Juergen Mayerhofer – enspired

David Hunt (00:00)
Claire Juergen, it’s great to have you on the podcast.

Juergen Mayerhofer | Enspired (00:03)
Thanks David for having me.

David Hunt (00:04)
It’s quite a journey you’re going through at the moment. ⁓ We first got connected through our friends at Future Energy Ventures who obviously joined your cap table recently, but been having the company on the radar for a little while. So I’m excited about diving in a little bit about what you guys are up to and of course your profile. maybe we can start a little bit with a summary if you like. We can dive much deeper later, but what briefly is inspired? Who and what are you and what problem do you solve?

Juergen Mayerhofer | Enspired (00:32)
Yeah, so the founding idea was pretty simple. It was back in 2019. So assuming a higher renewable penetration as part of the wider energy transition, we identified flexibility as a key resource ⁓ to unlock higher renewable penetration. And back then, we just focused on all sorts of flexibility, Demand side, pump storage, thermals, whatever it may be.

And what we wanted to do different compared to utilities is solving the last mile in our world. It’s from the ahead to real time or including real time. And that stuff is pretty complex. So it’s done by technology. So everything we do is automated, right? And there is a ton of machine learning, AI models, millisecond stuff, et cetera. actually it’s, I wouldn’t call it business, a new business model or whatever, right? It’s an energy trading service in that sense.

But being fully automated and with a hardcore focus on flexibility was new back then because spreads have been 7 euros per megawatt hour on average, not like today 150. So back then it was not that exciting as it today.

David Hunt (01:40)
Okay, but that’s very much more than an aggregator. And again, perhaps we’ll dive into this later, but more than an aggregator, more of a trading organization.

Juergen Mayerhofer | Enspired (01:48)
I would even call ourselves an R &D and software company, right? You wouldn’t find a typical trading setup with front, middle, back office, e-tour, etc. ⁓ We’re rather organized culturally and from an organizational design, a software company, ⁓ basically. But happy to chat about, you know, that the word aggregator has different meanings in different countries and different legislations. ⁓ But I would consider ourselves.

R &D and software company actually.

David Hunt (02:20)
We’ll certainly dive into that. One of the things clearly is your journey. You’ve been in and around the energy sector for some time. You’re an investor, serial entrepreneur as much as anything else. I know you sit on a few advisory boards, so not sure quite how you find the time, but perhaps you can share a little bit of the journey, particularly in terms of when and how you found it inspired those few years ago.

Juergen Mayerhofer | Enspired (02:41)
Yeah, so the early beginnings were like I stumbled actually into energy at all, right? I was very interested as a teenager already in software encoding. And then I found a company. I liked the people there actually. That was my main criteria during applying for jobs. And the first project was actually, there is something changing in the Austrian natural gas market.

got liberalized back in 2002, so you could switch your supplier. We moved away from fax scheduling to Excel spreadsheets in emails, etc. So my first job was writing the optimization algorithm for the Austrian natural gas grid, high pressure, so to distribute. And from then on, I basically fell in love with energy. As I was driving by a compressor station on my way back home, I dispatched basically, indirectly.

David Hunt (03:33)
Yeah. Right.

Juergen Mayerhofer | Enspired (03:36)
software and I stayed on the road of ⁓ physical energy, would say. First, natural gas, gas storages, Central European Gas Hub. ⁓ did the software in the background, helping OMV, the Austrian oil and gas major to enter power trading from scratch. Back then, we had this front middle back office, ether and systems, data flows, portfolio management, ⁓ deal reconciliation, all that stuff. ⁓

but also natural guess and power. And my latest setup before Inspired was algo trading. So with Visotech, we jumped on the end of 2014 on this API and M7 that EPEX made available worked a lot with them, had a lot of contribution to that API from a user’s perspective. And that was basically the whole background, right? So we have known

very well where utilities are good and bad and how they are set up, Completely different than us. So they have a lot of benefits in terms of balance sheet and long-term pricing and whatever. They can do a ton of fancy stuff. But we thought the niche we will take is hard, really hard for utilities because it involves a lot of cultural change, right? Moving from a trading organization into something fully automated that’s heavy on software engineering and machine learning.

David Hunt (05:03)
Yeah, yeah. And you saw that space and obviously then found it in, what was it, 2019?

Juergen Mayerhofer | Enspired (05:08)
So, actually, officially we found it end of January 2020, so right some weeks before COVID kicked in. So good timing on that one. But of course, the ideas have been there earlier and it was the right time to execute.

David Hunt (05:22)
Yeah.

Timing is an interesting thing. We touched on this before around, obviously you can call it luck to a degree, but timing can be very instrumental in the success or failure of a startup. two things here, they’re clearly COVID hit, which was a massive event for all of us. I was just launching a US operation five period at the time we were about to, and then literally got the plane home and everything is shut down. yeah, so that obviously was a challenge, but equally in terms of the evolution of

renewables and assets and the change of asset classes and the importance now of integrating these on the grid. So timing was positive in that regard. But how did you feel having co-founded the business when suddenly you were braced with the challenges of the pandemic before we look at the challenges of actually starting a new entity in a sort of an entrenched market like utilities?

Juergen Mayerhofer | Enspired (06:13)
So I would say the pandemic itself was not that bad at the beginning, right? Because I mean, the people who joined, we’ve worked together for quite some time. So we’re very trustful ⁓ relationships in the initial team. So actually working remotely was not a problem and we didn’t have to onboard new people, right? That would have been a challenge, right? If you don’t know people, have to recruit them during COVID.

But we had the setup done and we anyways planned that we need at least ⁓ half a year to get operational. So in the beginning it was scary, but it was not that bad. What then kicked in that our first friendly customers had to work from home office and out of history, a lot of them were utilities. And I remember cool stories of we have to send everybody to home office. People don’t have phones, company phones. People don’t have…

Laptops people have had nothing right? They didn’t even have teams, right? mean video conferencing seems to be pretty normal meanwhile, but I remember in 2020 people didn’t have enough licenses and you know all that zoom stuff that kicked in so actually It didn’t have a lot of impact other than some friendly customers were delayed because they were busy with other stuff And it also helped us ⁓ shape

David Hunt (07:19)
Is this true?

Yeah.

Juergen Mayerhofer | Enspired (07:36)
what to focus on because initially you can imagine if you have low spreads, low volatility actually compared to today, it was rather a focus on thermal plants or ⁓ outperform fuel prices or marginal prices in general, right? So generating additional profit out of providing flexibility. And with COVID and the following energy crisis, the focus changed completely on trading spreads and using intra product volatility compared to.

Flexibility in the purest form of ramping up and down,

David Hunt (08:10)
Yeah, it’s been a fascinating journey how that has evolved so significantly over the few years. And we’ve been working with, we were way back when with with LimeJump just before they were acquired by Shell. So this flexibility and aggregation DSR market is something which has really ⁓ disrupted and changed significantly over the last few years. How was the company now different from in terms of its first look at the technology and the offering different from now?

from when you started the company is, started selling exactly how you had them to be, right? So how has things, I guess, evolved in that time?

Juergen Mayerhofer | Enspired (08:46)
I would argue, I mean, of course there were some tweaks here and there in terms of use cases, but the business model is actually as planned. So I’m very proud of that because ⁓ we wanted to scale into new geographies with technology instead of building subsidiaries and local offices and replicating your organization and all this stuff that takes forever and is very complicated. the

Business model is the same, right? Just the assets have changed that we offer for our first asset was a pump storage and thermal plants, renewables, larger demand side cases. we, you know, as every young company, we tested out everything that could be tested in different countries. But we also started pitching batteries in the year of founding the company. So second half of 2020. Trust me, I have a lot of cool replies from big players that said, nobody needs this service.

And now they sit in panels next to me and say, we optimized batteries since the decades, But our DNA is typically if somebody tells us this is impossible, nobody needs that. We get really motivated, right? We had that in the past. We convinced the Hungarian power exchange to allow algo trading. We convinced PGAS to allow within the gas automated trading, right? That was not a thing like 10 years ago. So we got really motivated on that.

David Hunt (10:04)
Okay. Yeah.

Juergen Mayerhofer | Enspired (10:09)
because we thought that a battery is a simple version, a smaller version, a box of a pump storage, no casecades, no pumping, turning switches. Now we have different complexity in there, right? So it’s not easier, it’s different. But we worked the way through different use cases. But storage has always been a thing from day one, right? So business model is exactly the same.

And we have entered 10 new markets in the last 12 months. if you, mean, our story sounds really cool, but if you go back one and a half years in time, we only had battery storages in Germany, right? Now we’re active in Germany, Austria, Belgium, Netherlands, France, soon Poland, Greece in some weeks, Japan, Spain by mid of next year. So, so we have signed a lot of contracts, implemented a lot of stuff.

with short amount of time. And that was actually the founding idea, right? To say, not cover one country or just a region. It’s like, build tech that can be replicated very fast.

David Hunt (11:13)
Yeah, I guess one of the challenge being based in Austria, clearly not the biggest country in Europe. I know you immediately looked at the dark region for obvious reasons, but expansion was always intended beyond that. think that brings challenges both in terms of, obviously from a regulatory point of view and ⁓ from a stacking of revenues point of view in terms of what’s feasible and what’s allowed in different countries is somewhat different. Has that been a challenge?

Juergen Mayerhofer | Enspired (11:37)
Yeah, that was a business model choice what we do, right? So there’s a reason why we’re not in residential demand side, whatever stuff, because as you said, that’s completely different. As soon as you go behind the meter, some things are super easy in France because regulatory wise it’s allowed and it’s close to impossible in other countries, right? What we do on the grid scale is it’s not similar, There’s losses in every market.

But a lot of it is harmonized at least across the continent. UK is always an RGB is always an exception. But you have harmonized wholesale markets. You have Picasso, have Mari, you have SIDC. So you have cross border capacity exchanges. So there’s a lot of stuff that can be reused. ⁓ what we do is rather, I would call it mass customization. It’s not building from scratch. So our platform really is the same code base for all countries.

We upgrade our A4R building, we can use it like in eight countries. Bang. Done. That was the founding idea.

David Hunt (12:44)
Yeah. And how have you found going into, again, I know you had this experience of working particularly in the Austrian utilities in the early days of your career, but getting into a utility organization to offer a service which doesn’t yet exist and the need to some degree, like you said, people don’t necessarily know that they need at that time. It must’ve been hugely challenging. So again, what were some of the, I guess, wins early on or the things that validated that you were on the right track when you started to, you know, in those early days when you were knocking on doors, they were like,

We don’t need this or it doesn’t exist yet.

Juergen Mayerhofer | Enspired (13:17)
I mean, I’m used to that, right? I’ve worked for over 20 years. My customers have been grid operators, storage operators, utilities, right? Exchanges. So you will always find these people that say, I don’t need it. And you will find the other 48 % that says, I can do that in-house because I’m a utility or a trading company or whatever. And in the beginning you have to find this 2 % with less ego who say,

guys, I want to test this out. And in our case, it really takes the reputation of the past helped, right? The people knew we were just fancy algo trading guys. And nobody ever challenged if we can do that or not from a technology point of view that made it very simple, right? Because we just had to convince our first customers about the value that technology can bring, but nobody ever said, hey, can you guys build it? And is the machine learning AI stuff really working? And how about your forecasts and how about execution?

that stuff was solved out of our history. So the first ones were always, I would say the first ones were ⁓ in terms of roles, head of tradings who wanted to focus on the core business in the utility and said that nitty gritty flex stuff is super complicated, ⁓ especially in relation to the value it brings. We have to be honest, if you have a 10 gigabit generation portfolio and you talk about 50 megawatts flex.

Is this moving the needle in your portfolio? Yes or no, right? And so we found these people and that’s what you need to validate if the product is working or not. I sent out the first sales deck, I think even before founding the company to say, would that be interesting for you to use?

David Hunt (15:01)
Okay, and you’ve touched on some of the market growth, which we’ll come back to, but also in terms of the type of customer utilities is the obvious one. who else are your customer trading houses? Who else are the sort of people with whom you’re developing those relationships now?

Juergen Mayerhofer | Enspired (15:15)
So I would classify them as infrastructure funds, are our biggest clients, right? Why? Because first of all, have similar ambitions than us, right? They want to build the same type of asset in a lot of countries. So typically we have a large, like 70 to 90 % overlap in geographies that we think are we team interesting and they team interesting. ⁓

And there is no conflict of interest in that sense because we don’t own any assets. ⁓ They don’t want to operate any assets. There is one or two exceptions, smaller ones who want to optimize on them all on their own. But actually they see themselves as investors, right? And they want to hand over a commissioned asset or before commissioning and then say, do the job, right? Make monetize it. ⁓

sometimes different with utilities, right? Depending on their strategic positioning, some say, let’s work together. Even big ones, we work with a lot of big utilities. Other big ones say, battery storage is part of my core strategy. There’s no chance to work together, which is fine. So ⁓ ideally large infra funds with large geographical footprint is ideal partner.

David Hunt (16:34)
Okay. Yeah, makes sense.

Okay. And then looking at a couple of areas where I guess technology is increasingly evolving. of course is AI and I guess that’s a challenge both in terms of everybody now sticks an AI badge on everything. So that that makes, guess, differentiation somewhat a little bit different who’s actually generally got an AI offering rather than just something which is a facsimile of that. And then of course, from a talent perspective, know, there’s that’s really

You’ve grown substantially as a company. Like you say, when you started, there was a bunch of people you kind of already know. And how many people in the business now?

Juergen Mayerhofer | Enspired (17:10)
101 or so, roughly 100.

David Hunt (17:12)
Yeah, so that’s

a lot of additional heads. I’m sure that not all of the specifically in AI, but ⁓ how are you finding that as a, I guess as a challenge at the moment, the fact that now there is so much hype around AI and you, you have seen native to this for four or five years now.

Juergen Mayerhofer | Enspired (17:28)
If you look at our website, etc., we actually try to not overdo it with AI because as you correctly stated, it’s hard to look under the hood. What’s really AI? mean, what is AI? A support vector machine, a simple regression, deep reinforcement learning. So we in the beginning tried to classify between very established traditional machine learning techniques, random forestings, all that stuff.

and then say, then from deep neural networks, that’s the new stuff, that’s AI. But we found out that our customers or prospective customers were just totally not into the topic at all. And we just gave up on educating, but rather focus on the value that we bring. We have ⁓ as only player globally certified revenues by KPMG. So we publish ⁓ real revenues. ⁓

David Hunt (18:09)
Okay.

Juergen Mayerhofer | Enspired (18:26)
of assets from our customers on our website, even and in webinars, et cetera. So we moved away from the tech thing because we found out our clients want to be, have to have a credible partner with transparent results. They want to reduce execution risk, right? So it’s, it’s, it’s, think it’s not about anymore about doing the AI pitch in the beginning. It was a means of

communicating why you make more money than somebody else. ⁓ But I think times are gone. A lot of people are through the process of building their first battery or in construction. They have learned what the issues are. And I think a lot of them start to value track records, credibility, size of the company, experience in a lot of geographical countries. There’s a lot of knowledge to transfer.

So that’s why we actually, we use it. We have a team working since more than four years on reinforcement learning application for battery storage. We have a ton of stuff live, ⁓ but there is, think, no easy way to communicate that value to somebody. think the outcome has to justify it, right? Clients don’t care. We could do it manually. If we achieve the same performance, they wouldn’t care. Yes.

David Hunt (19:32)
No.

Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. I think that’s a factor. also hidden out on the head a little bit around timing is that when there’s a lot of noise, people look for substance, like you say, and what’s behind that and what’s the track record? Give me some examples. And we’re the same, obviously. There was a lot of hype around a couple of years ago in the market was frothy. Lots of recruiters suddenly came in their fold, but it’s a case of who’s been around doing it for some time and it makes a difference.

Juergen Mayerhofer | Enspired (20:03)
Yeah, but that’s how you get the people right. If you really do it, I mean, people will find out in recruiting, right, they will ask questions. And we have people from utilities, from Google, PhDs in AI, etc. So they will talk to each other in the coffee breaks of the recruiting process, right. And people will immediately figure out if it’s a password stuff or if there is hardcore R &D ongoing.

And as we are in R &D, ⁓ we get all these really exceptional people that want to work on that, on the combination of applying this technology to the energy transition, right?

David Hunt (20:45)
Yeah, no, it certainly helps when you guys have that background of success and those stories that you can tell, both from a customer acquisition point of view, but of course, from a talent acquisition point of view as well. The other thing I was thinking about, because I know that you’re an EV driver, have been for some years much like myself, and obviously that’s evolved significantly. You talked before about being focused, obviously, on behind the meter. ⁓ Where do you see or have you starting to see, in a broader context,

it’s obviously still in its infancy, sort of V to G playing a part in this transition and is that something that’s on your radar directly? How do you see that evolving over the next few years?

Juergen Mayerhofer | Enspired (21:23)
I would hope for it, trust me. As I’m driving EV since a decade now. Actually in 2021 we had a smart charging field test with a utility in Austria. So back then people thought smart charging is load management, but it was not about peak shaving. It was about smartly procuring energy. So we had that up and running and

The problem, think, with V2Gs, we talked a lot of ⁓ OEMs, et cetera, is that it’s the most complex stakeholder setup you can imagine, right? If you want to unlock this, you have the car owner, you have the guys who sell the wall box, you have the HEMS provider, which they sell you some stuff with your PV, not thinking about the car. And that stuff is all your supplier, right? And if you have a spot index tariff.

I have a smart charging offer at home from my supplier. I have one from my hands provider. The whole thing is not communicating, right? And nobody ever asked me if or offered me some value. ⁓ So I think that’s the problem. I’m technology wise. I don’t see any issues at all, right? We don’t care for me at home. And in Austria, least, I typically charge with 10 kilowatts. I have basically an eight hour storage, right? Aggregation is not a thing, but regulation is a problem. tariffs is a problem.

You interfere with the balancing of your supplier. It doesn’t work with your hands. think it’s, nobody has solved it other than I think the octopus guys have done a great job. They went around some of the stakeholder problems by making them their own stakeholder, right? By leasing cars, et cetera. I would really wish for, but I don’t see any progress in terms of regulation. And then…

it’s still not clear how customers will adopt, right? If EVs, a lot of people have expensive EVs still, and I don’t know if they would be, you know, they have range anxiety. I don’t know what they will think if you say, I use your battery, right? If they’re already afraid that the thing is charged tomorrow morning. I think that’s unfortunately a longer journey from a change perspective than from a technology perspective.

David Hunt (23:40)
Yeah, no, I get that from a consumer point of view. Like I I’m an octopus and more than happy to do that myself. But this is something I’ve been doing and living and breathing for many years. think new adopters, like you say, in terms of consumers are still a little bit nervous and reticent. what’s really interesting us at the moment is a lot of development, of course, in the heavy duty, the fleet, the integration where you’re with B2B rather than B2C. So although obviously the aggregator is the B2B, but

In the fleet, seems like there’s, again, it’s another possibility to add a revenue stack from buying an electrified fleet.

Juergen Mayerhofer | Enspired (24:14)
I think so, that also makes sense, It’s a bit like residential versus gridscale barriers, right? It’s easier to get scale, it’s B2B, you don’t have to convince a B2C consumer in that sense, right? So you talk company to company, there is more flexibility, more volume in there, there is typically fixed schedules, at least the ones we’re working with, you know.

When the bus is leaving, how far it’s driving, what’s the route, you have your logistics planning. So I think the B2B case is way more realistic. If somebody wants to, right? There’s still some regulatory hurdles with different tariffs on the same grid access point and all that stuff, depending on the country. But I think that that could be close. I don’t know how big the market really will be until they have changed, right? But I think that’s the fastest moving segments.

David Hunt (24:40)
Exactly.

Juergen Mayerhofer | Enspired (25:07)
I don’t know how that segment is called.

David Hunt (25:09)
Yeah. So from your perspective, then I guess the power source or the storage source is agnostic in a sense. So how much of what you’re mentioning now is specifically batteries and how much specifically lithium ion batteries, for example, versus other asset classes or other generational storage classes?

Juergen Mayerhofer | Enspired (25:28)
So out of our 5GW that we have under management, there is 1.3, hopefully this week 1.4GW of battery storage. In all sizes, shapes, so we have behind the meter assets and the hundreds of kilowatts since some time with co-located assets, with PV, with wind.

We have grid scale in single digit megawatts, scale two, the biggest one is the moment 103.5 to 130 megawatt hours. As it in northern Germany that we operate in all revenue streams. And the rest is historically pump storage, renewables, cross border capacities for the Danish GSO. Demand side cases like compressor stations of natural gas cabins.

There is a variety, since actually mid of 22, so the energy crisis will focus on battery storage. So out of 100 deals in the pipeline, 99 are classical lithium ion battery storage. I would say yes.

David Hunt (26:37)
It’s hard

to see around that a little bit. We of course work with a number of companies and different technologies and chemistries for storage. And of course there’s a place for many, but lithium just keeps getting cheaper and longer duration and more flexible, more use cases.

Juergen Mayerhofer | Enspired (26:52)
That’s it, right? The world is easy in the terms, right? It’s about IRR. And we looked for quite some time into flow batteries. I’m actually feeling a fan of flow batteries if you don’t look at the commercials, right? There is some non-degradable fluids and all that stuff or biodegradable stuff. That would be really cool, but it takes a lot of space and it’s more expensive and it’s unfortunately not there yet at scale.

Another thing that we look at is thermal storage, which I’m pretty excited about because while we’re happy to contribute in that flex ⁓ electricity space, energy transition is way broader and that would be for us an angle to get also into industrial heating, which is I think, roughly two thirds of, there is also ⁓ district heating, et cetera, but a significant part of the energy transition. So that would be our angle with.

David Hunt (27:20)
Yeah.

Yes.

Juergen Mayerhofer | Enspired (27:48)
similar technology, similar business model.

David Hunt (27:51)
Yeah, that’s interesting as you say rightly that the heat is the for anything the bigger problem. And it’s interesting working with clients who are, I guess, a return to things like solar thermal, even at high temperature compared to, everyone’s been chasing PV from a solar perspective for so long, but it’s in applications where, yeah, heat is a big issue. And that’s something where

Juergen Mayerhofer | Enspired (28:13)
But don’t know

actually, do you know why electricity is so prominent? mean, it’s more or less, it’s the energy transition, right? These renewables. But I don’t know why nobody talks about heat and transport and the other stuff, right? It’s like, or it’s just in my babbling. I don’t know.

David Hunt (28:18)
commit.

No,

I think it’s true. think it’s a little bit of just the ease because when we talked before, I started the solar business back in 2007 and primarily that was PV, but we were also doing sort of thermal, we were doing wind, we were doing heat pumps. So we were doing multiple clean technologies, but I think electrons are just easy to understand, I think, and easy to move, of course, and easy to generate. So I think it just became the easier option. The prices plummeted, everybody chased this, but

I think now hopefully there’s a realization that that’s cool. Batteries will still go down in cost. PVs still go down in cost. actually the bigger problem is the de-carbonization of industrial processes is a problem that needs to be solved.

Juergen Mayerhofer | Enspired (29:07)
But exposure is not different, I mean, it’s not that natural gas for boilers, etc. wouldn’t be impacted by global issues. Let’s call it like this. I mean, meanwhile, without importing a ton of Gazprom gas, right? It’s quite some exposure globally. So I don’t know if in general, right, this wouldn’t be smart to get more independent, to also electrify this segment.

David Hunt (29:32)
Yeah.

No, I agree. agree. I’m passionate about the electrifying what you can, but clearly we can’t actually electrify everything easily enough for certain use cases. yeah, that’s a challenge. How do you see then, Jürgen, the evolution? You’ve obviously now, I should say, been able to scale out into a number of different countries, primarily with the same solution or tools. That internationalization is always a challenge.

I guess there’s still more countries where you aren’t yet, but what does the next few years look like for the company as a CEO? What are the challenges on your horizon?

Juergen Mayerhofer | Enspired (30:09)
So there is, when we talk strategy, we talk in two dimensions, right? The one is really taking business model as is more or less and adapted to other geographies globally, right? So we’ve done our first global step with the Japanese market. There is some interesting European countries, but I would say the biggest ones we’ve covered. The last one we signed is Romania, for example. I totally enjoyed it. I’ve been working in Bucharest for over a year.

David Hunt (30:38)
It’s nice though,

Juergen Mayerhofer | Enspired (30:38)
in my

past, so have a good reason to go back. so the next step has to be in that sense, US and Australia, basically very large volume, highly volatile markets. But we first need to get stuff done on our home turf, right? Because the risk for us is a different ones in these markets. We know the other markets from our past, right? We know people there, we know…

Lawyers there, know utilities there, we can ask people, we have a network, we have a reputation, which is not the case for US and Australia. So we have to approach it different. And the second dimension is in terms of how broad the offering will be. And for example, we see collocation as an off-take agreements in general, would call it, as a thing to finance the energy transition, getting projects bankable.

So we’re working with a ton of partners. We can offer floors, the heads-up stores, for standalone, for co-located setups. I think this has to get more efficient because at the moment, I don’t know if you have some experience with that, it’s a hassle, right? You need these three partners help you in Poland. The other partner can do something in Spain. The next partner only does Greece. The next partner does three countries and only specific products, I think.

What we see in the flex space is like what PPAs were like 10, 15 years ago, right? Pretty custom, pretty… And we are only at the beginning there. So I think the second angle is having super solid standardized. I mean, there is no standard, but as standardized as possible, off-take agreements ⁓ for our countries.

David Hunt (32:27)
Yeah. So that element of international expansion you touched on, you said there were of strategically two areas that you look at. One, I guess, is that international growth. What other areas do you see as, I guess, opportunities for the business and how the market will evolve to your advantage or hopefully to your advantage, or you can turn it to your advantage.

Juergen Mayerhofer | Enspired (32:47)
Yeah, so I mean, we anyways have all use cases up and running, right? So our approach is to always get our hands dirty, right? So that’s why we also have behind the meter assets, we even have thousands of small ones that we trade aggregated. We have thermal plants with CHPs, have so whenever a new use case is coming up, we can say we have five years of experience without lying, right? Or making a sales pitch out of it.

I personally think thermal storage will be very important. I’m undecided if electrolysers will be a thing. I hope electric vehicles, some regulatory changes. mean, there are some moves in some countries, right? I’m still not a full believer on residential battery storage, to be honest. I have a pretty fancy setup at home and the battery is just always full, right? So the problem is the primary use case of optimizing myself, not the grid, not my neighbors.

And I think that they’re mentioning in, you know, if I hear the pictures of, have hundreds of megawatts of residential base, it’s like, cool. They’re full at 1030, right? Thanks. It’s like, I think to make residential a case, the approach has to be different. You have to not only look at how to optimize your household, but you would have to look further in front of the meter in that case, from that view. So I think thermal storage.

Everything co-located. have quite some talks about data centers, but I think it’s very early. It’s also a bit of a hype thingy. So the phase of where data center companies are is way earlier. And what we talk flexibilization is rather the cherry on the cake, I have the feeling, right? Still, it’s a very hype topic. It will be there. I don’t know in which ⁓ breadth and depth.

EVs, thermal storage, would be my pets, right? But we’ve set up the company, whatever comes around the corner in two weeks in whatever country, we will solve it with technology, right? The more complex, the better.

David Hunt (34:55)
Yeah. Well, that leads a little bit to my final question, which is around the culture that you’ve built within your organization. You’ve grown from actually starting with probably a few people in mind, co-founding and internationalizing now and expanding. The ability to adapt to all of these things as they come is a technology problem, but ultimately I think it’s a people, not problem, people solution, if you like, it depends how you look at it, but it’s around the culture and the people that you have on the team. Perhaps you can just show a little bit of the culture of the business and your

I guess your leadership style within that culture and how have you managed to evolve the business from a people perspective.

Juergen Mayerhofer | Enspired (35:31)
So first of all, we’ve learned a lot in the past, right? So we have my colleague Connie, which was here from day one. She takes care about people and culture. Also sits in our board, just to know how important this topic is for us. And we typically started designing organization leadership ⁓ setups, etc., a year before fundraising-ish.

So we never went to fundraising, got money and then thought what to do with it. I mean, nobody does that, right? But exaggerated, really. ⁓ So we started a year before and said, how big can the business be? How many people do we need? And then we thought about what people or seniority to hire and which roles can we promote somebody internally? Do they need the training upfront? How will the organization change? What will other people?

David Hunt (36:06)
A lot of people do do that, unfortunately. Yeah.

Juergen Mayerhofer | Enspired (36:29)
in existing organization thing, our roles, responsibilities changing, et cetera. So we have a team that takes care about people and culture and learning and whatever. ⁓ So we invest actually a lot. The second thing we did from what we also learned in the past, everything was even as an Austrian company, English, ⁓ no constraints in recruiting, no office presence. mean, hey, with COVID, ⁓ that was actually not an option. ⁓

⁓ But we were clear from the beginning that Vienna is an attractive location, also for young people maybe to move there, but that we will not find enough talent. I mean, how many people have an experience with algo trading and the AI in energy flexibility stuff? ⁓ So we have people with more than I think 26 or 27 nationalities from US to Japan to Australia to Hungary to…

China to whatever, right? So pretty diverse. was the idea. And also I would say culture fits first in recruiting very strongly, very, very strongly. So we have a lot of gates in there. We even developed our own, it’s called spice model to quantify our gut feeling. Let’s put it like this. There is a model around our gut feeling and there is coffee breaks and all the other stuff for both sides to get to know each other. And we do a really good job.

David Hunt (37:44)
Yeah.

Juergen Mayerhofer | Enspired (37:53)
The team does a really good job around finding the right people that are really passionate. And yes, the final outcome is we have people that can build stuff in time where others have not even scheduled the meeting. You wouldn’t believe how fast we can be if there is a big opportunity in a new country, right? We have been building stuff within weeks to enter new country. Weeks, not months, not years.

David Hunt (38:13)
Mm-hmm.

Juergen Mayerhofer | Enspired (38:20)
and not go to a traditional or incumbent player and say, hey guys, you’re in Germany. Do you want to go to France and how long does it take until you’re operational there? Right. And yes, that’s a part of our USP that you cannot sell to anybody because people will not buy it. Right. You can only convince if you do stuff in four weeks that others take a year for.

David Hunt (38:43)
Yeah, but that’s deep. That’s you say that’s deeply embedded in the culture that you have that mindset that that that that can be done. That’s the I guess the critical thing.

Juergen Mayerhofer | Enspired (38:50)
It’s still not so easy, right? You will not find

a hundred people that say, change priorities every day. but I think we found a mode of some stable long-term planning, right? There was some assets in construction where we know they will be life in Q2, Q3 next year, right? So, so we can plan ahead, but we also created that flexibility. So it shouldn’t be an exception, right? If there is an exciting opportunity in a new country, ⁓ we don’t want to be in ⁓

panic mode, we want to say that this is exactly what we’re good at. Right, guys? I mean, we can build this stuff in two months where others don’t even give it a try. Right. And so that’s, that’s the mode. It’s a mix of cultural processes because just jumping around what most young companies, including ourselves too, it’s just not scalable. Right. At some point in time, will lose people. They will don’t know. They will not understand the why.

David Hunt (39:24)
Yeah, yeah.

Juergen Mayerhofer | Enspired (39:46)
Why you change priorities? Why is this suddenly so important? So we wove on that one, but yes, I would say that’s core strength enabled by people and culture that we have.

David Hunt (39:47)
Yeah.

Yeah, no, it’s great. It’s great that have the people person on the board and recognize that. again, but to your point before, it’s surprising the number of, we work with a lot of VCs, obviously Future Energy Ventures, I know you joined your cap table recently. We work with a lot of VCs and it’s surprising how many people raise and then think, oh, now we have the money. do we do? Who should we hire rather than the other way around? Yeah. And obviously, yeah, most of our, we’d like to most of our clients aligned with you and actually for plan.

Juergen Mayerhofer | Enspired (40:01)
Yes.

Really? Interesting, interesting.

David Hunt (40:25)
But it’s workshop I ran for people like Techstars a few times around hiring to plan rather than planning to hire or plan to hire rather than hiring to plan. So having this mindset of where are we looking to go? What do need to get to that place?

Juergen Mayerhofer | Enspired (40:36)
You lose time, David. It’s horrible, right? mean, everybody who knows how long recruiting takes, as soon as a term sheet’s inside, we started recruiting, right? Because if you first raise, then plan, then recruit, you lose a year, right? It’s like…

David Hunt (40:44)
Yeah. But when you start thinking about it, when the

Exactly,

exactly. So yeah, that’s one of the things we bang our drum about and fortunately many are aligned with yourself and do this the right way but sometimes it’s hard being a founder, right? If you’ve not done it before, sometimes there’s a million things going on and you think, I just need the money then I can grow but like you say you, yeah.

Juergen Mayerhofer | Enspired (40:57)
Listen.

It’s always hard David, there

is no matter what size, is always challenges coming up, is always pleasures, ⁓ surprising ones.

David Hunt (41:11)
always challenges.

Yeah, it’s certainly a roller coaster. But listen, we’re a little bit out of time. Thank you for your time. It’s great to share a little bit of the journey with you and where you are. Thanks for doing that. Obviously, we’ll point people to the website and to yourselves on the episode page so people can find out some more. ⁓ But looking forward to the further evolution of the business and to keep it in touch.

Juergen Mayerhofer | Enspired (41:36)
Thanks a lot David.