In this episode of Smart Charge by RiDERgy, we sit down with Orlin Radev, CEO and founder of Ampeco, one of the world’s fastest-scaling charge point management system (CPMS) providers. Since raising a $26M Series B in 2024, Ampeco has grown to 200,000 managed charge points across 60 markets, serving utilities like E.ON and hundreds of CPOs worldwide.
Orlin shares his entrepreneurial journey from launching his first company in high school to co-founding 10 ventures before Ampeco, and how he went from being an industry outsider in Sofia to building a global SaaS leader. We cover the unique strategy that helped Ampeco scale without building its own charging network, its API-first approach, and why alignment with customers—not competition—is at the heart of its business model.
Key themes include:
We also explore Ampeco’s perspective on emerging EV markets in Brazil, Mexico, Ethiopia and beyond, where Chinese EV brands are driving adoption and leapfrogging infrastructure buildouts. Orlin reflects on the double-growth dynamics of an emerging industry, the role of flexibility markets in Norway, and why CPOs are drowning in complexity but don’t have to.
This is a wide-ranging conversation on scaling software, navigating regulation, and what it takes to become the operating system of EV charging worldwide.