Why We Invested in Guided Energy

We're excited to co-lead Guided Energy's seed round alongside Sequoia Capital and welcome Anant Kapoor and Eric Daoud to the Dynamo family!

Guided Energy is building a fleet management platform that helps European commercial fleet managers operate their EV vehicles optimally. The key parts of the platform include:

• Optimization - leveraging decision science to help fleet managers make the best decisions around vehicle assignment relative to the transportation at hand, while also developing a charging plan with context of the route plan and energy requirements
• Operations - a control tower that helps with charger visibility, power throughput, and real-time asset monitoring, as well as vehicle routing
• Payments - finance modules to help with payments, expense management, and invoice reconciliation

Our investment was underpinned by:

1. A Strong Founding Team. Anant (CEO) and Eric (CTO) bring a unique and qualified set of experiences and skills to deliver a fleet management platform for EVs. Anant has prior experience around telematics and connected vehicle software to help fleet reduce emissions while Eric was a PhD candidate in ML and built v1 of Guided Energy by himself.
2. A Demand-centric Approach. Guided's EV fleet optimization platform takes a demand-side approach rather than the typical supply-side or charger-centric approach. This allows Guided to:

• • Optimize fleet operations based on dispatch plans, considering asset availability, battery status, optimal routes, and charging recommendations
  • Maximize margins by treating charging as a cost input within the transportation stack
  • Make intelligent decisions about when to use internal charging networks versus external options based on route profitability
  • Expand into other fleet management areas, like vehicle diagnostics and maintenance over-time
  • Increase in value with fleet size and complexity, utilizing ML and optimization expertise

The platform shifts the focus from charging as a scarce resource to a commodity input that should be strategically managed based on revenue (and margin) potential of a fleet and the routes they operate.

3. Opportunity to build the fleet card of the electric era. The result of approaching the problem in a demand-centric way is that Guided Energy will be the authority recommending when, where, and how much to charge a vehicle. Given the position Guided Energy are in, they will likely be able to facilitate the charging and associated spend - especially at chargers that are “outside of network” for a given fleet. Today, fleet card solutions are often packaged into a fleet management offering so it is our belief that this will be a customer expectation in due course. We believe this will end up being a large revenue driver for the business as it grows.

We're excited for the future of EV transport and supporting Anant and Eric on their journey.