略,这在我们的客户群中引起了很大共鸣:我们只有在他们成功时才能成功。我们纯粹是一个软件平台。我们需要他们成功,进行他们的推出,在他们的业务中成功。没有利益冲突。有一个巨大的
一致性,这意味着我们把资源放在对他们有意义的地方。我们不会锁定他们,我们在赋能他们。我们在他们需要的地方给予他们灵活性。也许他们不想使用我们的白标移动应用,那很好。我们让这件事变得非常容易,实际上帮助我们的客户构建他们自己的应用,因为这样他们会更成功。他们会建立更多的充电站。他们会成为整合者,而不是被
收购的那些。这种一致性水平,由我们在产品开发方面的关注点支持,这对最大和最有野心的CPO产生了很大共鸣。有道理。我认为你也在努力引领的一个趋势是,未来不是自己构建所有东西,而是协调市场上最好的专家来实现可靠性、盈利性和无缝的用户体验。你能详细说明一下吗?是的,当然可以,
我的意思是我认为这是其他行业经历过的事情,从构建所有东西到实际关注你的差异化是什么,你带来的核心价值是什么,而不是试图做其他人也必须做的事情。例如在电动汽车充电领域,每个人都必须能够管理不同品牌的充电器,能够监控它们,能够设定价格,能够将其货币化。
这些不是创造差异化的东西。所以你必须弄清楚差异化在哪里被创造。也许如果你是停车运营商,它在于停车和充电之间的无缝体验以及你拥有的位置。如果你是一个基础设施参与者,那么这又是关于你构建的网站在哪里,它们的可达性如何,网站上的用户体验有多好。专注于这些事情,当
你把资源投入到这里时,这种专注真的能产生巨大的驱动力。相反,如果你必须构建其他人也必须构建的所有东西,你就会分心,你会把资源浪费在已经解决的事情上,你在再次解决它,重新发明已经被发明的东西,维护标准等等。所以协调最好的解决方案,只构建真正是你差异化的东西。这是我们传达的信息,我们的平台是最好的编排平台。
它解决了常见问题。它与你想要使用的最佳解决方案集成得非常好,它让你能够专注于真正是你差异化的东西。同样,补充一下,你在一篇文章中也提到CPO们被供应商管理淹没了,硬件来自一个供应商,支付来自另一个供应商,能源管理系统来自第三个,分析来自第四个,等等。所以机会是
拥有一个将所有这一切协调成一个统一生态系统的平台。是的,我认为通常CPO被复杂性所淹没。但这并不一定意味着他们应该使用更少的供应商,但他们不应该被迫使用一个特定的供应商仅仅因为他们有一个缺口。他们必须能够选择最佳解决方案,这真正给他们带来优势。我认为这是我们正在尝试做的。例如,我们在我们的平台中有一些功能
我们感到非常自豪,我认为效果很好。我们有我们自己的内置能源管理,但同时我们也确保我们的客户可以连接其他能源管理系统,这些系统对于他们的使用情况可能比我们的更好,怎么说呢,更多是现成的或通用的解决方案。这样做对他们有利。在这种情况下,他们会使用另一个供应商来处理非常专业化的东西。
而且做得比为其他所有人做的东西更好。我是说,对于也许偶尔必须遵守某事的人,或者仅仅是为了赢得客户,他们需要在能源管理中做一些事情。好吧,是的,我们的解决方案对他们来说是很棒的。它是现成的,使用它。但如果这是你价值主张的重要部分,使用将给你最好机会赢得胜利的供应商。
所以有道理,是的。你也经常谈论API优先的方法与白标的对比。你能详细说明这两个方面以及它们如何适用于你的客户吗?是的,早期当我们开始时,我们在白标营销信息上非常强大,只是因为这是客户最初联系到的东西。但实际上,API优先的方法就像是一个你可以剥离的服务
关闭。你从一开始能让你领先的东西开始,但当你准备好了,当它有意义时,你可以剥离其中的一些部分。例如,就像我之前提到的我们的EMSP应用一样,我们的客户通常是CPO。但是,一个CPO,一个充电点运营商,他们仍然经常必须有一个移动应用程序,以便他们的客户能够访问他们的网络。他们可能希望与EMSP有直接连接,这样你就不必下载他们的应用程序,但有些
客户只想要来自CPO的应用程序。好吧,好的,很好,我们有一个很棒的白标应用程序。我是说,它是以我们客户的品牌形式存在的。我们不会站在他们和他们的客户之间。但它是通用应用程序。它必须为德国CPO、法国CPO和英国CPO的情况提供服务。如果你真的想要它,它必须对那些
使用高功率充电的和那些提供目的地充电的都有效。但是,如果你真的想要为你的特定用例和更狭窄的客户群定制用户体验,你必须建立你自己的。那样的话,你可以直接使用我们的API,因为我们确保了这不仅是可能的,而且尽可能地简单,这样你可以剥离这部分产品,把它扔掉,并建立你真正定制的解决方案,
完美地适合你的用例。这是否像我思维中的一个谬误,但许多CPO就像能源公司,通常来自那个背景,核心DNA不是做软件。这对他们是一个挑战吗?是的,这是真的。我是说,不仅仅是能源公用事业公司,还有其他的。我们的一些客户在房地产领域,其中一些是
停车运营商。他们不一定是软件公司,所以你必须让事情变得简单。如果你想通过软件创造任何差异化,你就必须学会做好它。为什么不通过供应商做得很好呢?我是说,你不必完全内部构建它,但你必须让人为你定制构建它。我们不会为他们定制构建它。我们的
角色是解决常见问题并为你提供一个非常灵活的平台,但它不是定制的。你不必定制所有东西,因为那样你会有开销和维护等等。但有些部分非常重要,在某些情况下,这可能是用户体验,在其他情况下,也许是你如何与电网集成。也许这是你作为一家公司的秘密武器。也许是你如何管理位置,所以这是关于资产管理的。所以
有不同的方面,对于提供电动汽车充电的不同类型的企业来说,是他们的秘密武器,是他们主要的竞争优势。这是他们必须找到一种方式,也通过软件,来创造竞争优势的地方。他们不必是一家软件公司。我是说,公司已经建立了伟大的软件而没有是一家软件公司,只是因为他们已经将其外包了。但你必须知道你在构建什么,你是为谁构建的,你必须知道你的业务和你的
竞争优势,然后其他人可以为你构建它。但不要期望你会得到什么东西,在上面贴个标志,然后它完美地工作,因为你如何从你的竞争对手中区分开来呢,他们可能会采用相同的东西?有道理。你如何看待这个行业面临的标准背后的复杂性?有那么多不同的标准和集成。是否会有某个时刻事情会变得更容易,OCPP版本不会
更新得那么频繁,或ISO 15118或其他东西?嗯,从一个时代开始,当时许多充电器仍然有专有协议,我很高兴有标准,尽管可能似乎有太多。但我认为这是一个我们软件供应商必须解决的问题,而CPO应该是这个解决方案已经到位的受益者,而不是必须关心它。所以我看我们的角色是这样的
解决这个问题。其中一部分是用软件解决,一部分是通过我们所属的组织来解决,这些组织指导标准的制定。但最终,当行业在增长时,这是我认为相当正常的事情,必须找到事情应该如何工作的方式,有时还会犯错。因为如果你太害怕犯错,你可能会
花太多时间去完善,但到时候已经太晚了。我是说,市场不会等你,所以我宁愿有一些不完美但已经到位的标准,也不愿意做得完美但太晚了。好的,在这个叫Smart Charge by RiDERgy的播客中,让我们谈一点关于smart charging的话题。你对任何与smart charging相关的事情有什么看法,例如动态价格,或消费自产的太阳能,或双向充电?是的,
你有什么愿景,你怎么认为?我认为这里,当你谈论smart charging时,我们必须考虑到我们不仅仅是在进入消费者开始成为主流消费者的阶段。所以这些是早期多数人。这些是那些不是因为他们非常关心smart charging才购买电动汽车的人。我是说,他们只是认为:现在是时候了,是的。我是
有环保意识的,但这不是说我不会为此做出妥协。这只是另一个好处,对环境也有好处。这也是更便宜的选择。这是更方便的选择。这些是我们必须处理的期望,这意味着我们不应该期望客户会特意去做smart charging。所以所有关于smart charging的事情都必须是聪明的。它必须在
场景,完全由提供商处理。不要期望用户会自己安排充电。期望他们想要好处,但不想要麻烦。所以必须让它变得方便,我认为我们看到和参与的许多实验都低估了为客户提供便利的重要性。他们追求最大化,追求最优化。好吧,你可以
牺牲一些节省来换取便利。我给你举一个我们和几个客户尝试过的例子。这是关于目的地充电,主要是路边充电,人们也在那里过夜停车。这个想法是给人们机会让充电在非高峰时段进行,所以你在晚上7点插上,但实际上我们想在11点之后充电,那时候更便宜。所以这个一个版本是用户必须选择他们什么时候离开,以及他们是否想要便宜或昂贵的充电,结果根本没人用它。然后我们想到了一个更简单的方法。我说:让我们做一个Eco和Boost选项。Eco,我们决定什么时候给车充电。所以只要放一个通知:
你的充电将使用任何可用且合理的功率进行。Boost,任何可用的,我们都给你,你要么支付每千瓦时的高价格。所以Boost是常规价格,Eco是低价。你选择一次,价格就一样了。所以如果你选择Eco,你就是低价,无论我们什么时候充电。Boost,你是高价,我们给你任何可用的。这对客户来说简单得多,每个人都
用了它。不是每个人都选择了Eco,有些人就是想用Boost,但每个人都选择了一个选项,因为它非常简单。你不需要想太多。好的,我很灵活,我会得到低价。我不灵活,我就用常规价格充电。是的,还有一个,Elaway,我看到,他们是你在挪威的一个客户。几个月前他们很兴奋,他们
在发布关于一个项目的信息。你也能分享更多一些吗?我认为那是有关节点和电网的。是的,我认为那是和节点市场一起的。这是我们和Hafsund(一家挪威公用事业公司)以及Elaway一起做的项目,我们将大量电动车辆注册到灵活性市场,允许他们主要进行削峰。我
的意思是,这是灵活性交易,所以有人发布灵活性请求,然后你符合本地电网的要求。它是,不,它不是传输电网。这是用于配电网络的,用于配电网络。前提很简单。我的意思是,在Elaway的情况下,这些是住宅协会。人们在夜间为他们的车辆充电,通常他们
需要几个小时的充电,他们连接了8个小时。所以当那两个小时发生时,这根本不会影响用户体验,特别是当你提供灵活性时,你交易的是可用灵活性的大约10%,这意味着没有任何车辆在任何给定时间不充电。比如说,车辆计划在晚上11点到凌晨2点之间以全功率充电,好吧,实际上是全功率的90%,当你
在一个大型网络上聚合许多同时连接的车辆时,这允许你向市场提供灵活性。也许某人原本应该发电,但由于天气改变或他们有技术问题而做不了。他们与其支付罚款和费用,会向别人付费来实际减少他们的消费,这就是我们可以做的。
大规模做这件事。这不花哨,不是V2G,很简单,但利用率非常低。我认为可以实现的最大好处是智能充电在于调度,而不是V2G。我认为V2G在硬件方面、入门方面仍然太昂贵了。我们仍然有来自客户的不确定性:好吧,当你给我的电池放电时会发生什么?这会影响电池寿命吗?我们在以聪明的方式进行调度方面做得还不够。
这里有很大的潜力,对吧?那么,所以你提到了几个,但除了用户体验和客户体验,让它变简单,以及V2G的成本,你还看到什么其他的挑战,特别是让调度,或者说V1G或智能充电,在大规模上可能,然后还有V2G或双向充电大规模上?挑战?我认为一件事是市场不够多,因为没有人以大规模的方式注册车辆。因为当有双方进行交易时市场才存在。所以在灵活性中,你需要知道你可以交易灵活性。我的意思是,如果没有人来满足灵活性请求,为什么还要注册它呢?所以我认为必须发生的一件事是你必须弄清楚我们如何解决这个先有鸡还是先有蛋的问题。也许我们应该只是开始注册所有可能的智能充电使用
场景,这样在存在的市场上,因为这可能也会创造新的市场,吸引需要这种灵活性的参与者,但到目前为止他们还没有在这些市场上活跃。因为最后一切都是关于平衡,你需要双方。我们有车辆;我们没有真正将它们作为一种可以以这种方式管理的资源来展示。如果我们这样做,我认为需求会
为其他市场参与者创造机会。好的,那么我们快要结束了。展望未来的愿景和你接下来的几年,可以说,你有一个雄心勃勃的愿景在充电后端的市场细分中拥有25%的市场份额,对吧?所以你预见到达到那里最大的挑战是什么?好吧,首先,我要说的是我们只关心市场份额当
市场存在时。我认为这是关键的一点。我们不想最大化我们的市场份额,如果市场本身很小的话。我的意思是,充电后端市场可能仍然相对较小和分散,但它会增长,因为越来越多的运营商需要真正适当的软件来管理他们的充电网络和运营。如果我们可以成为其中的25%,我认为这将意味着我们正在真正改变一些东西。
市场足够大并且我们正在改变某些东西。我的意思是,如果市场只有1%的增长,我们没有进入,这对我没有帮助。所以关键是首先为市场创造价值,然后我认为市场份额会跟上。但我认为最大的挑战是,我们需要解决这个软件层面上的问题,使得这一切在规模上真正工作。正如我们之前讨论的,这不仅仅是关于优化充电,而是关于解决整个生态系统,电网、市场、客户、运营商。这需要与许多利益相关者进行非常密切的合作,我认为这是最大的挑战。
市场稳定下来。所以当我们达到充电基础设施建设的50%以上时,这就是你衡量市场份额的时候。因为在那之前,你可以获得市场份额,然后就被卡住了,而被那些随市场增长的人超越。但我们看待的是我们所做的基本上每一个决定,我们都在问:它是否关闭了通往主导地位的道路?如果
它关闭了这条道路,我们就不做。选择正确的道路要困难得多,但识别一条不能帮助你到达目的地的道路相对容易。同时,采取那条道路有时非常诱人,因为它可以给你否则很难实现的短期增长。比如说,如果我们要以
更直接的方式进入市场,特别是在那些已经比较密集的市场,好吧,我们可以增长得更快,但那样我们就会与我们的一些客户竞争。我们会成为主导平台吗?不会。所以我们不做这个,这就是我们衡量每一个决定的方式。我们打算在接下来的几年内做的是与生态系统合作更多,这样我们可以通过更好的集成为我们的客户带来更多价值,与其他能帮助我们的客户实现和达成目标的供应商和提供商更好地合作。这将是我们未来两年的主要主题。是的,非常有趣。还有哪些其他创新让你感到兴奋,会在行业的未来出现,也考虑到那些看起来非常遥远但实际上很近的东西,比如自动驾驶
或其他类型的,哦,有两件事让我很期待看到。一个是无线充电,它与智能充电相辅相成,因为我认为这真的会释放智能充电的潜力。因为如果你能在车辆停泊时接入它,人们不需要去插上他们的车,他们不必这样做,但如果他们只是停下来,它已经连接到电网,这真的会释放
智能充电的机会。我真的很想看到这种情况发生,但这是个远大的目标,它需要汽车原始设备制造商、硬件制造商和基础设施在通用标准和技术上进行合作。我认为这不会很快看到,但我为它的发生感到兴奋,如果我错了,它实际上更快发生,我会很高兴。另一件事是用户体验,我真的很想看到
即插即充被广泛采用。它目前的形式可能不是完美的,但总比必须使用应用程序或与RFID卡搏斗要好。我真的想看到一种无缝体验,你选择你的订阅,然后你就去充电器,插上。所以这是我真的很期待的两件事。一个是从无线充电与智能充电以及车网互动能释放多少价值的角度。另一个只是从纯粹的用户体验角度,我认为这将对电动汽车采用有益。好的。你最后有什么想传达给用户的信息,人们怎样能与你联系,比如说?好吧,我在LinkedIn上,这就是你可以与我联系的方式。但我的信息主要是对任何对电动汽车犹豫不决的人:要知道事情每年都在变化,速度非常快。
所以你的先入之见可能已经过时了。不要等待。是的,当然。好的,谢谢你,Arlene。谢谢。与Orle进行了多么迷人的讨论,从一个十几岁的几乎要辍学的学生,到创办了多家公司,特别是与他从十几岁起就一起工作的合作伙伴开发他人的想法,然后最终用自己的想法从事电动出行,不仅创办了自己的想法,而且还取得了巨大的成功。
这个故事真的非常令人印象深刻,从作为局外人开始,通过这个行业工作,能够自筹资金然后以大量牵引力在全球范围内扩展。而不仅仅是在一个国家或几个国家,而是真的在全球60个国家,这甚至更令人印象深刻。他的雄心勃勃的态度在他的愿景中也得到了很好的突出:成为这个非常困难市场中的主导者。
难以理解的,来自CPO、MSP等等,他为我们分解了这些,真正向我们展示了未来支付的角色是什么,以及他如何定位他的公司成为一个非常开放的生态系统,与专业化的参与者合作,比如例如RiDERgy。以及他如何看到地平线上有吸引人的新技术,包括即插即充和感应充电,这些将是游戏改变者。以及他对智能充电生态系统的看法,我不会
不同意确实用户体验和客户体验需要尽可能简单,就像他描述的生态加速模式,但也从V1G开始,然后才到V2G,这确实在大多数情况下仍然非常昂贵地运营,不幸的是。所以,正如他所说,不要坚持对电动汽车的老旧看法,因为事情变化很快,市场规模正在翻倍,正如他坚定地说的那样。继续关注,向你认为会喜欢这一集的人推荐,我们很快见。
市场稳定下来。所以当我们达到充电基础设施建设的50%以上时,这就是你衡量市场份额的时候。
不会很快看到,但我为它的发生感到兴奋。
继续关注,向你认为会喜欢这一集的人推荐,我们很快见。
Welcome to the Smart Charge by RiDERgy podcast. This is Claudio Geyken, founder and CEO of RiDERgy. This is your show to learn about all things energy management and smart charging innovation for electric vehicles and fleets.
Today I'm joined by Orlin Radev, CEO and founder of AMPECO, the EV charging platform, or back end, or charge point management system as you want to call it, powering large-scale networks worldwide. Since announcing a 26 million Series B in November 2024, bringing total funding to over 42 million, AMPECO has scaled to 180 clients across 60 markets. On its hardware-agnostic CPMS platform, AMPECO's footprint keeps accelerating from 62,000 managed charge points in early 2023 to close to 200,000 today, and marquee utilities like
E.ON operating across 11 European countries on the platform. We'll talk with Orlin about his serial entrepreneur experience, how he scaled so fast, what his take is on the future of the EV market, what makes this software unique, and what's next for smart charging. Let's get started. OK, Orlin, nice to have you here. You just arrived, I think, to Berlin, right? Yeah, I just flew in and right away I came here to talk to you. How long does it take from Sofia to Berlin? It's 2 hours,
so it's not far, but still, you have to take the time for the airport as well. And this time I think you made it sometimes with an electric vehicle to Berlin, and this time you came by plane though, right? Yeah, it's much faster with a plane. I've made it with an EV last year - I came for the conference with an EV and it took me... I had to sleep
at a hotel actually. I slept in a hotel in Budapest for 2 hours because the way I planned it, I would have had to arrive there at around 10:00 p.m. I spent like 8 hours at a border. It was awful. But from this year, by the way, no such border control as long as I don't go through Serbia, which I went last time. From this year, Bulgaria is now part of the
Schengen. So as long as I go through Romania - before, it was only for flights. From this year it's the actual physical borders. So if I go through Romania, I wouldn't be waiting at the border for 8 hours. That's good, yeah, for any EV driver out there, good to know. Yeah, and by the way, EVs actually may have a benefit in this case, because you're not spending that much energy just
standing there. Yeah. I'm not sure if you follow the Electro Trucker a bit or if you know about him. He's been moving throughout Europe with his electric truck, and he went all the way through Romania from Germany to Romania to Turkey, and he was also showing the border control - especially if you need to transport stuff, it was like almost a day of waiting between Turkey and... Yeah, these borders really can take some time, especially
if you're transporting something with a truck, yeah. So anyways, it's not about that today. Before we get into AMPECO and really into the details of the industry and the EV industry, can you share a little bit about yourself? How would you introduce yourself? What's your background, so to say? Well, depending on who's asking, I would like to say I'm an entrepreneur, or I would say I'm a product guy, but maybe I'm more of a product guy that has
turned entrepreneur. I've been building software products - initially for my own ventures and for other startups and for enterprises - ever since I finished high school. This is how I see myself: as a builder, as someone that solves a business challenge with a software product. Yeah, I learned that you already built something in high school, so how was the start really for you to build? Where did it come from? Have you
ever thought about that? Well, I think this is a very classical story. I started with solving a problem that I experienced firsthand. I was really into games and I wanted to play with my friends, but we didn't have broadband internet, so I started an internet service provider - together with my co-founder and CTO of AMPECO. He was then in college, I was in high school, and we started this company. We sold it in like 9 months,
mostly because we started it in January and I was in the 11th grade - not the last one, but the one before that. So by September I had to decide: am I going to do a business, or am I going to finish high school? High school dropout doesn't sound like a great start in life. I mean, college dropouts - this plays out well for some people in Silicon Valley - but high school dropout didn't sound like a
great start. So we sold the company, but I was hooked on entrepreneurship and quickly after that I found a way to continue doing this. I've co-founded probably around 10 companies before AMPECO. For the longest time, the one I had the longest was a software development company where we mostly built the products of other startups, and by working with them we became co-founders of some of those. This has been an exciting journey
before AMPECO, which is now our focus for the past 7 years - something that we are building of our own. Interesting. So after high school you decided to study something like computer engineering, or what was it? I was studying network engineering, telecommunications, sort of, yeah - networking. But I didn't go far. I mean, I studied this for 2 years and then I decided I'm not doing this. I also tried programming. By that
Alex, my co-founder, he was working at a software development company, and I went and had an internship with him for 3 months, tried to become a developer, and I figured I won't be a developer. I mean, I like what developers do, but I want them to do it for me - I'll not be the one developing things. And eventually I switched my studies to management, and this is what I graduated from college.
But yeah, I've been excited about building software products, only I don't want to be the one writing the code. But you have the ability to write - did you ever write before, or is it? No, I mean I tried and I decided it's not for me. You know, he's writing the specifications, but someone else is actually building it. And the co-founder that you were working with, he's more of a coder type. Yeah, he's - I
don't know - the best engineer I know, and a software engineer, so yeah, he's always been building the stuff that I come up with. Nice. Yeah, that's a good person to know. Yeah. And then how did you create this company - the software development one? Was it during the studies or after? It was actually after the studies, and it was both of us, my co-founder and I. We worked at other companies - not together,
I mean he worked for another company, I worked for another company - but we started it because we really wanted to build a software company where we build our own software product. We didn't have the idea though, so we figured we'll gather the team and we'll be building someone else's ideas until we come up with one. And it took us like 10 years. In 10 years, I mean, we were still building someone else's ideas, and it was amazingly exciting,
don't get me wrong, and I learned a lot - we both learned a lot - but it went for far too long before we actually ended up deciding, well, we're just building someone else's ideas. At some point we need to decide what we're building in this world. This happened 7 years ago, and Ampeco is the result of that. And just to give a flavor, what type of ideas were you working
on before Ampeco? Yeah, as I said, it was someone else's ideas, so they were in very different sectors. For example, we've built warehouse management software. One of the exciting things we built was actually an online farmers' market - or at least it looked to the end consumer as an online farmers' market, but it was more of a logistics platform that made it possible to source produce from very small farms and get them delivered to
customers directly in the city. And it was a lot of work. I got involved in this way more than just the product - at some point I actually managed this company. It was amazing, exciting, and it introduced me to sustainable foods, producing food in a sustainable way, smaller farms and what they struggle with. And yeah, it was very exciting, but again it was someone else's idea, which I got excited
about and helped to build the product that makes it possible, but eventually it wasn't mine. Yeah, nice. And how did you then discover the market need for Ampeco? How was that inception, so to say? Well, interesting story. I mean, I always thought I was going to build a software product. At some point, after 10 years building someone else's ideas, I said that's enough. Let's put a pause on this and decide what we're going to
build. And the decision I came up with was actually that I'm going to run a car sharing business - so not software at all, or at least not pure software. I got the idea when I was visiting Munich and got to rent a BMW. I don't know what the service was called then - like Sharen or something? Yeah, but it was before ShareNow. Anyway, I
liked the idea. It wasn't electric, by the way - it was just the idea of the shared economy where you don't own the vehicle, you get to use it, it gets used by multiple people, it doesn't stand idle. And so I really liked this and I said, well, this sounds like something that I would do. I mean, our previous endeavor with the farm-to-table thing was kind of in the shared economy
as well. So yeah, I decided this is a great idea, I researched the topic, and decided this is what I'm going to do. And I thought these cars should be electric. I thought at some point they're going to be autonomous, but at least from the start they will be electric. So while researching what goes into building a car sharing fleet and running a car sharing business with electric vehicles, I figured I'll be doing this in Sofia, in Bulgaria.
We didn't have an EV charging network to use, so we'd have to build one. I went to talk to hardware manufacturers and thought I'd be buying EV charging stations so that I can use them with my fleet. When I asked them about how I'm going to connect the chargers to my car sharing software, I didn't get very good answers - until eventually I stumbled upon a software company from Austria that was actually building EV charging management software. And
I was like, why do you need EV charging management software? I mean, I have the hardware, I have my car sharing - I should be able to connect the hardware somehow. Well, it turns out EV charging is way more complex than what I thought, and I got to dig deeper into that. More and more I realized it's actually a very underappreciated topic and space which has a lot of complexity. I mean, you have physical devices
So you have the IoT component, you have the energy management component, you have all these billing and AI operations aspects to it. It's an interesting intersection between transportation and energy, and yeah, the more I got to understand the space, the more I got excited. Eventually I actually pitched to my co-founder the idea: man, we should be doing an EV charging management software. So let's do what we know how to do, build a software product.
And yeah, with some research we ended up with a thesis of building a platform that others can use to run an EV charging business, and we dropped the car sharing part. Yeah, I didn't get to have a car sharing feed after all, but yeah. Fair, fair. And yeah, the beginning was - this is always and usually in business - a different story than what it is now. So maybe you can also share how it's changed from the initial idea
to today, or did it at all actually? Yeah, I mean, for us it changed a lot, because it started with: let's start a car sharing business, to: let's build the software platform that would manage EV charging networks. So it was a huge change from one idea to another. But once we settled on the EV charging space and did our research, we had a very specific idea of what we
are going to be in this space, and to be honest we haven't changed that a lot since then. The way we looked at it was: we tried to imagine how this space would look when there are no more doublings to happen. I'm thinking - this is an emerging market. In an emerging market, until the market settles, until you get to become mainstream, you have multiple doublings to do. So every doubling comes with a change of technology, business cases,
business models, so things look very different. But once it settles, you want to understand what the market looks like then. We figured it would be a market which would be relatively consolidated. We don't see that there would be thousands of EV charging networks in any given market, but it wouldn't be so consolidated that it's only companies doing fully vertical. Like, if I make a parallel to car sharing, I don't think it would be
- I think it would be much more consolidated, and this means it makes much more sense to be fully vertically integrated, build your own software, even build your own hardware, and run your car sharing business. I think this is where Tesla is going, this is where probably Waymo is going. But in EV charging, I think there'll be just enough fragmentation to justify a common platform that can be used by the actors in this space.
So we asked ourselves: what would this platform look like when the market matures, and we worked back from there. If we need to get there in - I mean, we thought it would be 15 years; now I think it's 15 years from now. But if we go back from this point, how do we get there? What are the paths we have to follow? And we started with something
that's marketable, and we climbed up to the point where we sell to the ICP that we envisioned would be our ideal customer eventually. Got it. And I also read or learned that you were an outsider in the industry and it was hard for you in the beginning to really grasp the basics and understand how the market worked. How did you go about that
to get really knowledgeable about the market? Yeah, we were absolute outsiders. I mean, when you think about it, I'm starting this from Sofia, at a time where we barely had any EV charging networks there. So I didn't have a chance to base this on my own experience. I had no previous experience in the energy space, transportation space, or infrastructure. I'm coming entirely from the software space with
zero connections or experience in EV charging, which is great, because I have no baggage or preconceptions. Absolutely - you were a blank slate. Just to be clear, nobody - because you were, I think, 6 co-founders as well? Yeah, we were 6 co-founders. To paint the picture: it's me and my CTO, then another friend of ours who is our Chief Commercial Officer, Kim, he comes from selling enterprise software, and then
the other 3 are engineers, software engineers. So really no experience in what we're going to be building - other than we know how to build software. That's what we know; we don't know anything about the space we are going to be building this software for. No preconceptions, a blank page that we can fill in only with the right things, if we have the luck to learn the right things. So we had to become
insiders from outsiders; we had to become insiders. The way we did it - our first year was 2019. We went to all the events we could find. Some actually were quite far-fetched and didn't move us that far. I mean, one of the first events we went to was actually in Dubai. So again, not the place to learn about EV charging, but I mean, it actually, it
actually helped us paint a picture as well. But yeah, it took a lot of conversations with people that are already doing something in this space, and a lot of critical thinking so that we can filter out someone else's preconceptions. I mean, we've gotten a lot of advice that we didn't follow, and I think we were right not to follow. Do you mind - I'll give you an example. I mean, a friend
of mine. Early on - I don't know if it was 2019, it was probably 2019 that that happened. We met Thomas Diver, and he had just stepped off as CEO of Hebject. He gave us amazing insights - amazing insights. He was so generous with his time. He invited us to Berlin, had a full-day workshop with us to help us hone our value proposition
and generally our business model and strategy and so on. But mostly - although again, amazing insights, super generous with his time - he told us: "Guys, you're entering an already crowded space. Very little room for differentiation. Go do something else." Focus on fleets, for example - that was one of the ideas he had, because what you're trying to do, you would have to outcompete people that are doing it already and are doing it
very well. That was in 2019 - I think it was 2019, yeah. And that was one advice we didn't follow. But if I knew what he knew and I was advising these two guys from Sofia, I'd probably give them the same advice. So again, everything else that we learned from him was so helpful and we incorporated it, but we didn't follow that advice and we
pushed through. Good example. I like Thomas as well - he was a podcast guest too, for those that want to listen. Very good insights. But indeed, that's a very insightful point: once you're an outsider, you are free to just be naive and also challenge preconceived notions. I think this naivety is a very important aspect of entrepreneurship. Very often it's the naivety - not knowing why something wouldn't work - that makes you
make it work. With everything I know today, if I go back to 2019 and have to formulate a plan of what we're going to do, I'd be crazy to do exactly what we did and hope that it will work out. But yeah, I didn't know that back then. So - do you remember, on the flip side, something that was given to you as advice that you cherish a lot, that was super useful, that you actually implemented? I don't know, it's
probably - I mean, there are things that are details, but all of them stuck for sure. I can't pinpoint a specific one, but we learned a lot from talking to people, and that's the only way we could do it. We had to tap into someone else's knowledge and then stitch these things together so that we could formulate our own thesis and plans. And we tried to show progress as soon as
we had some, even if it was just mockups of something, so that we could get instant feedback - be it from customers or insiders. And this guided us in figuring out how to do it. And the best event that was most useful to you in that time - was it the ICNC that you went back to, or was it - I think there are two events that really made a difference
for us. One was actually the first industry event that we went to: it was MOVE, in London, in 2019 as well. I think it was in March, so we started the company in October 2018. In March we went to MOVE as a startup - with startup tickets or something. They have this line of 1m booths with a poster there, yeah, exactly. And so what
we didn't have was any budget to spend. What I had was five more co-founders - so six founders. I made sure we rented an Airbnb and we all six went there. I mean, if you can't show much more than this, just show numbers so that we can have more conversations. In the end, we were still at a phase where we had something to show, but it was mostly mockups and an early version
of the software, and mostly we needed feedback and we needed to learn. There are only so many conversations a single person can have, so I brought everyone. And it was amazing. This is the event where we met one of our first quite significant customers. We didn't sign them then, but we got them excited then - they were actually an exhibitor and a sponsor. They got excited by what we showed them, and a year
later at the same event we signed the contract. I mean, it was symbolic - we signed them about a month earlier, but we made it official on paper there. So that was the first one that made a difference. And the second one was the first ICNC that we went to, which really - the value that we got out of it in the form of conversations and insights really accelerated us. Nice, and
so the first customer was then also the one from the MOVE event? Yeah, they were not the first customer, because in the meantime we signed a few other customers, but they were the first in the UK of significant size, and they helped us develop the platform in a direction that made it suitable for others like them. And usually it's difficult to find the first ones - what was the process
To convince those that obviously asked the question "Where have you done it before?" - just think about what we are selling. It's at the core of your business. It's the one thing that can't fail, and it's the one thing that you connect everything else to, and you buy it from a company that's a startup from Bulgaria. So think about how difficult a sale this is.
We didn't have any traction or proof points, so we had to compensate with value. It was about how much better it is for the use cases that you need to solve. And we just tried to make sure it's so much better that you have to make a compromise with everything else, because again it's a core platform, business-critical ones, and it's from a company that doesn't have the track record to prove that it's solid and it's
reliable. And now, taking a step back and getting to the meat of the issue, so to say - I know, talking to investors personally as well, people are not so familiar with the space, and it's a complicated one as you already pointed out. So how do you explain what is the problem you're solving with your company, and what is your company about in simple terms for the listeners that might not be in the weeds of all
this jargon - CPMS, MSPs, etc.? Yeah, that's a tough one. I mean, by the way, this is probably why we didn't do so well on the first round of financing that we were seeking, because I was never able to explain what we do in simple terms. But I think with core vertical software it's sometimes like this, because you're not doing one thing - you're doing a lot of things that are purposely built for a specific industry, very well
and they integrate very well together, and the value comes from that. Because many of our early investors that I talked to, they wanted to hear what's the secret sauce - what's the one thing that people are buying our software for, the USP. And that's the thing: they're not buying it for one thing, they're buying it because it's a lot of things that work very well together and that fit their use case. But in essence,
what we're doing is vertical software for EV charging networks. That's the one software they definitely use - and they may use others - but this is what connects their chargers, their users, their partners, their billing. This is their operations. This is the operating system of an EV charging network. That's what we are, that's what we're doing. And just making it simpler - what is the problem you're really solving with this software for the charge point operator? Let me come
back to the example of my question: how do I connect your charger to my EV from my car-sharing software? The problem is, you don't - you need a system that has the charger connected; that's this operating system. And the problem is, there's no EV charging network that doesn't have such software, so it's not a problem like "I need to know that my charger is online" - yeah, that's one thing it's solving if done right, but
that's not the problem you come up with. If you want to run any business in EV charging, you need a software management platform like ours. So that's a great place to be as well, because this is software that you don't throw out - you may switch, but you can't give it up. If you're doing SaaS and it's optional, if you're selling to enterprises something that they can use or they cannot
use, that's one thing. If they have to replace it because their business doesn't exist without the software, your stickiness is much higher. And just to break it down - you would agree with me, right, that the core problems and the solutions you're bringing are: on the one hand, if you don't have a connected charger or software to manage it, you risk the charger not being usable. You cannot accept payments, you cannot bill as you need to, you cannot manage load. That's
the problem in reality - that's not even a question of whether to consider if you're going to run a business in EV charging. You have to have the charger connected, because otherwise you don't know if it's online, you can't say who can charge and who cannot, at what price, whether to accept payment - none of this is possible. So it's not so much a question of do I or do I not. It's a matter of what software do I use to manage
my charging network, right? Just to also give the listeners a bit of an aside - maybe you can fill in. I think you're now at the Series B stage. The latest - last year we raised our Series B round, so this was a $26 million US dollar investment. And previously, in total, we've raised like $43 million - that's quite a lot. And you are a company of how many people right now? We are nearing 200
people at the moment. And I've seen the latest - 60 countries already, right? You're operating - we're in more than 60 countries, pretty much every continent where there are cars. There's a customer using our software to charge EVs. Our market - I mean, still the biggest concentration is Europe, like 60% is Europe, but we have customers in Australia, New Zealand, or in North America, and even customers in Africa. And yeah, it's not in
South America as well, so it's quite well spread out and used in a lot of countries, so that's quite impressive. And how would you explain the scaling that you did in these years? What convinced so many people to adopt your solution? Well, one thing is it starts with the strategy. We decided that we are only going to build the software platform that others use on the ground - in specific
markets to run their business, which meant that we don't have to be in a market in order for our software to be applicable to that market. We just needed to make sure that it works for whoever's doing business in that market. So when we signed - actually one of our first customers was in Taiwan. They came to us around Christmas 2019. They visited us in Sofia and we signed there. We didn't have anyone in Taiwan. We didn't have any
marketing to this region, but the software was applicable because we made sure that we build a platform that is not tied to specific markets or specific geography. This means that we just need to find the companies that would use our software to run an EV charging business in these markets, which makes it easier compared to having to actually be present in a market - like building your own network there, or even if you're providing more of a service, like if you're
going to individual site hosts - say a hotel - and you want them to buy charging stations and monetize them through our platform. You have to have at least sales there, but probably some field service and support as well. We don't go there. We sell to whoever's going to sell to the hotel, and with this strategy it was easier for us to find the customers that actually then build out the network. To give you some idea about
the scale: our customers today operate around 200,000 charge points, and this is spread between around 180 customers, so we only had to sell to 180 customers in order to have 200,000 chargers on the platform. Got it. And just to make sure I understood - all these aspects like when a charger failed and so on, that was basically not handled by you, which allowed you to scale faster because that would be handled by somebody else. You don't have
to have a local presence too much. Exactly. Our job is to make sure that the software will detect this, notify them, and give them ways to troubleshoot. But then the actual service is provided by the charging network. There is also one key aspect that maybe I'm not as knowledgeable about: the billing and payments aspects. I think that also quite highly depends on every geography. Isn't there a hurdle to scaling that fast? Or is that one aspect where you have to
adapt to geographies and different markets? This is why early on we didn't process payments directly. We make it possible for our customers to process payments. We started very early on with almost 10 different payment processors for different markets, and today we have around 40 different ways to process payments, and we have integrations with invoicing solutions for different markets so that we can cover these aspects. But in the end, the seller - the merchant - is our
customer. So we make sure that our software makes it easy for them to accept payment, to do the accounting, payouts and so on when payouts are involved, but we are not the party doing this. So we don't have to be registered in a country or pay taxes in a country in order to sell there, because it's our customers selling there. We just have to make sure that the software supports them. And when I say 'just', I mean it's not like
it's a very easy thing to do, because it really increases the complexity when you have to do it for so many markets. But it's easier for us to scale the software than to scale the people in different markets and the operations in different markets. So in other words, you made the variables accessible to the merchant, and then he takes care that it complies with the local regulations. We go as far as to make sure that they comply, but it's
not us actually issuing the invoice. It's our software that issues the invoice, but the name on the invoice is the name of the company that is our customer. We do make sure that it's compliant - we have a team following that. Their job is to study regulations and how they apply to the businesses of our customers so that we can build it into the software. But in the end it's our customer that's the one
doing business in these different markets. Got it. And you're based out of Bulgaria - do you see a strategic advantage of being based there or coming from there? Yeah, the most strategic advantage is that the founders are there, so - joking aside - in the beginning what played a role was that we have access to talent. At some point, at a certain scale, you actually get limited because on the other hand the market is not that
big. You have access to talent when you need 10 people, but when you need 100 people with a particular skill set, then you're better off seeking that talent in a bigger market. For the start it was an advantage, but it's mostly where we started from. It's not something that - if I had to choose where to start a business - I would specifically go and start it in Sofia with what we're doing, but this is where
We made it for the origin story, yeah. And you don't have the team all there - you have a more distributed team, or how is the company structure and what is your view for the future? Well, when COVID hit and the first lockdown hit, we were 16 people, and two years later we were 40-something people. So between the different times of lockdowns we had to grow the team fully distributed, so we built the whole
company in a way that it works remotely. So even though I say a lot of the team is in Bulgaria, they're not really all in Sofia - because in Sofia's office we have like 50 people coming to the office out of 150, 117 in Bulgaria in total. The rest work from home, from other locations in Bulgaria. We have a couple more offices, and we also have people in other places. We have people in the UK, in France, in the
States, in Netherlands. So yeah, we're not really tied to a single location. The company has been built in a way - also by necessity, because we had no other option - but because we built it that way, this now allows us to hire where we find the talent rather than having to find the talent in a particular location. And how - one key advice when starting a
company that one gets is: focus on a specific market, a specific region, a specific use case. But it seems like you didn't follow that advice, or at least you proved that it can work with scaling very, very fast to so many different geographies. What's your thinking behind that? Well, part of it comes from the fact that we had no other option but to choose a market that is not our local market, because our local market doesn't exist. So
easy choice, yeah, easy choice. But then the second part is we were looking again at how does this market that we're entering look when it matures? How many of these platforms would there be? And I don't think there'll be that many. I think there'll be probably one dominant, two more of significant size, and then some very niche ones. And my job is to figure out how do we get to be the one dominant one, and I don't think it would be a local
one. I don't think it would be one that's built for Germany or one that's built for the UK market. So from the start we had to build the platform that would be the one dominant platform when the market matures, and this one would be used in all kinds of markets. So we decided: let's learn from these markets early on so that we don't close off our platform or tailor it too much to a specific market, because especially in emerging technology, sometimes
the advancements don't come from the markets that are first getting to maturity, or at least to early adoption. I mean, none of the markets in Europe have reached maturity - even in the Nordics, still yet to get there. But a lot of things that early on define the market later get disrupted. Because if I get back to these doubles - when you have multiple doubles to
do, any new double is a significant increase; it allows for new things to outpace old things. Just to explain the double concept, because I'm not sure - the thing about the doubling is: if your market doubles in size, when the market doubles in size, this means that if you hold a certain market share with a certain type of business model and the market doubles in size, someone else who has just started with a disruptive business
model can already outpace you just because the market allows them to grow. So you don't lose business, but you lose market share because the market grows so significantly. So when you have this rapid increase of the market, you have to be nimble and you have to be able to adapt, because it's still not settled, it's still not clear what's working. And we thought there'd be markets that - I mean, if
we focused from the beginning, say, on Germany or the UK or the Nordics, we'd be missing out on things that may actually define the future of this space, because we are not in these emerging core markets which may skip steps. It has happened in communications, it has happened in pretty much every other technology. Markets that are later to start may skip steps, they may not have the same costs, and they may actually advance faster at a later stage, as long
as there's more growth to happen. You don't want to miss out on these opportunities, and this is what formed our thinking and this is why we started from the beginning and continue to be quite spread out in terms of where we sell. And it's not an easy thing to do, because it's much easier to focus on use cases and markets where you already have concentration, and when you put more focus there you're more competitive and
you get more of the existing business. But in the long term this may actually be the wrong play, and we believe the right approach for our particular business is to go with this more broad, multi-market approach. Yeah, got it. Just maybe for the listeners very quickly - there are different key market players, and I'll explain this so that you can give your view. There's the charge point operator that operates the chargers, then there's the
MSP - mobility service providers - that have the payment cards or the payment app that they usually use for charging. And then there's the so-called CPMSs; that's what Ampeco would say is a form of positioning, offering software for the charge point operators. And then there are roaming hubs that try to connect them all together, like Hubject and the ICNC that we have been dropping as a name, which ensures that everybody can talk to
each other somehow. So where do you see the market going? Different markets have a different split in terms of numbers of these different types of market actors, and what's your view on that - you said the ten-year vision? Well, the first thing is that EV charging infrastructure follows EV adoption. You don't build the infrastructure way in advance; you kind of follow the EV adoption. In some early developments you may have
to build the infrastructure first, but this is very early on. This is why we had Ionity, and this is why a fast-charging network was built by a joint venture by automotive OEMs - because you needed some infrastructure in order to foster EV adoption. But mainstream infrastructure is built to be used, and what is using this infrastructure are electric vehicles. So how fast it is developing, and in what markets, the pace depends on the adoption
in these markets. So we are looking at infrastructure that works with a lag. When you see a drop in EV adoption - so what this means is you're looking at new car sales, how many of those are electric - and when in a market there is a drop or slowdown, you can expect that infrastructure build-out will slow down as well. When there is an increase, you can expect that infrastructure will follow. It may take a year to catch up, because
infrastructure doesn't react at the same pace as consumers do. But this is what we're looking at: in what markets EVs are being sold, at what pace, and this tells us how infrastructure build-out would look. Europe at the moment has just returned to an accelerated EV adoption this year, so we can expect an acceleration in EV charging infrastructure build-out. The US has seen a steadier growth -
they're not growing as fast. So you can expect again that infrastructure wouldn't be built out at the same pace as in Europe. And there are other emerging markets - by the way, you have Brazil and Mexico where EVs are being adopted at an amazing pace, mostly because of Chinese brands who are selling there, Australia as well - and then infrastructure build-out follows as well. What we see is that on the infrastructure side, which
are the CPOs that you mentioned - charge point operators, who manage the networks - there will be consolidation, mostly on the high-power charging side, where this is the kind of business that resembles the petrol station business much more than other aspects of EV charging. Because other EV charging operators, like CPOs, are parking operators - anyone with a parking space. If you can imagine that every car is electric, where does it make sense to charge an electric car? Well, first
of all, when it's parked - this is the easiest and most convenient. You don't have to go to a specific place to charge. If you have to charge your petrol car, you have to specifically go to a place to charge it. With EVs, you're already parking somewhere, so ideally at home - but not everyone has their own parking space. And some of these EVs would be shared; I hope more would be shared. So you look at where do they spend time, and that
is a place where they will be charging. Obviously when you travel on the Autobahn you'd want to have fast charging, and this is where it's consolidated and it looks like a petrol station. Everywhere else it actually looks more like a parking operator. And it's not just parking operators that are becoming CPOs - it's anyone with a parking space: the retailers, the office buildings, the
residential buildings. And these don't consolidate EV charging because these are different kinds of businesses. You don't consolidate on the basis of offering EV charging just because one is a retailer, another is a residential building, another is an office building - it doesn't make sense. These are very different businesses. So this means that there will be some level of fragmentation in these segments. As long as the fragmentation is not immense, there's
no reason to consolidate at all. Maybe you just partner with another CPO and you don't care. But if you manage thousands of parking spaces, or tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of parking spaces, you are a prime candidate to become a CPO. This is why we have, for example, in our portfolio a company called Indigo, which is the biggest parking operator in the world with 1.4 million parking spaces under management. And just in France they have like half a
million parking spaces - they're French. And there's Cora, for example, who are also a very significant charge point operator. This type of company will eventually in-house EV charging; it's going to be part of their business. The same goes for many retailers, for many real estate businesses as well. So we're looking at them as candidates as customers for our platform. On the EMSP side, which is mentioned
You have the card, but most of what you have is the user. So how does the user access EV charging? These are the EMSPs. Well, I believe this would be very consolidated. I think there'll be - you wouldn't have a very diverse market there. You would have some players that are oriented towards businesses, so they work with fleets, and there'll be more fragmentation there. But for the mainstream consumer, you're probably going to be using something that you're already
using for something else, either your navigation app or your payment app. So eventually I see this going towards some of the bigger fintechs and also the big tech - Apple, Google. I expect they'll be the biggest EMSPs eventually. And we don't sell to those. I think it's too consolidated for them to have to use someone else's platform. But on the CPO side, this is what makes our market interesting. And I think Germany, if I'm
not wrong - you might know the numbers better than me - has one of the largest numbers of CPOs in the world, right? It's interesting because here, I mean, there's probably a reason Thomas was advising us against it, because there's also the biggest number of softwares for CPOs as well, because almost every utility has their own charging network and you have too many utilities. So yeah, that's the legacy reason. Yes, but it was also one of
these early market things where there was a lot of activity early on, which doesn't follow the rules of a mature market. So I expect there'll be a lot of consolidation happening in Germany on the CPO side as well. I don't think the market would look that fragmented, so I wouldn't be basing my prognosis on the level of fragmentation on Germany. I think actually Germany is a market that is going to see a lot of consolidation on the CPO
side. Which market do you think it will more be like - like the UK, that has I think a few dozen or so? I would look at France, UK, and Netherlands - Netherlands because of how far ahead they are in terms of the number of charge points, and UK and France because they were a little bit later in the game. But I think they're more telling for the market dynamics of a maturing - not a mature
market, a maturing market. And what do you make of China, the big elephant in the room? I think in the West we don't touch it too much. Is it one of the 60 countries, or do you think it might be an attractive market for Ampeco as well? Oh, China is just - I mean, it's by far the biggest market. It's bigger than all of the rest in terms of EV charging. I wish we were able to tackle China, but for now we're staying
away. One thing about China is, obviously, it's a very different market. It's very consolidated, by the way, and much more vertically integrated than what we're seeing in other markets. But also when it comes to SaaS businesses and vertical SaaS in general, it's very difficult to do any vertical SaaS in China from outside China. For one, if you really want to run a SaaS business in China, you have to run it on servers in China. You have to
give access to the government to your source code, and you can't access it from outside China. So if I was to run what we're running - an Ampeco software - in China, I wouldn't be able to support it from Europe. Technically, I don't have access. I mean, that's how it works, so it's very restrictive to outsiders, especially when it comes to vertical SaaS. Because what if you're doing something mainstream
like a social media - you can access it, just because the numbers justify it. But when you're doing vertical SaaS like we do, I mean, we'd still have hundreds of customers there. They would be significantly bigger than what we have in other markets, but it would be very difficult for us to justify all these operations in the beginning, and as long as the other markets have sufficient growth in volume, it's much easier to
stay away from China. That makes sense. And one thing that I also find quite interesting in this industry is the fact that there are also certain developing countries that are leapfrogging as well - that are really boosting their EV adoption - like Brazil, Thailand, Ethiopia, and others. What's your take on developing countries as markets for EVs and for charging businesses? Well, for them, today's leapfrogging is mostly
accelerated because they've let in the Chinese manufacturers of electric vehicles. And everywhere, as I said, in the end EV charging follows EV adoption, and when people are buying EVs they have to charge them somewhere, and businesses then take on to build the infrastructure that's needed for this. So all these countries with high volumes of citizens - I wouldn't even say cars today, because in many cases EVs can acquire a new type of
customer that before didn't drive an EV. They may be driving a two-wheeler - still may be an EV, but it's not a four-wheeler. They may be driving a two-wheeler, or maybe they didn't have a car at all, but now the entry barrier is very low, because it's not just the purchasing price of these Chinese EVs, it's also the maintenance cost. And in many of these countries, electric cars are now making it more affordable to own a car in
general, and they're just expanding the markets for cars in general. So I think a lot of those are going to be leapfrogging, as they actually are, just because they don't have any industry to protect, and because they're also tapping into a new customer base that previously may not have even bought a car or may not have considered buying a car. And so when you try to convince new CPOs to
work with you, or your sales people rather try to convince them - I'm still doing the convincing, you're doing the same in your day to day - OK, yeah, it's especially, when it's so big, CPOs I guess for the larger accounts you and the CEO take ownership. So what is typically the USP, the killing argument, that's where they decide to go for Umeco? Well, there are a few things that we didn't have before
which today are very strong selling points. One is we now have the proof points that it is one of, if not the most robust and dependable platform on the market, which is of huge importance, especially now in a more mature market where the customers are more demanding, the regulators are more demanding, everyone's more demanding because they expect this industry to be mature, even though it's still in its teenage years. And you now really need a robust solution because this is the backbone
of your tech stack, and now we have the proof points that ours actually is the one that excels at this. But then what really sells it is - I'll go back to strategy - and it resonates very well with our customer base: we are only successful if they're successful. We are purely the software platform. We need them to be successful, to do their rollout, to be successful in their business. There's no conflict of interest. There is a huge
alignment, which means that we're putting our resources where it makes sense for them. We are not locking them in, we are enabling them. We are giving them the flexibility where they need it. Maybe they don't want to use our white-label mobile app - that's great. We make it very easy and actually help our customers to build their own app, because this way they'll be more successful. They'll be standing up more charges. They'll be the consolidators, not the ones that get
acquired. And this level of alignment, which is backed by where we put our focus on the product development side, is what resonates very well with the largest and most ambitious CPOs. Makes sense. And one trend that I think you're also trying to lead on is that the future is not building everything in-house but orchestrating the best specialists in the market to achieve reliability, profitability, and a seamless user experience. Can you elaborate on that? Yeah, absolutely,
I mean I think this is something that others in other industries have gone through - from building everything to actually focusing on what's your differentiation, what's the core value that you're bringing, instead of just trying to do what everyone else has to do anyway. In EV charging, for example, everyone has to be able to manage chargers from different brands, to be able to monitor them, to be able to set the price, to be able to monetize them.
These are not things that create differentiation. So you have to figure out where differentiation is created. Maybe it's in site selection if you're a parking operator - it's about the seamless experience between parking and charging and the locations that you have. If you're an infrastructure player, well, this is again about where are the sites that you've built, how accessible are they, how good is the user experience on the site. Focus on these things, and when
you put your resources there, this focus really creates an immense driving force. Instead, if you have to build everything else that others have to build as well, you're distracted and you're wasting your resources on things that are already solved - you're solving them again, reinventing something that's already invented, maintaining the standard, and so on. So orchestrate the best solutions and build only the thing that really is your differentiation. This is the message that we have, and our platform is the best orchestration platform.
It solves the common problems. It integrates very well with the best-in-class solutions that you want to use, and it leaves you to focus on the things that are your differentiation. And also, adding to that - you mentioned in one post as well that CPOs are drowning in vendor management, that hardware comes from one supplier, payments from another, EMS from a third, analysis from a fourth, and so on. So the opportunity is
to have a platform that orchestrates it all into a cohesive ecosystem. Yeah, I mean I think that generally CPOs are drowning in complexity. That doesn't necessarily mean that they should use fewer vendors, but they shouldn't be forced to use a specific vendor just because they have a gap. They have to be able to choose the best-in-class that actually gives them an advantage. And I think this is what we're trying to do. For example, we have in our platform features
that we are very proud of and I think work very well. We have our own built-in energy management, but at the same time we also make sure that our customers can connect other energy management systems that are just better for their use case than our - how to say - more off-the-shelf or universal solution. And it's to their benefit to use more vendors in this case. They would use another vendor for something that's very specialised.
And that does the job better than something that's for everyone else. I mean, for maybe someone that occasionally would have to comply with something, or just to win a customer, they need to do something in energy management. Well, yeah, our solution is amazing for them. It comes out of the box, use it. But if this is something that's a significant part of your value proposition, use the vendor that's going to give you the best chances
to win. So it makes sense, yeah. And you also talk a lot about the API-first approach versus white label. Can you also elaborate on these two aspects and how they are applicable to your customers? Yeah, early on when we started we were very strong on the white label marketing messaging, just because this was what the customers related to in the beginning. But in reality, the API-first approach is like a service that you can peel
off. You start with what gets you ahead in the beginning, but then when you're ready, when it makes sense, you can peel off parts of it. Like for example with our EMSP app, as I mentioned, our customers are usually the CPOs. But a CPO, a ChargePoint operator, they still often have to have a mobile app for their customers to be able to access their network. They may hopefully have direct connections with EMSPs so that you don't have to download their app, but some
customers would just want to have the app from the CPO. Well, OK, great, and we have a great white label app. I mean, it's under the brand of our customer. We don't stand in between them and their customer. But it's the universal app. It's the one that has to serve the case of a German CPO and a French CPO and a UK CPO. If you really want it to, it has to work for the one that's
working with high power charging and the one that's working with destination charging. But if you really want to tailor the user experience to your specific use case and your more narrow customer base, you have to build your own. So then you can just use our API, since we made sure that it's not just possible, it's as easy as possible to do this, so that you can peel off this part of the product, throw it away, and build your really tailored solution that
amazingly fits your use case. And is it like a fallacy in my thinking, but many CPOs are like energy companies, usually from that background, and the core DNA is not making software. Is that a challenge for them? Yeah, that's true. I mean, it's not just energy utilities, there are others. Some of our customers are in real estate, some of those are
parking operators. They're not necessarily software companies, so you have to make it easy for them. And if you want to create any differentiation with software, you would have to learn to do it. Why not do it very well with vendors? I mean, you don't have to build it entirely in-house, but you have to have someone build it tailored for you. We are not going to build it tailored for them. Our
role is to solve the common problems and give you a very flexible platform, but it's not tailored. And you don't have to tailor everything, because then you have overhead and maintenance and so on. But there are some parts that are very important - in some cases this may be the user experience, in other cases maybe it's how you integrate with the grid. Maybe this is the secret sauce you have as a company. Maybe it's how you manage the locations, so it's about the asset management. So
there are different aspects that, for different types of businesses that offer EV charging, are the secret sauce, are their main competitive advantage. And this is where they have to find a way, also through software, to create a competitive advantage. And they don't have to be a software company. I mean, companies have built great software without being a software company, just because they've outsourced it. But you have to know what you're building, for whom you're building it, you have to know your business and your
competitive advantage, and then someone else can build it for you. But don't expect that you'll get something, put a logo on it, and then it works perfectly, because how do you differentiate from your competitor who can take the same? Makes sense. And how do you look at the complexity behind the standards that this industry is facing? There are so many different standards and integrations. Will there be at some point an easier time where OCPP versions will not
update that often, or ISO 15118 or other things? Well, having started at a time where there were still proprietary protocols for many chargers, I'm happy that there are standards, even though there may seem to be too many. But I think this is a problem that we, the software vendors, have to solve, and the CPOs should be the beneficiary of this solution being already in place rather than having to care for it. So I kind of see this as our role to
solve this problem. Part of it is to solve it with software, part of it is to solve it through the organizations that we are members of and that guide the standard-setting. But in the end, this is something that I think is quite normal when the industry is growing - to have to find the ways that things should work and be wrong sometimes. Because if you're too afraid of being wrong, you may
It may take too much time to perfect when it's too late. I mean, the market doesn't wait for you, so I would much rather have some standards that are imperfect but are in place, rather than doing it perfect but too late. OK, in this podcast called Smart Charge by RiDERgy, so let's talk a little bit about smart charging. What's your view on anything related to smart charging - dynamic prices, for example, or consuming self-consumed solar energy, or bidirectional charging? Yeah,
what's the vision you have and what do you think? I think here, when you talk about smart charging, we have to consider that we are not just entering the phase when the consumer is becoming - this is the mainstream consumer. So these are the early majority. These are the people who didn't buy an EV because they care so much about smart charging. I mean, they just think: now is the time, yes. I am
environmentally conscious, but it's not that I will not make compromises for this. It's just another benefit that it's also good for the environment. It's also the cheaper option. It's the more convenient option. These are the expectations that we have to work with, and this means that we shouldn't expect customers to go out of their way to do smart charging. So everything, when you're talking about smart charging, it has to be smart. It has to happen behind
the scenes and be entirely handled by the provider. Don't expect that the user would be scheduling their charging. Expect that they would want the benefit, but not the hassle. So it has to be made convenient, and this is where I think a lot of the experiments that we've seen and participated in underestimate how important it is to make it convenient for the customer. They go for the maximum, for the most optimal. Well, you can
sacrifice some savings to make it convenient. I'll give you one example with something that we tried out with a couple of customers. It was about destination charging, mostly on-street charging where people also leave their car overnight. The idea was to give people the opportunity to let charging be scheduled for off-peak hours, so you plug in at 7 p.m., but actually we want to charge it after
11 when it's cheaper. So one iteration of this was the user had to choose when they were going to leave and they had to choose whether they wanted cheap or expensive charging, and just no one used it. Then we came up with a simpler approach. I said: let's do an Eco and Boost option. Eco - we decide when the car is going to be charged. So just put a notice:
your charging will happen with whatever power is available and makes sense. Boost - whatever's available, we give it to you, and you either pay a high price per kilowatt. So Boost is the regular price, Eco is the low price. You choose it once and it's the same price. So if you choose Eco, you're at the lower price whatever we charge. Boost - you're at the high price, we give you what's available. This was so much easier for the customer and everyone
used it. Not everyone chose Eco - there are people that just wanted to use Boost - but everyone chose an option because it's very simple. You don't have to think about it. OK, I'm flexible, I'll get the low price. I'm not flexible, I'll just charge the regular price. Yeah, and there's also one - Elaway, I saw, that is one of your customers in Norway. They were very excited a couple of months ago, they
were posting about a project. Can you also share a bit more? I think it was the nodes with the grids. Yeah, I think it was with the nodes market. It was something that we did together with Hafsund, a Norwegian utility, and Elaway, and we onboarded a significant number of EVs onto the flexibility market and allowed them mostly to do peak shaving. I
mean, it's flexibility trading, so someone posts a flexibility request and then you comply with the local grids. Was it - no, it was not transmission grids. It was for the distribution - for the distribution network. The premise is simple. I mean, in Elaway's case, these are housing associations. People have their vehicles charging overnight, and usually they
need a couple of hours of charging and they're connected for 8 hours. So when those two hours happen, it doesn't affect the user experience at all, especially when you're offering flexibility - you're trading like 10% of the available flexibility, meaning no vehicle is not charging at any given time. Say, for example, the vehicle is scheduled to charge between 11 and 2 at full power - well, it's full power minus 10% in reality - and
when you aggregate across a large network with many vehicles connected at any given time, it allows you to offer flexibility to the market. Maybe someone was supposed to generate some electricity and they can't do it because the weather changed or they have a technical issue. Instead of paying the fine and the fees, they would pay someone else to actually reduce their consumption, and that's what we can do.
at scale. And it's not fancy, it's not V2G, it's very simple, but it's very underutilized. I think the greatest benefits to be achieved are in smart charging in terms of scheduling rather than V2G. I think V2G is still too expensive in terms of hardware, in terms of onboarding. We still have this uncertainty from the customer: well, what happens when you're discharging my battery? Does this affect the longevity? We are not doing enough in just scheduling in a smart way.
And there's so much potential there, right? And what is the - so you mentioned a couple, but next to the UX and the customer experience and making it simple, and the cost for V2G, is there any other challenges you see, especially to make the scheduling - or the V1G or smart charging - possible at scale, and then also V2G or bidirectional charging at scale? Challenges? I think one thing is there's not enough markets because no one
has onboarded the vehicles in a massive way. Because the market exists when there are both sides to trade. So in flexibility you need to know that you can trade flexibility. I mean, if there was no one to fulfill a flexibility request, why bother to register it? So I think one thing that has to happen is you have to figure out how we solve this chicken-and-egg problem. Maybe we should just start onboarding all possible use
cases for smart charging, so that on the markets that exist - because this would probably also create new markets and pull in participants that need this flexibility but until now haven't been active on these markets. Because in the end it's about balancing, and you need the two parties. We have the vehicles; we are not really exposing them as a resource that can be managed in that way. If we do, I think the need would
create the opportunity for other market entrants. OK, and then we're coming to an end here. So looking forward to the vision and your next few years, so to say - you have an ambitious vision to have, I think, 25% market share within the segment of charging backends, right? So what do you foresee as the biggest challenges to get there? Well, first of all, I would say that we only care about market share when the
market settles. So when we're at 50+% of EV charging infrastructure build-out, this is where you count the market share. Because until then you can get to a market share and then just be stuck there and be outpaced by someone growing with the market while you stagnate. But what we're looking at is mostly every decision that we're making - we're looking at: does it close the road to this dominant position? And if it
does close the road, we don't do it. It's much more difficult to choose the right path, but it's relatively easy to identify a path that doesn't bring you to where you want to be. And at the same time it's very tempting sometimes to take that path because it can give you shorter-term growth that would otherwise be more difficult to achieve. Like, for example, if we were to enter the market in a
more direct way, especially in markets which are already more dense - well, we can grow faster, but then we'll be in competition with some of our customers. And will we be the dominant platform if we're competing with our customers? Well, we won't be. So we're not doing this, and this is how we gauge every decision. What we intend to do in the next years is we intend to work more with the ecosystem, so that we can bring
more value to our customers by being better integrated, working better with the other vendors and providers that can help our customers foster and achieve their goals. This is going to be the leading theme for us in the next two years. Yeah, very interesting. And what are other innovations that excite you that will come in the future of the industry - thinking also of things that seem very far away but are still quite near, like autonomous driving
or other types of - oh, there are two things that I'm very keen to see. One is wireless charging, and it goes hand in hand with smart charging, because I think this would really unlock smart charging. Because if you can tap into the vehicle when it's parked, people don't go out and plug in their vehicle - they don't have to - but if they just park it and it's already connected to the grid, this would really unlock
the opportunities for smart charging. I really want to see this happen, but it's a far-fetched thing and it requires both the automotive OEMs, hardware manufacturers, and infrastructure to work together on common standards and technology. I think it's something that we wouldn't see that soon, but I'm very excited for it to happen and I'll be very happy if I'm wrong and it actually happens sooner. The other thing is in user experience - I really want to see
Plug&Charge be widely adopted. Its current form may not be the perfect one, but it's better than having to use apps or struggle with RFID cards. I really want to see some seamless experience where you choose your subscription and then you just go to a charger and plug in. So these are two things that I'm really looking forward to. One is from the perspective of how much value we can unlock with wireless charging together with smart
charging in vehicle-to-grid integration. The other is just from pure user experience, which I think would benefit EV adoption in general. OK. And is there a last message you would like to leave users, and how can people get in touch with you, for example? Well, I'm on LinkedIn - that's how you can get in touch with me. But my message is mostly to anyone that's hesitant about EVs: to know that things are changing every year, very quickly.
So your preconceptions may already be outdated. Don't wait. Yes, for sure. All right, thanks a lot, Arlene. Thank you. What a fascinating discussion it has been with Orle about his entrepreneurial experiences - from a teenage almost drop-out to starting several companies, in particular working on others' ideas with a partner he has been working with since he was a teenager, and then finally working on e-mobility with his own idea, and not only starting his own idea but also making it a great success.
And this story is just very impressive - from the beginning of being an outsider and working his way through this industry, to being able to bootstrap and then scale with a lot of traction worldwide. And not only in one country or a few countries in a row, but really about 60 countries all over the world, which is even more impressive. His ambitious attitude is really highlighted as well in his vision: to be the dominating player in this very hard market.
Difficult to understand - from CPOs, MSPs, and so on - which he broke down for us, and really showed us what the role of future payments will be and how he positions his company to be very much an open ecosystem, working with specialised players like, for example, RiDERgy. And how he sees fascinating new technologies on the horizon with Plug & Charge and inductive charging, and how these will be game changers. And his view on the smart charging ecosystem, where
I wouldn't disagree that indeed the UX and customer experience just needs to be as simple as possible - like the eco-boost mode he was describing - but also starting with V1G before going to V2G, which is indeed still very expensive to operate, unfortunately, in most cases. So, as he said, don't stay stuck with old-fashioned views of EVs, as things are moving so fast and the market size is doubling, as he was adamant in saying. Stay tuned and recommend the episode to whoever you think
will like it, and see you soon.
节目笔记
AMPECO scaled from 62,000 to 200,000 managed charge points in two years, and Orlin Radev, CEO and Founder, says the CPMS is no longer a backend, it's the platform for energy services. The $26M Series B (total $42M) fuels expansion to 180 clients in 60 markets, with utilities like E.ON running 11 European countries on the platform. Claudio and Orlin trace the serial entrepreneur path, the hardware-agnostic architecture, and why smart charging + solar + storage = the next product tier. Orlin shares his entrepreneurial journey from launching his first company in high school to co-founding 10 ventures before Ampeco, and how he went from being an industry outsider in Sofia to building a global SaaS leader. We cover the unique strategy that helped Ampeco scale without building its own charging network, its API-first approach, and why alignment with customers - not competition - is at the heart of its business model. Key themes include: - Bootstrapping from Sofia to 180+ enterprise clients across Europe, Asia-Pacific, Africa, and North America - Outsider advantage: how naivety and persistence opened doors in a crowded CPMS market - Selling to CPOs: the “killer arguments” that convinced operators to switch platforms - Why orchestrating best-in-class vendors beats trying to build everything in-house - Smart charging today: why V1G scheduling is underutilized, and why V2G remains costly - Orlin’s long-term vision: from consolidation of CPO markets to seamless plug-and-charge UX and the promise of wireless charging We also explore Ampeco’s perspective on emerging EV markets in Brazil, Mexico, Ethiopia and beyond, where Chinese EV brands are driving adoption and leapfrogging infrastructure buildouts. Orlin reflects on the double-growth dynamics of an emerging industry, the role of flexibility markets in Norway, and why CPOs are drowning in complexity but don’t have to. This is a wide-ranging conversation on scaling software, navigating regulation, and what it takes to become the operating system of EV charging worldwide.