Another ClimateTech Podcast
Another ClimateTech Podcast is a weekly interview series that explores the fight against climate change through the lens of entrepreneurship, investment, academia, activism, and art. Join Ryan Grant Little, a seasoned climatetech founder, advisor, and investor, as he interviews the climate warriors trying to save us from ourselves.
#Climate #Climatetech #Cleantech #Sustainability #Environment
Another ClimateTech Podcast
EV charging must be open-source! With Marco Möller of Pionix
Marco Möller is a computer scientist, physicist, and serial entrepreneur. He’s passionate about electrical transportation and recently turned his attention to open sourcing the world of EV charging.
In this episode we talked about:
🔋 The company Marco sold to Intel and its impact on climate change through drone technology
🚗 The current state of the EV market in Europe, including growth and price trends
🔌 Common concerns about switching to electric cars and how to address them
⚙️ Marco's new company Pionix and its open-source EV-charger operating system, Base Camp
💼 The stakeholders involved in the EV charging space and the role of collaboration
🕵️♂️ Resistance to open-sourcing EV charging and the industries' changing perspectives on open source
#climatetech #EVcharging #opensource
Welcome to another Climate Tech Podcast interviews with the people trying to save us from ourselves. Marco Moeller is a serial entrepreneur with a red thread that runs through electrical transportation. Today he's focused on open sourcing the world of EV charging. I reached Marco at home between Karlsruhe and Heidelberg in Germany. I'm Ryan Grant. Little Thanks for being here, marco, welcome to the podcast.
Marco Möller:Thanks, ryan, for having me Really really looking forward to this.
Ryan Grant Little:You're a computer scientist and physicist by background, as well as a serial entrepreneur who sold a company to Intel. So, first of all, not bad, you're doing pretty well. It looks like the company to Intel. So, first of all, not bad, you're doing pretty well, it looks like. When did you know that you wanted to combine your passion for technology with entrepreneurship? You're still quite a young guy.
Marco Möller:Yeah, maybe I look like that, I don't know. At least, when I was 20, I always had to show my passport and clubs. That was annoying. Yes, how did I get there? My dad was a farmer and then he transitioned to becoming a trader for beekeeping equipment and that was when I was five and then I started helping in the shop selling stuff to people. At the same time, I was super interested in tech and, yeah, really early on I had the idea like, no, no, I want to build something myself and I just I don't know continuing the shop of my dad.
Ryan Grant Little:So in a way, I guess it started really early. Okay, so you're a computer scientist, physicist and beekeeper.
Marco Möller:I should add to it yes, you're running that as a teenager then, or what? Yeah, I at least. I was running a beekeeping shop as a teenager, but I also still have some beehives.
Ryan Grant Little:Yeah very cool, okay, and I mean, what was the? How did you shift from that and getting involved in technology? What was your first technology play?
Marco Möller:In, I don't know. In school, seventh, eighth grade I was always doing coding in my free time. I even started earlier. And then after 10th grade, I had to decide what kind of job I learned. Do I go the high school university route or not? And I had really really bad grades in languages, so almost had to decide what kind of job I learned. Do I go the high school university route or not? And I had really really bad grades in languages so I almost had to repeat some classes.
Marco Möller:So I decided, okay, let's go a detour on the way to university and go with some technical education first. And then it went technical, because it was just way more interesting than just learning how to trade goods. That's kind of what I was already doing before. So I decided for adding on the tech route and within that I learned how to fix car radius at Bosch Blaupunkt. Back then what really really catched me on fire was a teacher coming there and asked like oh interesting, you have all these people learning the job here. Do you want to make them participate in some competition? So we have this human force in Germany which is all about making your own science or tech project and then presenting it to a jury and that was amazing. And this is the kind of folks I'm still working with, literally.
Ryan Grant Little:Okay, very cool. And so you with the car radios, you had this kind of hardware drive at the beginning. We'll talk about the project you're working on now in just a moment. But I want to hear a bit about the company that you sold to Intel, which was a drone software company called Mavinci which is an awesome name, so M-A-V-I-N-C-I and tell us a bit about what it did. And I'm curious you know I've over the past couple of years, for a variety of reasons, gotten really interested in drones myself. What possibilities do you see for drones today in the fight against climate change, eight years after you sold the company? Okay, so many questions at once.
Marco Möller:So how do we get into drones again? This young scientist, double a friend of mine from there, was always hobbyist that they remote plane pilot and he wanted to automate that just for a fun project. And then he got professor, convinced that this is his uh, deeply promo thesis. And then afterwards it was done and it was too sad to throw it away. So he asked some friends if we should make a company out of it and we did. That turned out into Mavinci.
Marco Möller:Back then drones have been called micro air vehicles, so MAV, that's where the name was coming from. Naming is so hard, believe me, and also everyone thinks you're an Italian company if you call yourself Mavinci. Anyway, so fast forward. We mainly worked in mapping and construction. So a lot of, let's say, big road sites, big civil engineering things, bridges and a lot of that, a lot of mining. So I think our first customers have been all from Australia, this big coal mines making 3D mapping so they know where to dig next and how to dig there. So in a way it was bad for climate change, I would say. Then we sold the company 26 into Intel, had an interesting ride with another drone company there, acquired to try to scale this. Then our entire industry got disrupted by open source. So that's a bridge to my next topic, what I'm doing in the future. But also, in a way, we got sick of drones. We want to do the next tiny thing.
Marco Möller:Drones turned out to be so complicated If you want to go out of a niche because of all of that regulation. I think, in a way, the war is now accelerating this entire drone stuff quite a bit because I think I would say, near to front lines on military use, no one cares about certification or you have different processes at least, and money also is, let's say, more flexible, and I hope this will, let's say, shine back to the civil side and do some improvements there. And fighting climate change hard to tell. I think drones are, in a way, a bit overinflated. But what I'm really looking forward is electric aviation in general. So let's say bigger drones, not about so much.
Marco Möller:Let's say, replacing every public omnibus or tube with drones. That's crazy ideas. This will not fly, but regional aircrafts, all this especially in these low-density countries, northern Europe, there's a lot of regional flights and I know people try to fight them. But if you do them electric, actually I think it's even better than building additional roads, additional rails, because you need way less infrastructure. We have to put way less CO2 in concrete and things like that. So I think electric aviation if you scale it up and use it properly and replacing things which are nasty, that can be a big thing, and I think the drones can be a forefront of that. So I have seen that in my career.
Ryan Grant Little:I had Maxime Meyers, the CEO and founder of S2 Air, on the podcast recently and he has founded this new platform for reducing especially contrails and reducing kind of the climate impacts of aviation currently. But he spent most of his career at Airbus working on the vertical takeoff and landing electrical kind of vehicles and it sounds like there's a lot of interest there industry wide and we'll see these especially for trips to the airport, funnily enough.
Marco Möller:So I think in general this is a bit overinflated, the drone story. But there are exciting things Commutes maybe. I think I would personally more bet on the regional transportation instead of, I don't know, taking 1% of the cars off the road. If you have the road already there, just stick with cars or buses or tubes or whatever. That's just way more scalable. I think this drone thing and this urban transportation in air is not as scalable as people hope it will be. But regional flights replacing that I'm totally all in. And there's another interesting side effect Now that the founder I learned on my way also sold his company to Intel, is now building electric boats and with foiling and you can remove 90% of the drag, make it way more fuel efficient. But it's a complex, let's say regulation or let's say steering problem how to control the flaps and the foils. And this seems to be similar to what he's done in drones before. So in a way you can make transvelocity transfer also to, let's say, non-air parts.
Ryan Grant Little:Okay, so let's get to the heart of the matter, what you're working on right now, which is electric vehicle charging. Before we talk too much about the project itself, what do people need to know about the EV market in Europe? So is it still growing? Is the price dropping relative to traditional vehicles?
Marco Möller:So it's growing, but there are some countries where it's doing less well and some countries where it's doing amazing. So I think growth has a bit slowed down. In general there's a robust growth. Germany has a bit of decline. I think Italy has a lot of decline and I think everyone else is doing quite well.
Marco Möller:I think Germany has a mood problem. So they abruptly had to cancel all subsidies because of some highest court ruling regarding governmental spending. They had to cut somewhere in panic mode. But interestingly, what happened? At the same time, I think within a couple of months, electric vehicles have been at the price point without subsidies, as they've been with subsidies before, so the price dropping is fast now. So the really thing, what's holding us back is a mood and perception in Germany and, I think, in Italy. So from what I read, this is kind of orchestrated by the government that tried to keep it as small as possible, and everyone else who has not so much vested interest in vehicles is doing actually better than us. And I think in the US I heard similar things that it's growing but, let's say, slower than expected. But I think globally it's doing amazing If you look on. What surprises me quite a bit is that this global south is really really catching up way faster than expected. Like Brazil, 1,100% annual growth rate. So they will be faster than Germany in a year. That's my prediction.
Ryan Grant Little:So I'm thinking of a cartoon that was on your LinkedIn profile that illustrates this point pretty well. But if there's a listener who's thinking about switching from a traditional car to an electric car and is worried about the things we're used to hearing about, like range charging time, these other hesitations, what would you say to them now, in 2024?
Marco Möller:I'm driving electric for I don't know five years now and a lot of my friends and there's like a few simple rules like don't charge at really really old fast chargers because they're typically broken. It's part of the problem we try to fix and you typically can see it at the power rating 50 kilowatts. Don't go there. That's the old ones. But this is only a very few percentage, like two or three. The majority of the infrastructure is new and well working or way better working, so you have to get used to it a bit.
Marco Möller:In the beginning, like in the first I don't know, road trip might be an extension, like first time driving cross nations, but from the second time it gets boring.
Marco Möller:And the total cost of ownership, especially if you're living not in a city but in the suburbs where you can park at home, it's so much lower with electricity cost and especially if you charge at home or at work, this is really going well and if you look on the electricity prices there are some numbers out in the media oh how expensive it can be.
Marco Möller:But it can also be really, really cheap. If you just going once on the comparison side and picking a cheap contract, I think it's cheaper to drive electric, I think the range of anxiety is totally not there, not justified, if a car was just 400 kilometer range and this is, I would say, the lower end of what I would recommend and typically the car holds longer than me or my family. So typically we're not charging because we had to charge, but because someone had to go to the toilet, need some food, need some fresh air. Yeah, I think that's reasonable where the cars are and it's evolving quickly. Price-wise, there's some incredible price drops ahead from, we hear, from China, from the battery market, which will then penetrate over, I would say, next year or so, into the car market. This is really kicking off in the next years.
Ryan Grant Little:So the charging infrastructure is getting better, but it still remains quite proprietary. And that's kind of where you're stepping in to open source the space. So your company, pionix, you've created a software platform called Basecamp that you call an open source EV charging OS or operating system. So maybe talk for those of us who don't yet haven't experienced this at the charging pump or the charging stations along the way what does the infrastructure look like and why is it not open source yet?
Marco Möller:So, first of all, charging is quite different than fueling. I mean charging you're basically putting a pipe into another pipe and mechanically had to fit. Then you can press a button and some liquid flows through. So there's no, let's say, advanced digital things going on For charging. Basically, your car and the charging station are connecting over, let's say, a data link and exchanging data, and then the charging station is connecting to the internet and exchanging data for payment and for authorization and whatnot. And this makes it technically a bit more challenging. But from the user experience, typically you just have a payment card, go to the charging station, swipe it, press a button which cable you want to use and plug it in and then it starts charging, except the cases where it fails for whatever reason. Yeah, so it could be quite unspectaculous. Why is it not open source yet? Maybe?
Marco Möller:Coming back to my drone history, so I also did my research. You can see this pattern all over the place. Whenever something new emerged, like a computer or a phone or whatever, the company invests quite some money to make it work. So they want to sell it, including the software. Over time it gets boring because a thousand companies have done it, and then there's standards in place, so every car and every charging station are compatible.
Marco Möller:So you can't do whatever you want. You're anyway restricted by the technology effects out there, like when you're programming a new web browser, you still have to be compatible with every fucking website out there. So you can't do whatever you want. You have to work with the environment and when you're in such, let's say, a grown-up market, a lot of this work and software development is actually in a way wasted because it's commoditized. So everyone can do it. You're not special. Yeah, I can charge a car, guess what? You're one of a thousand charging station providers. This is the one job you had to do. So you can't win with that argument. I have software to charge a car. So when it's not worth it in commodity but at the same time super hard and complicated to solve and fast evolving, then you need collaborative approaches and you can just share that work among the companies and can accelerate the entire industry and you're not losing anything, you're just winning. And I think in my opinion, it's a natural evolution you see in a lot of industries when they mature.
Ryan Grant Little:And so nobody wants to be the beta. Everyone wants to be the VHS and make sure that they're sticking around and not having this very expensive proprietary thing that's going to fail because it's not compatible with everything else.
Marco Möller:Yeah. So I think from the user perspective, end of the day, you should just not care. You're just plugging in your cable that charges and our promise would be yeah, it recharges every single time. It's not fading with any weird car. And just because you buy the early bird customers for this new Chinese BYD car should not mean you're suffering out there charging and or you just approach on this new charge pool from this new company entering the market had little experience how to do that. That should not giving a downside to you. So what our approach?
Marco Möller:At the moment we are going to all the charging station vendors and helping them to do the software and, let's say, the base layer for software, so they, on top of that, do all the juicy custom stuff. Let's make some special and we take care of the boring things. And you mentioned open source. We're not doing that alone, because what we're ultimately doing here is having one piece of software and it should in a way become a monopole so everyone is using it. But we don't want to go the Windows route, where everyone hates you at the end but just can't go away because it's the standard. We want to go the, let's say, linux route where this has the I don't know 90% penetration on servers.
Marco Möller:And then there's an incredible large ecosystem of players out there who whenever something is missing or is wrong there, he just change it. And sure there's commercial companies out there who can help you with keeping it stable, like Red Hat or Zuse or Ubuntu, canonical and all of those companies. They don't want to be one of those but just specialize on charging. People can go with us, but they can also go with a pure open source track which is also not only by us. But I think meanwhile more than 300 engineers actively contributed and it's maybe 15 from my folks. It's, I think, more than 50 organizations contributed. So this is not hobbyist stuff. This is people doing that for a living because their employee is paying them to contribute at Everest, at the open source project we do.
Ryan Grant Little:So the charging station companies are your customer and you're selling to them. You're selling software to them. Did they have they already made the purchase decision that they want to be open source and compatible with everything else, or do you have to convince them to do that rather than sort of their own proprietary protocol?
Marco Möller:So if the protocols are anyway, in a proprietary, it's just the code which speaks that language. So in a way, we're in a situation where everyone agreed to speak English, but you have a lot of weird dialects out there. So let's say, the language is standardized, but your interpretation of it? I also studied for a while in the UK and really we had issues with understanding the people not from the greater London area. So in a way, this is how translation could fail. Yeah, everyone should speak the same language, but it's slightly different, so they fail. And we just want to harmonize that with not only sharing the documentation how to speak the language but, yeah, with the code doing it.
Marco Möller:And what is about hesitation? So this idea is new into this industry. It had to be there before for servers, for phones, for phones for databases or for drones. So you see it in waves, like first everyone is doing their own thing and then there's a later wave for open source, it's up the market and we created that wave here for charging. So before everyone just hadn't the idea that this could be a thing, but we really really pushed hard to make it happen and now you can see this avalanche or tsunami of change evolving, which we try to right, and we have a lot of, let's say, government support, like the US government, or the Joint Office of Energy and Transportation has some engineers working with us. We have support from, for example, the Californian government and officials.
Marco Möller:We replicated things something soon, something in a way similar with Azure Can't speak too much about that yet. And yeah, and then there's a lot of vendors. Many of them are still in stealth mode, just doing their thing with us and silently contributing, but a couple of them are already quite vocal that they think this is the future. And then the technology cycles are slow. Typically, you start migrating to this new software whenever you anyway do a big change, so launching new product lines, and this is, I would say, done every two years or so. So it takes some years to penetrate the markets.
Ryan Grant Little:So some of this stuff you're doing with the company and some you're doing with this association where you're a board member. Is that right? Is that sort of more of the stakeholder environmental building work that you're doing with them?
Marco Möller:Yeah, in a way. So we are a bit way with different animals than a lot of the startups out there. Normally, as a startup, you sell your products. We first of all give all our products out there for free and try to earn money with that. I think that makes us special. Then normally you have to build a product, you have to build up a custom base and sell it. So we have to do one step further. We have to build an open source community and get that running and on top of that we can behave like a normal startup.
Marco Möller:But this extra thing is, I think, where you also meant up to Like, yes, I'm CEO of Pionix and I'm selling things, but then I have a second, third and fourth head where I'm head of the chair of the technical steering committee of the Everest project. I just got elected yesterday as one of the board members from the Linux Foundation Energy. I'm elected board member for the Open Charge Alliance, so one of those institutions doing those standards. So, yes, you have to be quite influential out there and help the industry to evolve and shape itself.
Ryan Grant Little:Yeah, when you're building the market, you have to be bringing your competitors all under one tent as well, and trying to agree on some of the basic rules for the game.
Marco Möller:Yeah. So in a way, I think there's very little competition for what we do. I think there have been, a year ago, like five-ish competitors who purely made money with something like we do. A lot of others, anyway, have been hybrid and for them it was okay to give up on this piece and just join our forces. A couple of them already did that and from this five-ish we had a year ago, I would say we had now had to cross out two or three which stopped doing that. So we anyway see market consolidation Once again. We're selling things which have a very special value proposition. In a way it's commodity. On the other hand, it's super hard to make it right, yeah, and if we now go in there with, let's say, a free approach, it's giving everyone else a hard time. But the majority of the community I'm working with are, let's say, from chip makers, charging station makers, sanitization bodies. So 99% of the or 99.9% of the community out there doesn't see us as a threat, but see us as something welcoming, helping to get this right.
Ryan Grant Little:What does the company look like right now? How many people are you? Do you have customers already? Maybe just paint a picture of what a day in the life of Pionix looks like.
Marco Möller:We started with this idea like four years ago. Three and a bit years ago we created the company. We raised so far almost 10 million, and we'll raise further money soon. So that's the classical VC case, because you have to be quick, you have to do quite some spending before you see returns. So we thought about bootstrapping this as we bootstrapped before. That wouldn't work with the strategy. We had to invest just too much to get this right.
Marco Möller:And, yeah, we have 34 people, but changing every day literally. So I think we have like four more open positions. Two-thirds of that is tech. I would say half of the tech is then committed to just do open source and get the open source community growing. Another third of the company is helping customers to get their product rights. I think there's about 10-ish products which are now underway or just recently launched, for example, from UK Podpoint. It's one of the bigger charging station manufacturers there. They announced last week that they now had to start a production and their product they now started to sell is based on Everest, or based on Pionic's Basecamp, to be precisely. Yeah, then even the one-third non-tech people half of them are doing community work, like me sitting committees, organizing conferences, working groups and, yeah, help the basically project management across companies and across continents.
Ryan Grant Little:Is there anyone who's trying to prevent you from doing this kind of work, from doing the open sourcing? And I don't know this for a fact, but I'm thinking of an electric car company owned by an entrepreneur who's not extremely well known for collaboration.
Marco Möller:Okay, I couldn't go into that detail so I couldn't reveal our customer names. But let me put it this way we see quite the opposite from literally all the car makers out there. What we do here. With some of them we're working really commercially together. With some of them it's just more, let's say, technically collaboration, because they also have quite a bit of things to win At the end of the day. They want to have happy customers, so they want to have charging as easy as possible. We make it way easier for them to test this and to get this right and, as I said, we work with I think with all international car OEMs, together with engineering teams, on testing prototype cars, either officially on so-called testables, which is kind of a speed dating for cars and charging stations, or also behind the scenes, ongoing whenever there's something new. We have also quite cheap charging station emulators or one watt, megawatt charging systems, so hand-carriable charging station where you can try out all the software and see if your, let's say, early prototype car can handle it. And then the last piece of the puzzle is they want to shape the future infrastructure out there. So it's about, for them, also, innovation.
Marco Möller:How you typically do innovation, either you have a lot of market dominance and try to push something through, but also that is hard and quite money involving. Or you go to committees and convince everyone on the committee to make a change in the standard, then you're debating it for two or three years, then you're publishing it and then you try to hope that everyone implements your standard, and so this is a 10-year journey. Alternatively, you can just let a couple of engineers sit down, make a pull request to Everest, put, let's say, an alternative or add-on into it, and it's rolled out into the market in half a year. So we can accelerate innovation speed by 20-fold in cutting costs down for this dramatically. So also here I have some examples from car makers who are using that to push out innovation. And no, there's absolutely no opposition out there.
Ryan Grant Little:I'm sorry. I want to hear more about what a testable is.
Marco Möller:There's actually two different testables. There's one testable for cars and charging station. They're called Charin testable and it's literally like speed dating. So every car charging station combination get an hour together to see if they can charge, if there's a spark in a way. And then you also have some similar events. They're called Plugfest, but charging station and cloud solution also try to make compatibility testing. So same approach 20 clouds, 20 charging stations or however many. And they also try to make compatibility testing. So same approach 20 clouds, 20 charting stations or however many, and they're getting an hour together and see if they can speak to each other and if things work out. And there I would say from each type for the like, a total of like 10 of this a year, globally distributed. We try to be as many as we can from them. We even hosted one of them ourselves in february. Sounds very romantic.
Ryan Grant Little:You mentioned you're hiring uh for open positions. I'll definitely link to your linkedin and to your website in the show notes, but what else are you looking for to help you further your mission?
Marco Möller:we need more engineers we always need more engineers and spare like yes, we hire globally and we even now relocating someone from Australia over to Germany, but we also have people who are working remote. But I think particularly we're now looking for people who want to work hands-on on superchargers, wallboxes and whatever, and therefore also people who are interested to work in the beautiful southwestern area of Germany, next to cities like Heidelberg and Strasbourg. So that is one track. And then on the other track so far, and actually still going amazing customers are more or less flowing in, but with upcoming Series A and with all the growth we have to structure our sales and marketing. So also here we're hiring for some more marketing people, some more salespeople and even the chief revenue officer who orchestrates all of that. So, as you mentioned, we are physicists and natural scientists by heart. We can do a lot of things and, if I believe to my investors, we're not the sexiest marketeers out there, so maybe it's good to have some more help.
Ryan Grant Little:Marco, it's fascinating stuff.
Marco Möller:Thank you so much for your time, yeah thanks a lot for having me and also please keep up the work. I think climate tech needs quite some attention and also, in a way, gets that also gets a lot of money, and I think together can do quite some change for good here.
Ryan Grant Little:Yeah, we need to tell stories like yours. Thank you for that. Thanks for listening to another Climate Tech podcast. It would mean a lot if you would subscribe, rate and share this podcast. Get in touch anytime with tips and guest recommendations at hello at climatetechpodcom. Find me, ryan Grant Little, on LinkedIn. I'll be back with another episode next week. Bye for now.
