Liliane Ableitner – Exnaton

David Hunt (00:01.593)
Hey, Lilliam, welcome to the podcast.

Liliane (00:03.916)
Hi David, thanks for having me.

David Hunt (00:06.457)
That’s good. good. There’s, there is, as is never the case, so much to unpack with what’s going on in your world and with X and the ton and of course your journey. we’re to do a lot of that, but perhaps you can start with very first sort of a helicopter view, if you like, of what X and the ton is all about.

Liliane (00:21.656)
Of course, that’s my pleasure. At Exaton, we support utilities in launching new energy products. And this way, we allow them to build those new products and to access flexibility of their customers.

David Hunt (00:36.429)
Right. There’s a lot in there and this is a place, a space that really interests me. I’ll share more for why in a moment. But again, I do traditionally like to say that this is a podcast as much about tech as it is about people or as much about people as it is about the tech. So I like to look at your journey, which is an interesting one. from, I guess, from PhD student to a Forbes 30 under 30 leading entrepreneur. perhaps you can share a little bit of how that all came about. first got you into firstly, the energy transition?

and then specifically to start a company or co-found a company.

Liliane (01:08.77)
Yeah, yeah, my pleasure. Well, I studied business informatics and I always wanted to apply my skills in a sector where I can actually have an impact. So this is how it all started off. then back at university, I discovered lots of energy classes and I thought, OK, this looks interesting. I want to understand more about this topic because I was never really interested in.

finance and insurances that much and I had the feeling everything was all around those verticals. But then I discovered energy and it was super interesting. A sector where you had to understand a lot, where you really had to dive in deeply and I loved it. And I then did my first internships in the energy sector and it all led to me going to ETH Zurich to do my PhD.

David Hunt (01:57.868)
Okay.

Liliane (02:03.022)
in the energy sector as well, but always also in the sector of technology, always applying my technical skills in the energy sector. And the energy sector has a huge potential for digitalization. And this is how I ended up in doing my PhD and meeting my co-founders.

David Hunt (02:14.966)
Yeah, yeah.

David Hunt (02:21.943)
Right, so you met them also at that time of studying for the PhD.

Liliane (02:27.508)
I did, I did. I mean, I met both of them at ETH Zurich. We were on the same research project. We all had kind of different backgrounds, but we were put together on that one research project and had the opportunity to build Switzerland’s first energy community.

Yeah, the project turned out quite nicely. the project, the utility wanted to buy the software and the end users that had tested the prototype wanted the software to be continuing or the trading of electricity to be continuing. And this is when we decided to found the company and really kick this off with Accent on.

David Hunt (03:10.905)
That’s really, again, I think what perhaps sometimes people don’t realize, even though there were lots of factors, as you said there, that led towards the realization actually this is a good idea, people want to buy the product, there’s something here, right? There’s still a bit of a leap to get to that point of saying, well, there’s something here, says, hey, let’s go found a company. So was there, I don’t know, a meal out or a drink at a bar or something that sort of got to the point of saying, hey, let’s do this.

Liliane (03:34.414)
Yeah, I mean, there was quite a natural point because all three of us, we were done with our PhDs and we had to decide whether we now go out on the job market to look for jobs out there or if this like very, very rough idea of our PhD research could be transformed into a real company that is generating real revenue. And this was basically the

David Hunt (03:40.846)
Mm-hmm.

Liliane (04:01.324)
the challenge because we came from a technical university. had to reduce the complexity. We had to make it easy to understand for our target audience what we’re actually doing and how we can help them. And we, for us, we had to calculate the business case. How are we going to be creating revenue from all of that? Is it a feasible business case? All of those questions were.

We’re bugging us back then in 2020.

David Hunt (04:33.729)
for that I’m sure it does feel like long ago in some ways as well. But what I found really fascinating is that when I first got into the cleantech sector was in 2007, I co founded a solar business in the UK. And two things struck me at that time, one of which is the incumbents, DSOs to DNOs in particular, but also the utilities were really, really entrenched in a monopoly that didn’t really understand or things were just how they’d always been or certainly for many decades.

And, one of the things that sort of struck me quite early is when we were installing solar, were, it’s primarily residential in the early days. And we were supplying a thing called a Sunny Boy, which was a little device which connected to the inverter. So you could see what you were generating and you could see, you know, when you were exporting to the grid and all this kind of thing. And it dramatically changed the behaviors of the people way beyond just the fact they’ve got solar on the roof and they felt good about themselves, especially with them when it was very expensive and the payback wasn’t brilliant.

It changed the behaviors. They used to ring us and say, you know, I’m using my washing machine or I’m doing this then the other, because it’s a sunny day and I can see the energy generation. So it changed behaviors beyond the fact that they’ve just got this soda on the roof. And I think that that transition from consumer to prosumer has been fascinating to see. that seems to be, correct me if I’m wrong, but that seems to be the world in which you enable things to happen and to support that transition.

Liliane (05:56.312)
Definitely, definitely. So we empower utilities to launch a number of different rates of the new energy system. It can be a prosumer rate, it can be a rate for local energy sharing, it can be a dynamic market rate or a dynamic grid fee rate. So we…

or with these new rates, we make sure that renewables are being better integrated in the energy system. And we incentivize end users, whether it’s households or businesses, to use their electricity in a more reasonable way and to also, we’re motivating them to invest into solar, to invest into battery storage systems. Because the more we

optimize on a local level, the less we need to extend the grid infrastructure. So we think we really think very locally and try to optimize the household first and then we try to optimize the local community so the neighborhood and then we optimize on the higher levels. And this is what we’re enabling with our very, very fine granular billing of energy data and also visualization of the data because

At the end of the day, we want people to invest in your energy.

David Hunt (07:22.913)
Yeah, I think that visualization piece, as I say, is really important. Well, one thing that’s a challenge is, on one hand, you’re looking at localization for obvious reasons of using and integrating energies and using them locally as much as possible. But utilities, by definition, even in the smaller ones, even in Switzerland, probably, they’re not small companies necessarily. And it’s really tough for a startup to start to sell to these big organizations in your own country, let alone in international territories.

Perhaps you can share how a little bit clearly you had the advantage in Switzerland because of the project, but how did you then evolve that into working with other utilities and convincing them that this small little scrappy startup from Switzerland could enable them to better engage with their customers and sell more of themselves?

Liliane (08:08.75)
Well, I mean, you’re already saying that’s quite the challenge, right? You’re this tiny startup and you want to sell production software to a utility. I mean, the good thing is, from our perspective, is that the utilities, need external support. I mean, of course, some of them are trying to build it in-house, but most of the utilities really need help from outside players. But then the question is, how are you?

positioning yourself in lights of all the other players out there, in lights of all the established players. I mean, one thing that is definitely helping us here is we’re rather fast. We can really take care of our customers very nicely and we can take their ideas up and put them into code sooner than many other…

more established companies out there because they have very very long roadmaps and you as a customer you have to fight for your ideas getting onto the roadmap but here we are we have a value proposition and we can really convert our customers ideas rather quickly into production software and you know

David Hunt (09:26.167)
I think that’s a unique. Sorry, go ahead.

Liliane (09:29.61)
At the end of the day, is really hard to sell into utilities, definitely. And you really have to see how are you getting into those large corporates? Who is your contact point? What countries are you tackling first? So yes, we started off in Switzerland.

But then we realized there was a market need in Austria, we rather or very soon went international, went into the neighboring country of Switzerland and then sold energy community software to many utilities in Austria.

From Austria, we realised there’s a market need in Germany as well. So then we entered the German market. You always need a first reference in the market. That’s super important. Utilities like to listen to other utilities. So you always want to collaborate with the first utility in the new market. And then make it public and spread the word. And let other utilities follow.

David Hunt (10:31.223)
Yeah, guess as you say, it’s always easy when you have a reference point or somebody who will champion or speak for, validate what you are doing and the product. This world has grown so quickly. Again, going back to little bit of in Hyperion’s early days, we were working with Zonon as they evolved the of the Zonon community and peer-to-peer trading very early on in batteries.

Liliane (10:50.35)
Hmm.

David Hunt (10:51.541)
I say very early on, it’s probably still only like five, six, seven years ago or something, but it feels like a long time. But again, now we have a world where there’s much more renewables, both on utility scale and of course on residential and commercial properties. We also have now batteries beyond where they were, you know, even just a few years ago. And of course, EV charging, you know, is becoming much more a thing in pretty much most countries, certainly across Europe. So all these, I guess, moving parts, how does Exnoton sort of, guess,

sit across all of those and interact with all of those different both energy use cases but also sort of generation sources.

Liliane (11:25.774)
Well, mean, our foundation is being able to build DR assets. So that means we can build consumption based on different rates, whether it’s a dynamic rate, a fixed rate, a time of use rate. So we’re always working with a time series billing engine.

So we don’t consider annual consumption, but we consider a consumption point every 15 minutes. And this means over the course of a year, we build 30,000 data points and not a single one. So the times that the friendly employee of your utility would knock on your door and read your meter rating, those times are over, right? We now have smart meters and now we want to create value from the smart meter data. We want to

David Hunt (12:05.497)
Mm-hmm.

David Hunt (12:14.329)
Yeah.

Liliane (12:22.644)
automized billing and we want to learn from all the smart meter data. So we do the billing for consumption, but we also do all the billing for production. So whether it’s a PV system, a local wind asset, all of that, we can bill as well. And at the end of the day, a battery is always behaving like a consumer or like a producer because it is

David Hunt (12:47.385)
Mm-hmm.

Liliane (12:51.518)
it is consuming electricity to store it or it is releasing energy into the grid and that is basically like a producer. So a battery is a prosumer in our case and a battery will always have two lines on there on its invoice. One is for consumption and one for production. This is how we’re doing all of that. That’s the foundation. And then the next point is, well now that you’ve

David Hunt (13:15.523)
Mm-hmm.

Liliane (13:20.264)
handled all the billing, you want to create an actual benefit from all of that. So now we want to steer assets based on the current prices. We want to the battery know when to consume electricity and when to release electricity into the local grid. This is why we need dynamic rates for

Because this is basically the incentivation because no battery, no electric vehicle would be willing to contribute to participate in the new energy system if there wasn’t a remuneration for that. That’s why we need dynamic rates for storing electricity, for releasing electricity. And the foundation is the capability of building all of that.

David Hunt (14:10.233)
That’s an interesting point. Further to that, again, going back to the internationalization piece is obviously in different markets, different utilities have different regulation, particularly around time of use tariffs, for example. So how are you, I guess, able to operate in territories where there are differences there? And perhaps just following on from that in terms of policies and sort of tariff pricing, what you see as some of the key things that will unlock more of what

we’re all looking to achieve, which is more of a renewable and more of a sort of a low carbon energy base.

Liliane (14:45.976)
Yeah, that’s a very good question. think one of the advantages that we have is that we went international from the second day on. So we had to build our system in a way that it would suit the Swiss market and the Austrian market and then early on also the German market. So we were just very…

familiarized with different regulations and we build our system in a modular way. So you can really imagine our software as this super flexible tariff editor. So imagine you have a dashboard and then you click together your rate. I mean, an electricity rate always has different components, right? So you pay for the electricity, so for generating it.

you pay for the grid, for transporting it, and then you have all the levies and fees and so on. So those components, you click together per drop, per click and drop in our tariff editor, and then you give it a certain rate. So now you can say, okay, grid fees is a fixed price of, let’s say, 10 cents per kilowatt hours. On top of that,

We have the fee for the electricity, for the generation part. Here we take a market rate from EPEX, for example. We multiply it by 1.2 and we give it a fixed margin of two cents per kilowatt hour. All of that is doable with our tariff editor. So then you click together your very individual rate and

With this approach, we can work under different regulations. It doesn’t matter whether it’s Germany, whether it’s Switzerland, because the idea of different components is the same in all the countries. And this is how we can adapt to the national regulations.

David Hunt (16:47.897)
Mm-hmm.

David Hunt (16:52.249)
Okay. Okay. I’m going to jump back a little bit because it still fascinates in terms of you going into as a startup, being a PhD student, no real working experience or sales experience as such. And I believe that you’ve been sort of the lead on the business development and the sort of commercial side of the business. So knocking on those first utility doors, even though you have this project behind you, it’s tough. How have you evolved personally and how much have you learned?

from a business perspective more than an energy or technology perspective in the last few years.

Liliane (17:24.334)
Yeah, I think I’ve learned quite a bit. No, it’s been a very, very insightful journey. Of course, a start-up is a roller coaster. You don’t always have good days. You also have few bad days. I mean, beforehand, I have…

supported companies as a freelancer in marketing and sales. have worked in a startup beforehand in marketing and sales. So I do have first experience, but of course it’s a different thing if you go out there with an established company trying to sell something, trying to make products more known, or if you’re in a startup that is newly founded.

I think for us the reputation of the research project has helped us a lot because back then when we started off everyone in Switzerland basically knew that one research project because it was all over the media so this was definitely a kickstart for us and also coming from a very renowned

Technical University was definitely an advantage for us here in Switzerland. Everyone knows ETH Zurich. So this was the door opener to first conversations with utilities in Switzerland. But that doesn’t mean that those conversations led to active signings. It was a bit of a tougher journey to get those utilities under contract. And one thing we also had to learn is that

David Hunt (18:50.306)
Yeah.

Liliane (19:02.08)
As soon as a utility confirms your offer, we then had to learn what it takes to bring those deals through procurement. This was another two or three months of work until we could actually start off with the project. So it was quite a journey, but you learn with every step. I mean, today we know quite well which questions to ask to our customers in advance. How are we getting this?

David Hunt (19:10.243)
Yeah, yeah.

Liliane (19:29.55)
through procurement, how should we deal with the pricing structure, what kind of incentives do your procurement team members have and so on. So I think we have learned along the way tremendously. I personally have learned a lot and it’s been quite a ride.

David Hunt (19:53.817)
Yeah, I’m sure it has. I’m sure it Explore that more. Getting back to the utilities, as we said at the beginning, they’re quite slow at innovation, at change. But primarily, clearly, what they’re interested in is maintaining or acquiring customers and selling power, essentially, is where they’re making their profits. How have they seen where you can enable that to grow from their perspective? Because like we said before, it’s an incentivization.

to for consumers to act differently in a way that’s more, again, greener or efficient. But again, just wondering how you were able to tell the story or help the utilities to see how they could benefit through this ability to interact better with their consumers with their customer base.

Liliane (20:42.228)
Yeah, yeah. I mean, one thing that we that we should take into account is the competition out there on the market. You know, in the European markets, you have new utilities in every market. Those utilities, they come into the market, they are super digitized, they have super modern electricity products, and they are really attracting

considerable market shares out there and even if a market share might be still small they make a lot of buzz out there. They have huge marketing budgets and they are really rethinking electricity and its products. So if you have a look at octopus energy for example, 1,5, n-pal, tibber

All of these players, have…

have made it possible to excite electricity consumers for electricity. So this is basically their achievement. They have made electricity a desired product. And traditional players do see this and traditional utilities, they do want to keep up with that, but they don’t know how to do it. And mean, a traditional utility.

David Hunt (22:10.36)
Yeah.

Liliane (22:16.306)
What are they good at? They are good at trading electricity, right? This is their core competency. They are good at maintaining the grid, building the grid, all of that. But they do not necessarily have the software capabilities in-house and this whole like user experience perspective, because in their systems, an end user is a measurement point, a grid connection.

And we are taking them on the journey to deliver great products to their end users. And our value proposition is like launch similar products like Octopills, like 1,5 and really build on the trust you have gained from your customers over the past decades. Because those players have been around, whereas the new utilities, the so-called new utilities.

They have the challenge of being trusted, being the trusted local partner, right? But those traditional players, have been trusted for decades. So they can use this trust now, launch great modern products. And we do think the synergies between modernized products and the trusted aspect is the best possible fit out there.

David Hunt (23:22.681)
Hmm.

David Hunt (23:41.113)
Yeah, that’s really interesting actually, because again, there’s still lots of statistics, even though there are now options to change quite easily in the UK and I’m sure across Europe as well. People still, many if not the majority still stick with those that have been with for years or even decades in some examples. But I get that. I mean, I had Greg from CEO from Octopus and also Philip Schroder very well from Eins Komma Front, both in on the podcast, which is cool. But again, that kind of

innovation and disruption that’s kind of, again, utilities that you have to buy into. So otherwise they start to fall into obsolescence, right? So it’s, these things are all changing and they need to go through this innovation journey. And I guess it’s historically obvious that they can do that through a third party much easier than they can do that internally.

Liliane (24:29.174)
Yes, exactly, exactly. you know, so the question is, how are you doing it? You know, so if a utility today wants to launch a new product, they make up their ideas, they make up their concept and so on. And I’ve heard so many times from utilities that they have the greatest ideas and the greatest concepts for new products, but they failed at getting those products.

on the customer invoice because it was just too cumbersome with the existing ERP systems out there. Because a large ERP system does not adapt to a pilot for utility, know. So it’s really tough to get your ideas on the roadmaps of the big ERPs. And this is where we come in. We really have the super flexible platform.

David Hunt (25:15.672)
Yeah.

Liliane (25:20.31)
We integrate with existing ERP systems and we outsource the complexity into our time series billing engine. And we do this within a couple of weeks and not months or years. So this is really our value proposition with us. You can launch a new raid within six to 12 weeks, depending on the complexity.

David Hunt (25:33.281)
Nones.

David Hunt (25:46.202)
Yeah, interesting. So going back to, again, your journey as you evolve, setting now into more territories, more utilities, the markets are changing, of course, in terms of both technical capabilities. AI is obviously going to play big part in things. There’s a lot of change. So there’s no longer three of you in the company, right? So talk to me a little bit about the journey of how you’ve personally dealt with growing teams to take on all this work, growing, I guess, internationally with resources.

Part of that scale up journey is really tough, I think, for an entrepreneur. say you’re juggling so many plates at any given time, but ultimately none of this will happen if you don’t have the right people on board doing the right things. So perhaps share a little bit of how you’ve evolved the team and the culture of the business over the last few years.

Liliane (26:32.352)
Yeah, sure, sure. I do think until now our company was on three stages. So the first stage is this founding stage where we transformed our research finding into a startup idea. Back then it was all around the business case, how to get started, who’s in the founding team, who’s doing what in the founding team.

How do you even found a company? All of that was the first stage. Then we have the second stage, which I considered the startup stage. This is the stage when you have to really go out there to the market to attract first customers. you know, I mean, in order to attract the first customer, you need a product. And in order to have a product, you need a team that builds it. And in order to have a team, need

David Hunt (27:23.095)
Yeah.

Liliane (27:28.822)
money for that and the money is typically coming from venture capital and what does a venture capital fund want to see in order to believe in you? Customers. So it really is this spinning wheel and you have to adjust all the different wheels and you have to make sure you’re progressing on every wheel in order to get the whole machine running. So that’s what I consider the startup stage.

David Hunt (27:41.369)
Yeah.

David Hunt (27:51.768)
Mm.

Liliane (27:57.676)
We were lucky because we brought our first customer from the research project in and then we had a couple of Austrian customers right away. So we were lucky in that sense that we had early market interest. And then in the startup stage you employ the first people. So it’s all about

How can I convince someone to work for me? How can I convince someone to leave their previous jobs in order to work for that newly found startup? So it’s a lot about convincing people, building trust and creating a desirable workplace for the people. Yeah, so this was the second stage. And then the third stage, which we’re in right now, is the scale up phase.

adding more more customers onto our platform, standardization in contracts, in processes, all of that. now we’re thinking in who’s responsible for what, we’re not in the stage of the company any longer where everyone can.

know everything and not all people can sit together at one table any longer but you really have to think in teams you have to think in interfaces between the teams how does marketing know of all the product updates when should we involve sales when should we involve the engineers and so on so now we’re really

entering the stage where the company gets a bit more organized and better structured. It’s an exciting stage. It’s also, it takes a lot of

Liliane (30:03.252)
lot of diligence right now to set all of this up because it is a change in the structure and you again have to motivate people to follow the new structure. mean most of the people were working quite autonomously in the past years and now there is some new processes that they have adhered to but it’s also a very interesting phase right now.

David Hunt (30:05.335)
Yeah.

David Hunt (30:28.449)
Yeah, no, it’s fascinating. Again, that’s part, obviously, that we play and we love to go through that scaling phase and how you adapt cultures, how you bring people in and don’t disturb the culture that you’ve built. it’s like I said, it’s a very different thing for people to work in companies as they’re 10 people or 100 people or 1000 people is very different environments. And from a leadership perspective as well, that’s really different.

Liliane (30:31.896)
Thank

Liliane (30:46.638)
Yeah, definitely. Definitely. One thing I would like to mention about our culture is, so we’re a remote first team. So we do have our headquarters in Zurich, Switzerland, but we have people all over Europe. And back in the days, in the early days, I mean, we started off during COVID. I mean, we hired…

people without having known them in person beforehand, simply because we could not meet those people. Borders were closed, so there was no way in meeting those people. And I remember back in the days, our investors have told us, you cannot hire someone without having met them. But I mean, COVID has changed this. And we then started off.

David Hunt (31:16.227)
there.

Liliane (31:34.694)
in different locations and very early on our CTO went on a conference which was a virtual conference obviously and they had a tool for collaboration and we then introduced this virtual office tool into our company and until today we’re really using it so you can really imagine it to be like a

little computer game, you have your avatar, there’s an office space, there’s whiteboards, there’s meeting rooms, there’s desks. And we’ve been using this until today. And this is part of our culture. And this way, I really don’t have the feeling that employees that are representing us from Barcelona or the UK or wherever are

so much in a different location because we’re all into that virtual office. We all see each other walking around. We know that when we leave the office and it’s a little bit late, let’s say 7 p.m. and you still see someone there, then you drop by and you’re asking them, hey, what are you still doing here? And so on. So this really is part of our culture.

David Hunt (32:45.549)
Okay.

Yeah, no, that’s really cool. So it is difficult, hybrid and remote, even more so remote teams, they can be fantastic. And there’s lots of benefits to them, but it can be a real challenge to keep that culture, as you say, to keep everybody aligned and, and feeling involved, and not alone. So it’s great that you found tools to do that.

Liliane (33:03.618)
Definitely. Definitely. Yeah.

David Hunt (33:08.953)
Looking a little bit, it’s always difficult to look in a crystal ball in our world because everything changes from obviously from policy and geopolitics and all the other things that are happening over the sea, over the pond at the moment or the sky. There’s lots of moving parts, but I’d love just to get a feel for you because you must look at what’s coming down the line, both from a technology point of view. mean, everyone’s talking AI, I don’t particularly need to go down that path, but I’m happy to hear about that because it does play a part and will play a part in all of our lives and in this work in the energy system in particular.

Liliane (33:32.13)
Yeah.

David Hunt (33:38.371)
But just looking a little bit at how you see the energy system changing or evolving over the next five years, which is quite a long time in how things evolve. As we said before, you’ve got DRs, you’ve got mobility, you’ve got batteries, you’ve got lots of things happening. So maybe just a little bit of a look into the crystal ball of what you would like to see or what perhaps you do see coming in the next few years.

Liliane (33:59.446)
Yeah, yeah. I mean, from our perspective, billing is achieved, or let’s say we now have solutions for billing all of the fine granular data. And the next step is definitely optimization. We really want to integrate the DRR assets smoothly into the market.

And I mean, we’re seeing first electric vehicles that support bidirectional charging. So we need rates for bidirectional charging. We’re seeing more and more battery storage systems being deployed all over Europe because the technology is getting cheaper and cheaper every day. So now it really is about integrating all of those assets in an intelligent way. And this is where AI

David Hunt (34:32.067)
Mm-hmm.

Liliane (34:53.164)
will be kicking in. So we need agents that control all of the assets, that tell the asset when to store electricity, when to release electricity, at what times it is best to do all of that because it creates most revenues for the battery because at the end of the day you want to amortize your hardware. So we really believe in

dynamic incentives to steer all of the assets. And we do think that we have to take the technical capabilities of providing that brain for the flexibility. And you want to bring the flexibility to the market, you want either the grid operators to buy the flexibility or the utility to buy the flexibility or other players, whoever is

offering most for the flexibility in a certain moment should be getting the flexibility and the owners of the flexibility should be remunerated best. That is our whole vision around dynamic pricing signals. We really want to pave the way into accessing flexibilities and make investments in renewable energy attractive.

David Hunt (36:14.809)
Yeah, yeah. What really fascinates you touched on it there is this, I should say, starting to get the bi-directional charging both in the vehicles and obviously from a grid perspective as well. And we already enjoy, obviously, a charge overnight. And sometimes it’s free. And sometimes you get paid to charge the car. And it’s cool, right? But again, now the next evolution of that is this. It’s not going to happen maybe this year. But it’s not too far, I think, before most vehicles will have

Liliane (36:30.324)
Exactly, you get paid for consuming. Yeah.

David Hunt (36:41.655)
bi-directional charging infrastructure. So this is fascinating to see how that level of aggregation and flexibility will play its part in the growth of the grid.

Liliane (36:52.878)
Yeah, definitely and definitely but one thing I would also like to mention I mean in order for Having all those assets out there. We need to create great user experiences in the energy sector. We need to Access the capital of the end users, you know many households do have necessary investment

free for PV panels for battery storage systems. But they need to know how fast those hardware assets will be amortized, where to get them, how much electricity they are producing, how much electricity they are consuming, all of that. they, with this whole transformation from being a passive consumer to being an active prosumer, flexumer or however you want to call them,

their needs are changing drastically. They want to get insights. And you have to provide those insights on different levels, on a high level and on very fine granular level for those that are really interested in the information. this providing all of that again accesses young.

financial power and investments into the sector. And the better we are at creating all of the positive user experience around the assets, the more assets we will see and the more flexibility we have in our system. And then on a long term, the less we need to extend our physical infrastructure. So we really want to think through the whole chain and optimize all bits of it so that

we as a society are successful in making the switch to renewables. But it requires a lot of digitalization.

David Hunt (38:51.789)
Yeah.

It does digitalization, visualization information. These are the things which obviously help, I should say, prosumers to make those choices, be they commercial or residential. Cool. We could talk forever. It’s been great to get some insights into how you see that world and how you’ve grown the business in such a short period of time. yeah, it’s been fascinating to hear and to share some of your thoughts. We’ll make sure on the episode page that we share links to Texas and Thailand to yourself and to so people can find out some more.

Yeah, for now, it’s been great to share that story and really looking forward to see how you evolve and the market evolves over the coming years.

Liliane (39:30.488)
Thank you, David. Thanks for the invitation. It was great to be here.