On six continents
AMPECO’s main product is a charging infrastructure management software platform that it sells to EV station operators. It has various modules that comprehensively cover the management functions of this activity: from customer relations and payment, through tariffs, management of energy capacities, etc., i.e. all in one integrated system. The advantage of the Bulgarian company’s product is that it is compatible with any hardware and operators can create their own brand by choosing and adding the functionalities needed for their business. AMPECO’s customers are over 120 operators in more than 45 markets. The new financing will be used precisely for further expansion of the business, and a local representative office will be established in the US. The company already has customers there, but wants to significantly increase them. Its leading markets are currently in Western Europe – Great Britain, the Scandinavian countries, the Netherlands, etc. It also has clients in Bulgaria, where it works with the Municipality of Varna, VsichkoTok, EVN and EVpoint.
“We have two big goals that we want to achieve with this investment. One is the internationalization of our team – especially expanding with new people in the US – we want to add a sales team to serve customers there. And the second big goal is the development of the product and the addition of tools that use machine self-learning and artificial intelligence – this means expanding our team in Bulgaria,” Orlin Radev, CEO of AMPECO, told Capital. He founded the company with five more partners in 2018, gradually growing its business. Currently, the company’s team is over 80 people, of which there are over 70 in Bulgaria. Among them, the largest part are R&D – programmers, cloud specialists and etc. followed by sales team etc.
The beginning
Orlin Radev, CEO of AMPECO
“My first touch with electric mobility was in 2010, when I started a company to convert ordinary cars into electric ones. Although it didn’t work out as a business, I became passionate about electric mobility. Before AMPECO, we were involved in software development for over twelve years and in 2018 we found a way to join this revolution. We were doing a shared car project and then we realized that charging is a pretty big field with its challenges that can be addressed with software, so we decided to make such a platform.”
The experience of the great experience
BMW i Ventures is the venture capital fund of the BMW Group and already has significant experience in financing hardware and software companies in the field of transport, manufacturing and logistics in the EU, USA and Israel. It has offices in Silicon Valley, San Francisco and Munich and has made over 100 investments and 18 exits to date. Among the young companies funded so far are Lime, Moovit, Chargepoint, Boston Metal and others. To date, BMW i Ventures has invested through three separate funds, with a total of over $930 million in capital raised.. The last of them – BMW i Ventures Fund II starts in 2021 with a capital of 300 million dollars.
