In this article, our new CMO wonders what’s in a name, following research by Flashpoint Venture Capital and a look around this new, emerging software category.
In a previous blog post, my colleague Lucy reviewed some research that one of our investors, Flashpoint Venture Capital, conducted into the business opportunities in the EV space, specifically the software market for EV charging.
The conclusion from that research was a resounding “yes” to the opportunity. Despite much reporting on the slowing of EV car sales, we are still chronically underserved when it comes to public charging infrastructure, especially in North America, and the business case for becoming a charge point operator (CPO) remains strong.
Our friends at Flashpoint also looked to define the software categories that serve this market and named some of the vendors in each of those categories.
Image from Flashpoint Venture Capital, showing Dodona Analytics classified as a "Charging Point Analytics" vendor. (Source)
Broadly, as a charge point operator, in addition to all the usual business software to manage finance, projects, and all of that, you need specialist tools to help find sites, deploy, and optimize profitable network growth, tools to manage that network once installed, and tools that provide the customer experience, like apps and payment platforms.
I have simplified that a great deal, but clearly, Dodona Analytics falls into the first of those categories—a category that some call “EV Charging Optimization Platform,” although Flashpoint called it “Charging Point Analytics,” and one of our competitors calls it “EV charging station intelligence software.” As a newbie in this category, I’ve discovered many others (I’ll list them at the end).
But, despite having a slight identity crisis, what does this software category do, and how does it help Charge Point Operators?
In a nutshell, the purpose of these platforms is to help business users easily find and assess viable and feasible EV charging sites from a collection of aggregated data sources without needing to do this manually with spreadsheets, multiple systems, and, to be honest, gut feel and guesswork.
The core features and functionality of these platforms are:
These core features help the commercial team make profitable decisions about charging sites and which contracts to go after, but once the contract is won, this same data helps to inform the project to install the chargers, so, in addition, these platforms need:
All of this of course, needs to be served up in an interface that is business user-friendly and easy to use and, on the back end, have the ability to:
That’s a very high-level overview of these tools and this newly forming category, but this software makes a huge difference to CPOs, who are looking to grow their network efficiently and profitably and attract investment in a capital-intensive industry.
These platforms enable CPOs to:
Ah yes, that identity crisis. Well, I have collected a few terms I have come across that you may hear describe a similar platform to solve these problems:
While this article provides an overview of the category, my colleagues would love to discuss our experience with our clients, the problems they’ve solved, and, of course, our take on EV Charging Optimization, the Dodona eMobility platform (DeM). So please come say hello.