Field Frequency

Tritium 2.0: Power Cycling Toward a High-Voltage Comeback

• Jason Cortes • Season 1 • Episode 5

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Jason Cortes welcomes Arcady Sosinov, CEO of Tritium, for a candid look at the company’s transformation. From early wins with the RT50 to the challenges of scaling globally, Arcady shares how Tritium restructured its service model, refreshed its product roadmap, and re‑centered around long‑term infrastructure reliability. Listeners will hear how Tritium is building trust back with measurable SLAs, follow‑the‑sun support, and a new flagship platform, Triflex.

Highlights

  • Career path: From hedge funds to founding FreeWire Technologies, and now leading Tritium.
  • Early impact: How the RT50 (ChargePoint CPE200) helped spark public fast charging adoption.
  • Growing pains: Global expansion, the SPAC/NEVI era, and the hard lessons that followed.
  • Tritium 2.0:
    • 24/7 support through a UK hub.
    • Transparent SLA reporting with fee refunds for misses.
    • A new Customer Success team driving regular business reviews.
  • Product roadmap: Modular architecture, DC‑fed sites, and the upcoming Triflex platform designed for large, high‑density sites.
  • Market view: Why subsidies can distort growth and why durable partnerships matter more.
  • Future focus: Deep technical collaborations, cost‑per‑port efficiency, and scaling beyond 400 kW.

Today on Field Frequency, I'm joined by Arkady Sosinov, the CEO of Tridium. Tridium helped pioneer DC fast charging in the United States. And like many other companies in this industry, Tridium has navigated hard times. In this episode, Arkady walks us through what happened and what's happening now as Tridium enters a new chapter. We dig into what Tridium 2.0 looks like, from a new product strategy to a full rebuild of its service model. Tune in to hear how one of the industry's earliest pioneers is rewriting its future. Let's get into it. Welcome to another episode of Field Frequency. I'm joined by Arkady Sosinov and I'm very glad to have Arkady with us today. A little quick background. Arkady will share with us here in just a moment, but you know, he's with Tridium and that's near and dear to heart. Got some background attached to that personally from within the industry. So very excited to talk to you today, Arkady. Thank you for being willing to join us today. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it. Yeah. Well, we want to talk about uh Tritium. We want to talk about all things related to this wild industry that we're a part of. But I think before we kind of dive into Tritium's story, I want to start with yours. I want to kind of find out about Arcadia's background. I find out what brought you to here. You've taken the reins of a company, a legacy EV company, at a pivotal moment in the company's history. So I'd like to first kind of, before we dive into that, I'd like to Find out about your background, what drew you to this challenge in this role. Yeah, I'd be happy to. I've been around the EV charging infrastructure space for a very long time. I founded a company as early as 2014 and that company was called FreeWire. We were developing ultra-fast charging infrastructure with integrated battery storage. In the early days, that company began as something a little bit different where we developed mobile charging systems, basically a battery on wheels to provide a charging service on corporate campuses. in the San Francisco Bay area. And ultimately that service and the ultimate product that we developed, which was our ultra-fast battery integrated charger, they served the same pain point. What I noticed at the time was that grid infrastructure was very difficult to scale up. When you wanted to deploy charging infrastructure on campuses or in public, you had to bring new utility service in. that could take months to years in some cases. And I realized pretty quickly that if we were to deploy ultra fast charging at scale, we need some sort of buffering solution to enable that. So the idea of pairing battery storage to charging was novel, was unique. And I argue I was very early for my time, but it ultimately played out to be the right thesis. And Prior to founding Freewire, it's less interesting for your audience, but I spent many years in finance. most recently before Freewire, I was at a hedge fund based in Boston. There, I spent a lot of time looking at the utility sector. I did a little bit of work in oil and gas, but that was a little bit less interesting for me. But I spent a lot of time looking at the utility sector and understanding that. And I realized pretty quickly while there, that we were in an interesting and pivotal moment in the early 2010s with the introduction of electric vehicles. It was pretty clear to me at the time that it was not going to be a fad, that there would be a consumer transition to electric vehicles. But it was also pretty clear to me that our infrastructure on the utility side is aging, especially in the US. Most developed countries, frankly, their utility infrastructure is aging. You look around at in the UK and in parts of Europe like Italy and France and Spain. It's ultimately the same problem. So with electric vehicles coming to market and with consumer adoption being what I thought it would be, I knew there needed to be an interesting technology solution. Eventually, after about 10 years of running FreeWire, we scaled up the company to be a pretty significant player in the North American charging space. We deployed about 1500 ultra fast chargers. We grew to about 300 people. We raised about $300 million to fund that company. And we've solved a real pain point, but there were challenges in the industry that we all saw. And those challenges, I think really began in 2022 and hit ahead in 2023. And they impacted a lot of folks in the space. They impacted free wire. And so. uh That company I eventually sold, it wasn't a spectacular outcome, but it was a sale and that company is still operating as a subsidiary of an electric vehicle fleet company called Orange EV. I eventually left and started looking around and noticed a lot of things were happening in the sector. Pridium was one of the big players impacted by the downturn in the industry. Interest rates were rising and so projects became just more difficult pencil on paper. Tritium in particular, we had won a significant portion of the federal funding available at the time, which was Nevi funding. We can talk about that again later on in the conversation, but at the time when Nevi funding was just introduced, Tritium was the second largest winner. And from a charging infrastructure perspective, behind Tesla. And so we scaled up the company. dramatically to try to take advantage of that opportunity. frankly, it wasn't even an opportunity, Jason, at the point anymore. was what we thought was a burden hand. Well, ultimately, it was not a burden hand, as we all know. And again, we'll dive deeper into this later in the conversation. But Tridium was a publicly traded company. had to delist when that happened. And the company went through effectively a bankruptcy process. The company's now was now Gold is now owned by a publicly traded company based out of India called Exocom. And I was brought in to really take this company Tritium 2.0 into the next phase of the industry. And so we have a next phase of our company, but we're also interestingly at the same time in this next phase of our industry. And companies have to be different in this next phase. It's no longer growth at all costs. It's a realization that what we're selling is infrastructure, critical infrastructure, and operating to that effect. And previously, I think a lot of companies didn't really understand that, didn't really understand what they were selling, and didn't really understand that position in the market or what the market would become. And so we'll dive deeper into it, but I hope that was a good introduction as to how it came here and my background in the space over the last now 12 years. No, that is a compelling background and interesting story. think that from mobile charging into a uh differentiating product, like you mentioned with FreeWire and your vision behind grid edge technology, battery integrated system, that was very forward thinking because it was addressing a point within the space, especially that DC fast charging that is available power and you know, demand charges and all of that stuff. So that's a, you know, very insightful and, I appreciate that background. um, you know, uh, when we get into the conversation of background, what leads us to where we're at, it's always an interesting path. It's never, it's never a straight line. It's always a disjointed path of lefts and right turns and taking steps back and taking steps forward. But, um, you know, as I alluded to, when I first hopped on was, you know, Tritium, you know, has, has a special place with me. because it signals back to my entrance into the industry in 2016, 2017. So don't have as much time on the board as you, entering ninth year in the space. so Tridium was a product, was the first DC fast charging product that I was a part of getting into the market, selling that. And of course my target audience was when I first entered the EV space was the petroleum retailers. Trying to get retailers Uh, selling petroleum fuel. was trying to get them to buy chargers in 2016, 2017, 2018. can imagine what was like. It was very difficult and not one that wanted to be ahead. um, you know, so, you know, I was, I was, you know, selling tritium, not, not for tritium, but as a, as a kind of distributor. And, uh, even that though, the, first charger that, that I sold, that was a tritium charger was branded by charge was branded as charge point. And. in that vein, you know, when we, when we kind of look at legacy Tritium and what that means Tritium, you know, as you said, is, one of, is a legacy company. It's, it's been around that the brand has been around long time and Tritium helped pioneer DC fast charging, powering charge points before charge point had a DC fast charger. was Tritium that was building their, DC fast charger. And so, a lot of, a lot of early deployments, went out there, but, you know, looking at legacy Tridium and I know you've used the term Tridium 2.0. It's one that I've kind of co-opted myself. uh What do you think, what did Tridium get right in the early days? When did things not stay going right? When did they go left, you might say? Well, you're right. Tritium has been around for such a long time. It's about a 20 year old company at this point. And the company began in the early days, like many others in the space, not selling charging infrastructure because there was no charging infrastructure to sell at that point. In the early days, the company was developing inverters and motors and motor controllers for solar racing series. an electric vehicle racing series, which was a nascent, nascent industry at the time. But the company, its roots were around power electronics. And when there became a need for EV charging, specifically DC fast charging, right, we don't play in the level two or AC charging space, but specifically DC fast charging, the early founders of the company realized that they could take that power electronics expertise and they could wrap an EV charging business around it. And that's essentially what happened. Tritium first launched their 50 kilowatt charger to the market. That was called the RT50 globally. ChargePoint branded it as, I believe, the... CPE200, believe it was. DPE 200, that's right. Wow, what a blast for the past, right? So that 50 kilowatt charger, I fundamentally believe, and this is me coming in later and being a little bit retrospective, I fundamentally believe that product didn't exist, the EV industry wouldn't be where it is today. That was a seminal product in the industry, and we sold a lot of them. I we sold about eight, 9,000 units. of that CPE 200 slash RT 50 globally. And that's a lot of units to move for a product that came out that long ago, right? That's now the product, the oldest one is about 13 years old. So you can see how long ago it came out, how long it's been operating in the field. And many of those are still operating in field today. So that product came out quite a long time ago. And it got write a few things. It was the fastest charging product at the time. 50 kilowatts was breakneck speed then. And most vehicles could barely accept that. think the Nissan Leaf tapped out at 42 kilowatts. And so it was one of the fastest charging DC fast chargers of the time. So they got the speed part right. And Tritium realized that level two and AC charging is not really a fit for public charging and even not really a fit for most fleet charging applications. So they went right into DC fast charging right away. Pretty unfocused on the space constraints that naturally exist on our customer site. So when you look at that RT50, it's a very slim design. It's not very deep. It fits in between two parking spaces very nicely. And that design language and the ability to package the Power Shtronix so tightly. I think that was an early right decision, right? And you could compare that to the charges of the time. If you remember those early FSQC 45s, if you remember that the ABB terror stations of the time, they were rectangular, tall white boxes, right? And that's an okay, that's a fine decision. Nobody faults them for that decision. But when you look at your market that you sold into Jason, the fueling retailers, You know, those products are a bit of a non-starter for that space because of the space constraints. need, you need to package things very tightly. and then also early in those days, Tridium really focused on liquid cooling and liquid cooling, not for liquid cooling sake, but liquid cooling for the sake of being able to seal all of the components in the product. And that makes the components last longer and, makes them run cooler. and increases efficiency. And so that focus early on, on longevity, reliability, and the ability to operate in all types of climates and conditions, given that liquid cooling, the space constraints, the early focus on DC fast charging and the speed of DC fast charging. I mean, it was a product that sort of captured hearts and minds and took off. Now, it wasn't all perfect, as you can imagine. And there were a couple of, I think, moments that started to show the chinks in the armor. And one of those moments was in the transition of vehicles from 400 volts to 800 volts. And that early RT50 was not designed to be an 800 volt product. And so that was a challenge for the company as it transitioned into its latest generation of products. But in those days, it was a, it was a, um, I think a little bit of a weakness, right? The, the, the company scaled incredibly quickly and, the company had to. Because it was based in Australia. It, I mean, it grew out of a company based in Brisbane, right? You naturally right away have to think global because I mean, think of it this way, logically, if you're a US company, you can focus on the US market for a decade and be fine. If you're a European company, you can focus on the European market for a decade and be fine. You're an Australian company. You have to expand beyond Australia immediately. When you look at the Australian market today, as an example, Jason, Australia today has about 2200 DC fast chargers in the ground. 2200. Right? that, you know, if that were the entire market that we serviced. And by the way, Tritium has somewhere between 60 to 65 percent of that market. Right. We have about 1300 chargers in the ground in Australia of the 2200. So it's about Tritium has about 1300. Tesla has about 700. And the other 200 are. Third party charging companies, right? But we just saturated that market immediately. We had to go global. And that going global very quickly was a real challenge for the company, a real challenge for the company. We went out to Europe, the UK, into the Nordics. We had some very, very large employment in the Nordics. And pretty quickly, this company was a product in over 50 countries. Today we have products in about 52 countries, but that happened very, very quickly in our life cycle. And that stretched our resources. It certainly stretched our ability to provide service. And in those early days, you know, usually the OEM provided labor service themselves. That's less common today. Today, there are third parties that do it. But in those early days, that wasn't the case. And so that stretched our resources. And we had to make some very tough decisions in being able to provide servicing. and data around reliability and the speed of response in terms of spare parts dispatch that the company really, I think, didn't do as well as we should have. Now, that was a common issue in those days. I think that a lot of companies exhibited those early problems because we were forced to scale. of other companies chose to scale because they saw it as a major market opportunity. So I don't think that we were singled out in that. But I do think that, like I said, we should have done better than we did. Well, what you've outlined very, very well, you've given the background very well to Tritium, but you put your finger on a key point around the difference of scaling in a global context. It's, you know, to look at what Tritium did in its local market, in its local region, capturing the market, supporting the market and being successful at it. That's noteworthy because try to see that duplicate here in the U S it's kind of hard to find that, you know, of course, bigger, you know, it's different context, but at the same time it is, it is a story of success. so, you know, Tritium came to the U S, you know, was obviously supporting the charge point network in its early deployment days. And, Tritium had a, had a significant arc. had a significant both from its local success, then to its, its global success. and, and, You know, I might be taking the conversation a little bit myopic, but I, you know, I want to look at, you know, kind of zero in on the U S and, and, know, 2022, 2024 were pivotal years. was a significant art during that period of time. Um, I know I ended up joining Tridium. So to kind of shore up about selling Tridium, was, I was selling Tridium before I worked for Tridium. Um, but, um, you know, in 2023 was whenever I had, I had joined the company. and was pursuing being its vertical, know, petroleum retailers, as I alluded to. But, you know, a year before that, a year after that, we saw, so between 2020 to 2024, we saw significant arc. Tridium had a White House spotlight visit by President Biden, public listing, all of that happening. then, and so there was a lot of, a lot of, a lot of eyes on the company. around that time and then of course, you know, by, or there was some insolvency and that's a dramatic arc. and so, you know, you've already told the story kind of the pre-story and we, we, know where we're at today. We're treating them as that today, but, that dramatic arc, I think has a story that that's worth unpacking because I think there's less in it and insights in it. And so from your vantage point where you're sitting right now, what, what lessons does that journey offer to the broader EV industry? to EVSE companies navigating scale and capital and the legitimate burden of manufacturing. Yeah, so that was such an incredible journey for the company. And I'm hearing it again in hindsight. I'm hearing it from people that were around back then. I didn't live it just to be very open and transparent with you. But I've heard so much about it that I think I can speak to it pretty well. very large in 2020. Really? But he reached over $200 million in revenue. But he was a publicly listed company. At what point? But he was valuation or market cap was over $2 billion. But he opened a very large and incredible facility that we still operate today, by the way, in in Tennessee, in a little town called Lebanon, which is about 25 minutes outside of Nashville. And the prior Tridium CEO, again, was on stage to what you said with Joe Biden and was really a flagship company that was underneath the Inflation Reduction Act. This was the flagship story of a scaled up EV charging manufacturer coming to the US, bringing jobs, opening a factory, investing in the US. and taking advantage of some of the policies put in place by the former administration. And so that story arc was high. I mean, the expectations were sky high, right? And yet there were telltale signs that I think we should have been aware of, but I think the whole market should have been aware of. some of those telltale signs. One is um Interest rates were already climbing at that time. And fundamentally, what do we do here? What do you and I do? You and I are selling products and then servicing into infrastructure. Right. This is fundamentally infrastructure. Right. These are large capital projects. You put them in the ground. You expect them to last 10 to 20 years. You have to service them over time. These are infrastructure projects. And when interest rates rise from the ZERP era to where they are today, A lot of projects just simply don't make sense on paper anymore. And a lot of our customers saw that and started walking away from projects because they knew they wouldn't be able to get a meaningful return on those projects. And so that started happening. And that was, say, one leg of the stool. The other leg of the stool is that there was a lot of exuberance around the Nevi program and what, seven and a half billion dollars that would hit the streets. And everyone started chasing that money. States started submitting their plans. The site hosts and third party charging operators started submitting responses to the state's plans to try to win some of those dollars. And a lot of those applications, effect in Tritium hardware. And then a lot of those applications won. And we started receiving both. indications, as well as commitments, as well as simply purchase orders on against these wins. So we started scaling up our ability to manufacture and our supply chain big time. Right. We hired a lot of people in Tennessee. We hired about 500 people in that factory in a very short period of time. In a matter of months, we bought over $100 million worth of raw materials from our supply chain. Because remember, we were just at the time coming out of supply chain woes. You couldn't get parts, right? And you're going from the troughs to the peaks, all of a sudden, you can't get parts. It's very frustrating to you think you've won hundreds of millions of dollars of awards. And that's by the US government, which is a counterparty, of course. And And you need to start ordering materials in order to deliver against those projects. You go heavy, right? And I don't know that if I were in that position at the time that I would have done anything differently, but in hindsight, that was the wrong move. And yet it was the move that we made, but we went heavy into ordering and procuring parts. And then things started to slow down, right? These awards, they didn't really hit the streets. And there was administrative burden, There were slowdowns, a slowdown in the Department of Transportation and the Department of Energy and that joint office. You had slowdowns in the state DOT offices. Things just weren't moving. It was, was, was jammed. Right. There was some sort of backlog in the system. And, and we, we got exposed. Us, Pridium as a company got exposed. Right. With, with that in particular, we, we had to pay for all these parts and yet we didn't have revenue coming in, in time to cover all those cash requirements. And then the third leg of the stool that I think was a really challenged tritium is that when we went public, we went public in this, in a SPAC process, right? We did what was called a de-SPAC. And as part of a SPAC, the expectation is that you would go public with a big pool of cash that the SPAC had on their balance sheet and they would hand that to the company they acquired. Unfortunately, when we went public, our redemptions on that SPAC were near 100%. That meant that the SPAC no longer had any money to give to us. So we went public, we were listed on an exchange, but we didn't get any cash out of that go public process. We didn't raise any money out of that go public. process. But now we were sitting there as a public company and our expenses were growing, growing very high. As a public company, expenses are much higher than if you were a private company. I think we can all understand that. And so we couldn't raise cash out of that SPAC process. And what do we need to do? We needed to go out and fund the growth, those raw materials inventory, that new factory, the hiring in the factory, the hiring globally. We needed to fund that somehow. We funded that with debt. And we ended up amassing over $200 million of debt. the company was not doing the company just did 200 million dollars of revenue and now we have 200 million dollars of debt. It was a very precarious position for the business to be in. And all of these factors contributed to Trinium eventually, our market cap sliding, we couldn't raise any additional money. We had all these suppliers that we needed to pay, we had all this debt that we needed to service because our interest rate a significant interest rate on that debt and payments had to be made against that debt. I think Tritium was the first domino, the first big domino to fall in this industry. It wasn't the last and those dominoes are still falling. Jason, you and I both know this. But it was the first. Now, that's not great, obviously. but Tritium had an incredible platform underneath it. And we have over 21,000 fast chargers out there in the world, right? And I combine fast chargers and power cabinet, but 21,000 fast chargers and power cabinets out there in the world. We've touched basically every customer you can think of in this industry. Those customers have either bought from us or they seriously considered buying from us. But we have those relationships. We've touched every customer. Any customer that has bought our product is still buying from us from a spare parts and services perspective. So we're still generating revenue and great gross margin revenue, by the way, from those customers even today. We have some of the, what I argue is the most technically talented engineering team in the industry. Our engineering team is second to none. So we have just a lot of great assets in this company. And because we were the first to sort of suffer the fate that we suffered, We found a buyer and we found a patient buyer. We found a buyer that wanted to back us. We found a buyer that wants to build on those assets. And that's, that's exit comm as we talked about. And, and so we were, we were in a lucky position where we have the second opportunity. We have a chance to rebuild and we're rebuilding in a different way. And I'll tell you about how we're rebuilding. And I'm sure that's going to come up in a couple of questions, but unfortunately, a lot of other folks who have suffered that same fate and who are still suffering that fate today, right? They're not going to get that opportunity. And so I feel very lucky that we're able to continue building this brand. Now it's a different company, Ultimately, the entity is a different entity than it was before. But a lot of the same people are still here. We're still leveraging a lot of the same assets and we're still leveraging that brand. And I'm really proud to do so. Well, an understanding of the past is obviously a way to avoid the wrong future. It's the direction that you go. I'm just, you know, while the name was retained, the company is different. The backing of the company is different. There's core pieces in place. What about the name? know, why was that? Was there any thought at even changing? the name Tritium or was it about retaining that name to ensure, you know, connection or, or I don't know if you can speak to that or not. I'm just curious. I, know, I do, you know, we've, you've, you've laid out very well. We went through kind of the discussion, but, I want to get into that, into that blue sky of Tritium 2.0, but I'm just curious before we, what, was there any ever a point of considering of, of dropping Tritium or did it make sense? just hold to that name. serious consideration, serious consideration. Yes, absolutely. It could have gone completely differently. We could have changed the name and we'd be having a different conversation today. But yes, there's serious consideration. Ultimately, what we decided and what the acquiring company decided is that there is a lot of retained brand equity in Tridium. For all the trials and tribulations that we went through. right, for some of the trust that we lost. And we did lose trust with customers. Absolutely. And now we're rebuilding it. think we're going to gain more trust than Tridium ever had in the industry. We'll talk about that soon. But for all the trust that we did lose and for all the brand damage that we did under that administration process, Tridium still has a lot of brand equity. It's very well recognized. You can go into any executive room, any management room right now and They know about Tridium. They know about our charges. They know we've been around for a long time. They know about our scale. And so we think that that's valuable and important. And frankly, even these conversations, as difficult as they are, I'm trying to be as open as possible with the community and with everyone here, but as difficult as they are, these conversations, I believe, would not have happened, Jason, if we didn't retain the name. Yeah, no, that's, that's, that's good. And I think that's the, I think that that's the right decision because it's not, it's almost like it's transparency and it's not where we've been and what happened. It's about what we're doing. And, and that's where, you know, the, conversation towards Tritium 2.0 I think needs to come in the concept of, of, of new ownership, new strategy, rebirth, you know, but what does rebirth look like practically? And that's where you and your leadership, you know, your leadership. And those you've got in different roles, they've got to be able to speak to that narrative. They've got to be able to take that message and talk about what rebirth looks like, both practically and in application. so to that end, would ask, you know, what stays the same and what is intentionally being rebuilt to respond to today's market? What's that look like? Yep. One of the biggest pieces of feedback that I heard coming in here. I started right at the beginning of December. So I'm going on nine months now, just over nine months. And it was availability of spare parts and it was service, right? It was all of the after sales piece of this company. I'll tell you before I even get into the details. This company and many others created the EV charging industry as if it was a consumer product, meaning um to me is that upfront sale. I want to sell you as many widgets as possible, right? And I'm going to come back in three years and try to sell you another widget because that's your refresh cycle. That was the expectation of the industry before, right? That's completely off, completely wrong, right? It is about the 10 year or 15 year, in some cases even 20 year relationship with that customer. And so selling them the widget, that's just the first step. and in a much, much deeper relationship. And I today, I've trained the company to think of itself as an infrastructure business. I'm not really all that concerned about making money day one from the customer. I'm concerned about making sure that customer trust me for everything they need over 10, 15, 20 years. And that's how I'm going to make my money. Right. They're going to come back to me for, and, and I think that's just a different mindset. than we've had before. And that mindset meant previously that we didn't focus on the after sales. We didn't have a very strong after sales business. And that's where the most growth happened. my service team, for example, when I walked in here was down to about 13 people globally. My service team now is 65 people globally. We opened up a new service and support center in the UK. the very, large facility. And we have about 40 people working out of that facility on top of the fact that we store spare parts locally there. We have testing facilities there, and that's meant to service the UK and broadly the European markets. We didn't have that before. In fact, you know, I just signed a lease on another, a third building next door to it because we're growing that so aggressively. That was a big part of the growth strategy for the company. We implemented follow the sun, a follow the sun model on service. So previously the Australian team would service Australian customers. The European team would focus on European customers. The U S team would focus on U S customers. But after hours, what happened? You were, you were sort of out of luck as a customer. So we've implemented a pretty simple strategy to just follow sun. So the European team is picking up overnight issues in Australia. And Australia is picking up overnight issues in the US and so on and so forth. And so now we have 24 hours a day, seven days a week service. We'll pick up the phone if you call us, we'll respond to tickets anytime, day or night. It doesn't matter if you're in the US or in Europe or Australia, one person on the team, have the product, the products are the same, right? So one person on the team is going to spin it up and pick up that case. And that, That new level of service has just been a welcome relief to customers. We also introduced SLAs. And I want to make a very big point about this. We had and sold SLAs under the previous company. You might have even sold some SLAs. I can tell you for a fact when I walked in here, we had no way of tracking whether we conformed to our SLAs. Did we actually hit the 24 hours or the 48 hours that we promised we would hit? We had no way of knowing that. So we were selling these SLAs as if they were this profit. If you can't measure, you're not actually selling a service. You're selling false dreams and hopes. And so I came in here and I brought in a new service head into the organization and we spun up tracking around our SLA conformance rates. how fast are we actually closing service tickets, how fast are we responding service tickets, how fast are we shipping out parts. We check every step of that after sales process around service and spare parts, and we can measure it to the minute each of them. And now we go to customers and when we sell an SLA, we say every single month, at the end of the month, you're gonna get a report. And that report's gonna tell you how many times we hit our SLA's and how many times we did not. And if we did not hit our SLA even one time, in that month, we're refunding you the fee for that month. Right? That's unlike any offer in the industry. We said, we're going to live and die by this. Your success is our success. Even one, if you have, doesn't matter, five service tickets in a month and just, I've, and I've hit the SLM on four of those five, but I missed it on that last one. Yeah. I'm refunding you the fees for that month. 100 % of fees. Right. And so that was our commitment that we made to customers. think that was very, very well received. And that was a big rebuild for us. The second part of that after sales rebuild, I figured out pretty quickly is that Service, we have a fundamentally technical product, right? And our service engineers are fundamentally technical, right? And they do a great job in diagnosing issues, but it's not necessarily their skill set to talk to customers. We also measured them by the time that it takes to close tickets and the time that it takes for first to fix the first time fixed rate for those tickets. And so they're incentivized to diagnose, fix, close a case, move on to the next one. And so they don't have that wide view of, what's happening across my customer's network? Yes, I just fixed this one charger on this one site, but is there something broader happening with my customers? Is there some deeper attention that I need to give them? That's not the way the service theme is designed. That's not what they're incentivized to do. So what I needed to do pretty quick is I spun up a new group called customer success. And now I have, I don't know, 15 people on the customer success team. And all they do is they take that broader view. Quarterly business reviews with customers, in some cases, monthly business reviews with customers. For certain customers that have large fleets are actually doing weekly check-ins and going through every single ticket that is opened, every single charger that may show some sort of fault. And we review the health of their fleet. every single week. And they know how to communicate. They know how to set expectations of timelines. They can pass feedback from the field back to our engineering teams. That was one thing that was always missing in the past too. The TSEs are not inclined to take the feedback received to them and not focus on a ticket, but instead go to the engineering team and try to provide feedback. So the customer success team now does that. And that was a big win for us. customers are absolutely thrilled with their customer success managers, the people that they deal with. They've established these really warm relationships with them. Those people are not trying to sell them anything, right? They're just trying to make sure that there's, that the customer's fleet is healthy. Right? And so that was, I've spent the last nine months, you know, working on these groups, working on the processes in these groups, and it is paid off in spades, right? We're still not perfect. We have... product reliability issues like anybody else has, we have an aging fleet. We still have those RT 50s in the ground that are now long in the tooth. Let's just call it what it is. products are going on in most customers' hands. They're going on seven, eight, nine, 10 years now. They're long in the tooth. And so you would expect reliability of those products to start to decline. You would have to, right? And yet, because of the after sales, the improved after sales that we're providing, we're not best in class yet, but that's the goal, right? Well, I think we think we've rebuilt a lot of trust with our customers. And based on the, and we're doing NPS surveys with customers, so we know the improvement that's occurring across these different parts of the business. Based on the trajectory of the NPS surveys, I believe fundamentally that we are going to rebuild an even higher level of trust than Tridium 1.0 ever had with its customers. And that's what we're building our new business off of. Well, that's, that's, those are some fantastic examples of how there has been rebuilding and the intentionality, know, just, you know, looking at those specific examples that you gave around spare parts and, and the building out of the service team, the SLA, know, the customer success. I see those values because I've been in the trenches and understood. of resources and values were missing and the result of those being missing, affecting my success. You you show up in a CPO, you know, office building, you're talking to a mid-tier CPO, regional CPO, national CPO, whoever you're talking to, asset managers, you're talking to the folks that are going to invest in hardware. And this is, I'm saying this from the perspective of my past, whenever I was selling, I've represented a number of EV charging brands, both as a manufacturer, but then also as a value added distributor or reseller. so, when, you show up and you're trying to sell a widget, but thoughts around spare parts, thoughts around how this charger is going to be supported. Yeah, I know there's a to attach to it, a standard warranty. And I know I could probably expand that standard warranty into something more, but what about the post sales experience? And so what I found early on in my career and trying to sling hardware was that I had to think about it from the perspective of that asset manager, of that CPO. They're going to invest in this hardware, how is it going be supported after it's sold? It's not just, hey, buy this widget. Here is a device. how this device is supported and here's all the ways that you need to support it. And so I would, you know, that's how I came to, you know, be connected with FieldAdvantages. I, you know, I saw them as a valuable, you know, open and partner field service provider that was doing real work, real change in its own lane. And so I knew that I could partner with a company like FieldAdvantages. And of course I'm speaking about, now I'm leading our EV business over here, but prior to joining FieldAdvantage, I found that I was more effective in trying to the capabilities of a product, regardless of whatever brand you put on that product. If I could talk to them about SLAs, like you've keyed in on, if I could talk about, even the NPS that you mentioned, it's like, tell me what we got right. Tell me what we got wrong. This feedback, all of those things, that makes a fantastic difference. You've kind of laid out the strategy, some of the strategies that that you are setting up Tritium 2.0 for success. And that's real investment. Those are real tangible values. So you talked about that strategy. Let's talk about the product because we've alluded in this conversation to the legacy RT-50. Even when you compare the legacy RT-50 against the RT-M75, you're looking at two different types of products. Two different types of products, different designs. We get into the vein of and whether we're talking about the Tridium Triflex, I'd like you to share kind of what that product looks like. What was the thinking behind, you know, the product releases around Triflex? Tell us what that's about. But then also, you know, the strategy, are these symbolic of a broader product or service philosophy? What's going on? Because, you know, Power Models, as an example, you know, Tridium announced, was it in July? Maybe it was June, about a lifetime warranty. for a power module. And that's a game changer because modules aren't cheap. And so when you're looking at what they do and how they fail, now Tritium is offering a lifetime warranty to undergird that, that's a game changer. So yeah, let's talk about product strategy. Talk to me about it. And you'll notice, Jason, very interesting. We just spent the first 45 minutes not talking about product. We spent that first 45 minutes talking about the brand, customer's customer trust around that brand and around the company and the after sales of the business, because that's what wins the industry today. I think the product is second to those pieces. So that's where we started. I've been switched to product, but I just want to make sure that you know and your audience knows, I hope you can feel it for me, that our main goal is to make sure that we rebuild Rust with our customers and rebuild it to a higher level than it ever was before. And fundamentally, we're going to do that on the after sales part of our business. Okay. So now let's switch to product, which people find fun and I find it fun too. So the RT50 was again a seminal product in the EV charging industry. So really seminal product. We then had a few more first moments, first of its kind moments. We launched a 350 kilowatt charger before 350 kilowatts was, you know, even really a consumer need, right? Vehicles just weren't capable of it before. And so we launched a 350 kilowatt charger back in 2018. What is that? Seven years ago? Wow. Seven years ago, a 350 kilowatt charger. that became the one of the, I think, probably the leading high power or ultra fast charger across Europe. That's the charger that underpins Ionities network across Europe today. And Ionities operating about, I don't know, two and a half thousand of those units. across Europe still today. Right. And so when you talk about high power charging, when you talk about road tripping, when you talk about 800 volt charging, you know, we took it to the extreme and we were the leaders there. And again, this is one of those moments where if we had not launched that product, I don't believe this industry would be where it is today. I really and this is one another one of the things that attracted me to Tritium because we had so many firsts, we had so many moments in which we move the industry forward. And that's a foreshadowing to our next conversation around power modules. Okay. But we have so many of those moments. But those early products, RT-50 and then the PK-350 as we called it, if you remember, those products were monolithic is the term we used. Monolithic meaning they weren't very modular. You couldn't swap power modules in and out. You know, there was one big charger, one big design. And we eventually started a pretty significant engineering effort around what we called our MSC platform or our MSC architecture. That's modular scalable charging architecture. And really what this did was it pushed as much of the power conversion technologies and all of the technology into a module or a power module so that we can manufacture it easily. We can produce a lots of these power modules. We can service it more easily if some of these power modules failed. We wouldn't take the whole charger down if a power module failed, right? There was a lot of reasons why you want to go to that modular architecture, but that's really what Tritium worked on. And then in 2020, we launched our first product under this MSC architecture. And that was the RTM75. The RTM75 was a standalone all-in-one 75 or 50 kilowatt, but generally speaking, 75 kilowatt charger. And again, that just became a bread and butter product for us. A very popular product in the UK, extremely popular because of fundamentally they have shorter travel distances. They have longer dwell times in the UK when they go to a pub or restaurants or so forth. And so that product's just, I think, again, one hearts and minds in the UK. And today, that product that all in one is the reason why our market share in the UK, we have a 17 % market share there today. We have more chargers in the UK than Tesla does. Tesla has about a 12 % market share, we have about a 17 % market share. And that RTM product, I think, is what just really unlocked the UK market for us. Eventually we took that product and we made an extension of it that we called the PKM product. And that was a 150 kilowatt charger. The PKM product was at six DC to DC power modules inside of its shell, inside of its enclosure. But then it also had a large rectifier unit, a big, what might be, some people might call power cabinet, had a large power cabinet that you would deploy on the site. Now that PKM150 was good for, was a distributed charger and it was good for larger sites. You usually would have one cabinet attached to four dispensers, what we call charging stations, but dispensers and each dispenser can, and each cable on each dispenser can output 150 kilowatts. That product is now the PKM150 is now the bread and butter of BP's network in the U S for example. If you go to all of the sites that BP is deploying across North America, the vast majority of that site is that PKM 150 charger. Versus in places like the UK, the vast majority of BP's network in the UK is actually that RTM all-in-one 75 kilowatt charger. I love going to London because as you're driving through London, you can actually see these RTMs on the sidewalk. Right. And it's, and then you have two London black cabs parked on the sidewalk next to a charge. mean, it's a really brilliant site. It warms my heart a little bit, but that, that was the product portfolio that we came out with in those early 2020s, 2020, 2021. And that's the product portfolio that we're still selling today. Now we all know 75 kilowatts, 150 kilowatts is, uh, you know, that's not what the market is anymore. Um, there's still a use case for those products. Right. but we needed to think outside the box a little bit. And the first way we thought outside the box was, let's look at this PKM system, the PKM 150. Fundamentally, when you look at the architecture of the PKM 150, you have DC coming in, you have six DC to DC power modules, and then have DC going out. So without that rectifier unit, without that power cabinet, it's actually a DC fed charger, right? Well, Where do I come from? What's my background? My background is in batteries plus charging. And I looked at this thing and I said, wow, this is the first of its kind. I've never seen a DC fed charger, not one at least that's commercially available, certified in every market, had years of usage, thousands of units in the field that I can rely on. I think Trinian, you're missing this opportunity here of pairing battery storage and or renewables. on a DC microgrid with a charger. This is a real opportunity. I know it. I've been selling it for 10 years now. And Tridium sort of opened my eyes a little bit and they said, what do mean, okay, we didn't miss it. have several hundred installations like this with batteries integrated on our DC bus. And I feel as well, that's true, right? We have utilities in Scotland, for example, who have that installation. We have fleets in the US who have done exactly that installation, but we've just never marketed. Trini never marketed because we, you know, we were selling bread and butter products and we never marketed. We thought it was a niche market. Well, I said, have to, we have to put some, we have to productize this. And so we launched the P, we relaunched the PKM as a DC Fed charging station. Since relaunching the PKM as a DC Fed charging station two quarters ago, that's been our best selling product. By far, customers are realizing across Europe, across the US, that battery storage inherently goes with charging, that renewables inherently go with charging. And they're starting to deploy these DC microgrid solutions where they're bringing in some utility power, converting it to DC on their site in one big rectification unit that they can buy from anyone. And then all DC on the rest of the site, the battery is DC, the solar is DC, the generator is DC, the charging is DC, the vehicle is DC, everything's DC. And that's a real use case. It's a real product. We've sold a lot of them. And I'm pretty excited about it because you're lowering capex costs, you're increasing efficiency, you're allowing a very easy integration of battery storage onto these sites. You can do anything. on the DC side and the utility is not involved and you don't need to involve the utility, which is also great. And, and so, and a lot of the technologies that we're doing with DC microgrids for charging are the same technologies that they're using in the data center space. Right. That's what the data centers are also asking for. They're asking for a full DC microgrid solution for that industry. So I'm, I'm super bullish about it. That's, that's one of the first things I did. And I'm glad we did it because it's, It's moved a lot of volume for us. Let's just put it that way. The next thing we announced was the Triflex product, right? That product is not yet in the field, in the market. We have now some customers that are going to be deploying it. We have customer in the UK, for example. We have another few customers that we haven't announced that are going to be deploying it. But that product should start hitting the ground in kind of end of this year. time frame, November, December time frame. That product is what I think is what I call a category killer. why is it a category killer? So we have always been very, very fond of distributed charging, right? Power cabinets with lots of dispensers, always very fond of it. We doubled down on that thesis with the Triflex. Within the Triflex, you have three system components. That's why we call it the Triflex, also for Tritium. there's a lot of threes going on here. You have three components. You have an AC to DC power cabinet. You have a DC to DC power cabinet. So it's just for either of you is called our AC power cabinet or DC power cabinet. And then you have dispensers. And what we've enabled is... the ability to oversubscribe your grid capacity. So you can have up to 1.6 megawatts feeding our AC power cabinet, and then you can have 3.2 megawatts in our DC power cabinet. Tied to that, you can have up to 32 dispensers. And that's 64 charging ports. So 32 dispenser, 64. You can have 64 vehicles charging at the same time. on that 1.6 megawatt AC power cabinet. And that's an industry first. mean, the closest for some of our competitors that they can do is 12 plugs at a time. We can do 64 plugs at a time. So we're just completely blowing out of the water the ability to scale. Now, what does that mean? That means... Of course, if every vehicle showed up in charge at the same time, your average power rate goes down. But any one of those vehicles can get full power. And what does full power mean? We have a 400 kilowatt dispenser. So if you can pair all 400 kilowatt dispensers, any vehicle can get 400 kilowatts. But the average power will be low if every vehicle plugs in. But that's just not the way the world works. Not every vehicle plugs in. the same time and not every vehicle's charging curve looks the same. Right. So it's very, very, very rare. I think almost impossible that you would have that many vehicles charging simultaneously. What you're doing is you're creating a bunch of 400 kilowatt parking spaces so that any vehicle that comes in can choose any parking space and know that they can get 400 kilowatts in that moment. Right. But the other thing that you're doing with that level of scale is your cost per port just plummets. It's absolutely plummets. Right. And when you look at our pricing for the, for the suspenser at large sites, and when I say large sites, I mean sites with let's say over 12 parking spots, right? So over anything over six dispensers, 12 parking spots, our price is just unbeatable. It's untouchable actually. Right. Because of that scalability of the power cabinet and the dispensers. That's a really, that's why I call it a category filler. Now it's not meant to compete against the all in once, right? If you want an all, if have a small site and you need two chargers charging four parking spaces, that's not the product for you, right? There are other products you can go buy that are more cost effective. But if you need six chargers charging 12 parking spaces or more, you just, you can't beat the solution. You just can't beat it. So that's why I'm really excited about it. The other part of it that's really interesting is you can mix and match power levels on the same power cabinet. So you can have a 100 kilowatt dispenser, can have a 400 kilowatt dispenser, can have a 640 kilowatt dispenser, and soon you'll be able to have a megawatt dispenser all attached to the same power cabinet. And they can all work in unison. So that scalability is just, I think, it's... What I like to tell people, whereas in the last few years, we ultra fast was the name of the game. You had to become ultra fast. You had to reach 400 kilowatts. That was the name of the game. We're done with that. 400 kilowatts is already fast, guys. I how much faster can you get at this point? And 400 kilowatts is table stakes. Everyone should have 400 kilowatts. you don't, there's not really a place for you in the market. The next frontier is scaling because our customers, and it's been very clear to me, are moving to larger and larger sites. That two-charger site is not going to get the traffic you think it's going to get. Consumers don't want it. Consumers want to go to a site where they know there's plenty of chargers, that they'll have a spot available. And if there's a charger broken, they can go to the next one. So larger and larger sites is the next frontier. And that means scalability is going to win. And that's where the Triflex is just unmatched. Yeah, that's, that's so a lot and there's a lot to unpack there. I think it's, it's notable, uh, you know, keying in on the, on the term oversubscription, you know, there's to what, Tritium has done historically as far as there is a market need and then that oversubscription, I mean, it's, you, you alluded to it in your early example of the, of the King 350. you know, at a time when there just wasn't vehicles out in the market with the type of architecture that could benefit from that type of output. But yet Tritium forward-thinkingly brought that to market knowing that there would be a need at some point. And so to your point of, of larger sites, 12 plus parking spaces a site, that is a legitimate thing because you know, when, you know, as just getting down to the consumer level and the consumer experience. My experience as an EV driver, whenever I pull up to a site and it's full and you you kind of know where you sit in terms of the queue when you're in a Tesla, but if you're in another EV and you're pulling up to say a, a, you know, a CPO network and there's all the ports in use and there's other cars waiting and you're kind of dependent on goodwill and everyone's trying to figure out who's turn is it next and you move through all that, but at the same time, that is an experience that can be resolved or improved by bigger sites. Well, you got to, of course, have a product that can support bigger sites and what all the implications are really involved with bigger sites. So that's really good. And I think it's telling. you know, regarding the oversubscription and the model and what you've described in the need that Triflex and its platform is kind of speaking to. That's really good. So, well, we've already been going an hour here and I feel like there's a couple more things I'd like to just kind of unpack here. think, you know, we've had our own arc here of conversation. We've talked about legacy Tridium. We've talked about Tridium 2.0. We've talked about product. I just think maybe it might be good for us to talk a little bit about this industry as a whole and where things are going. But I certainly want to keep the conversation around Tritium. But maybe just maybe one question around public funding and subsidies. That was a part of the narrative in kind of the things that Neve was a component in that three-leg stool that you described and how there was all of this buzz around money available and then whenever it got down to execution and slow down factors that Tritium couldn't control and no other manufacturer just the nature of the business. then eventually we'd go on to see Nevi at pause. Okay, Nevi is back. It's a financial opportunity that's out there. Are these public funding opportunities? Are these subsidies helping or hindering progress? That's just an industry question. I'd like your opinion on This should be a very quick answer and it goes back to the history of Tritium. Nevi was dead six months ago. I wish it stayed dead. Absolutely. mean, it caused such, it caused issues with the market, right? You had a lot of people flooding in who didn't know the industry into the space to try to capture dollars, right? And that's not good for the industry. It's not good for the industry to have these fly by night companies, these CPOs who had never deployed a charging station in their history, all of a come into States and try to capture tens of millions of dollars to try to run a network that you know ultimately was going to be decrepit because they didn't know how to service it. They didn't know how to run that business. That that's a, market, uh, you know, that that's a market dynamic that we just didn't need. Right. And for the companies that I think were, even for the good companies in the space, like Trinium was at the time, it was just a shiny prize that we couldn't keep our eyes off of. And it forced us, you know, it caused us to lose control of our business. Right. When ultimately it, it didn't come to, it didn't become what everybody told us it would be, right? What all the market experts thought it would be. And I worry that's going to happen again this time. We're going to stay and be cautious, right? If customers want to use Nevi funds to purchase our products, you're more than welcome to, right? But I am not relying on that business in any way, shape or form. I'm not relying on that public subsidy in any way, shape or form. I'm not capturing that public subsidy. Again, it's someone else who may want to capture it. Fine, you can buy our products. But I do believe, again, this is gonna cause a little bit of a groundswell of folks rushing into this industry. And I do not think it's healthy for our industry at all. No, I share a similar opinion. I have a similar view and agree. I think that public funding is good. think it's a bonus, at the same time, projects and opportunities that are contingent upon it are hinging on it. That's not a good model. In fact, it's a model that is kind of teed up for failure because to your point, capture one aspect of what what that failure looks like, i.e. businesses that don't understand the industry, that don't understand the customer experience, that don't understand the technology, that don't understand EV charging sites from end to end and the value supports. They just are all of sudden having a seat at the table that they really didn't earn and don't deserve and that money could be redirected. You know, even my own experiences back in funding office, communities that were publicly out, know, diesel gate money that was, that was being distributed to all the States. Even that convoluted product or projects rather, it delayed decisions, it influenced decisions. I experienced firsthand clients that would prove for a bucket of money, like, not, you know, not just a hundred K, but like we're talking multiple millions of dollars. And then they would in turn still walk away from the deal, not leverage the money. The money never went to them. They were an applicant that got approved and then they still didn't leverage it because of the factors associated with taking the money and then all of that. So yeah, I think, you know, the market's going to decide the winners and losers and should decide the winners and losers, regardless of where funding sits in helping bring someone to a win or to a loss, whatever. But yeah, that's good. Well, okay, this has been a very good conversation. those that were listening, they got a taste of technology. They got some education around the history, where Tritium is going today and where it's been. And then really a peek behind the curtain around what makes Tritium successful today and moving forward. And some of those things that you spoke to that are real problem solvers, the SLA's, the post cell experience. from end to end, that being redefined and revised is important. All companies need to be looking at it from that standpoint. to that end, for those watching Tridium's resurgence, what does success look like from today, maybe 12, 18 months out from now? What does success look like? What should the industry be watching for that signals Tridium's back? You Tridium's back, but what's the industry need to be looking at or looking for? think Tritium historically has been very good at finding a strategic customer or two and having very deep technical integrations with that customer to push that industry forward. And then in the early days for us, that was, as an example, Ionity. Ionity was the first major network to deploy really high power charging all over a certain market, which was Europe at the time. 350 kilowatt chargers, incredible experience for drivers, a real focus on that driver experience. And they chose Tridium, small company at the time, to develop that product for them and with them and launch it to market. And we learned so much through that experience, things that most of the consumers in this space will never understand, even many of the folks that have been in this industry for a decade will never understand around how to build. technically complex, large charging sites, the interactions with the grid, servicing of different vehicles after sales and how that service looks. Though we've been very good at those types of very deep customer interactions with a handful of, just a handful of Shija customers. What success looks like for me personally is having another one of those. I have in mind who that customer or two can be for us. We are working pretty closely with them today. And that kind of sort of introduction of a brand new, technological architecture, customer focus to the market that no one's seen before the way we did with Ionity back in the early days. Having one of those, I think is a huge milestone of success. just as foreshadowing, think you should expect to see something like that from us in the near future. And the second one is just rebuilding that customer trust across the market. Right now, still today, you hear a lot of folks who see the tritium name, hear the tritium name and say, hey, I've worked with this customer in the past or this supplier in the past, but they're still concerned as to You know, is the company financially stable? Is the company back from a after sales perspective? Should I trust the company to buy a new product and work with over the next 10 years? And that'll change very soon as well. I think all the things we put in place in the company are absolutely changing customer's minds right now. And what success looks like for me is that within about six to 12 months, we send out these NPS surveys. And the feedback is, yes, I would absolutely buy from Tritium. And that's not something that the market can tell from the outside, but it's something you'll feel just by asking some of our friends in this industry, asking the executive teams, asking the supply chain teams, asking the engineering teams, how do you feel about Tritium? And I want the answer to be, I absolutely trust them. And by the way, they're the easiest company in the industry to work with. that's good. You know, to the, to the end of the, the, surveys, the NPS is important. And I know that that's not just going to customers because as a service provider, we have received them from Tridium to know what that experience has been like working with, you know, support and help desk, et cetera, to, to resolve a call, whether that call was based around preventative or corrective maintenance commissioning. We've gotten those surveys as well to, so, so you're, You're checking the polls of not only customers, all those. It appears to be the, those that are engaging with Tridium. so that's, uh that's good. Well, Arcady, this has been fantastic conversation. Lots of good, good things that were covered here today. I really appreciate you being on field frequency and, sharing your time with us, sharing your time. I want to, want to connect with you directly, want to follow you. where can people connect with you? Where can people follow your content? They should absolutely follow me on LinkedIn. people should also feel free to reach out to me. So it's very easy to get to me. It's my first initial last name at tritiumcharging.com. So if you want to reach me, I'm and I do respond to those emails. So please reach out. Well, that's good. Accessibility is perfect. That's really good, Arteti. Thank you uh for your time. Thanks for sharing this, your knowledge with us, your experience with us. We look forward to talking to you again. Thank you, Joyce.