The "Missing Link" to Delivering an Electrified Future for Fleets - Anant Kapoor, Guided Energy's CEO

Fleet management is at a crossroads. Electrification has added new systems and new data that is incompatible with existing operations, and the transition could prove costly. However, help is at hand in the form of France's Guided Energy.

Founded in 2023, the startup is an EV fleet and energy management system. Its platform helps fleets of all sizes lower costs through higher vehicle productivity and avoided capital expenditure.

"Electrification is the biggest transformation in the way commercial fleets operate since the rise of the internet," Anant Kapoor, Guided Energy's CEO, tells Auto Futures. 

Fleets are facing growing regulation, shifting customer demand and mounting public pressure to electrify.

"Existing solutions just don’t work for this new complexity and the data fleet managers need in order to work efficiently, is locked up in silos across a fragmented ecosystem. Getting this wrong leads to lower vehicle productivity and higher operating costs. Fleets need new tools, new systems and new ways of working," explains Kapoor. 

The Guided platform connects with the entire EV ecosystem to show what’s happening and what needs to happen.

"We integrate with EVs, on-site chargers, external charging-networks as well as legacy fleet management systems give operators critical visibility and automate time consuming operational tasks from planning charge sessions and managing dispatch to reporting and expense management."

"Using the Guided platform, fleets have a unified view across their entire EV operations, allowing them to use upcoming routes or jobs to schedule charging and real-time EV data to plan their dispatch and more," he adds.

Advanced Analytics

Guided Energy's platform is powered by AI.

"Today, we are collecting millions of data points across many different types of EVs and chargers. We use AI to create advanced range analytics that account for weather, terrain, OEM and much more, helping dispatch teams plan and monitor routes affectively, and overcome range anxiety," says Kapoor. 

"Similarly, we are using this data to automatically schedule and prioritise charging based on a number of factors from upcoming routes to cost of charging and availability of external infrastructure."

Global mobility provider Sixt is one of the company's happy customers.

In a press release, Marc Aubrée, Managing Director of Sixt France, comments: “Guided Energy will optimize our use of charging infrastructure both on-site and on the road, enabling us to maximize utilization over the course of a day, while embedding external charging solutions directly into our operations.”

Boosting EV Profitability

Guided recently announced a $5.2 million seed round of funding with Sequoia and Dynamo Ventures. Its angel investors have included F1 Champrion, Nico Rosberg.

"This round of funding will be used to continue investing in our cutting edge software and AI algorithms as well as fuel growth to onboard thousands of commercial EVs across delivery, transportation and car rental fleets," says Kapoor.

Santosh Sankar, Managing Partner at Dynamo Ventures, states: "Having spoken to fleets navigating the transition, we found that Guided Energy is the missing link to deliver an electrified future that is both sustainable and economical. The ability to integrate dispatch, fleet operations, along with internal and external charging networks sets the baseline for optimizing and automating fleet operations, which boosts EV profitability for businesses."

Finally, we asked Kapoor what EV charging will look like by the end of the decade.

"EV and charging technology is improving every day. As battery sizes get better, chargers become faster and infrastructure becomes more readily available, fleets will have to think about how they manage their rapidly increasing electricity consumption in ways that aligns with their business operations. Fleets will have to look at solutions like solar panels or battery storage to reduce the cost of energy and increase their peak power capacities," he predicts.

"Regardless of the setup, the Guided platform is built to help fleets access the cheapest, the easiest and the most renewable energy for their operations," concludes Kapoor.