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:

• Bootstrapping from Sofia to 180+ enterprise clients across Europe, Asia-Pacific, Africa, and North America
• Outsider advantage: how naivety and persistence opened doors in a crowded CPMS market
• Selling to CPOs: the “killer arguments” that convinced operators to switch platforms
• Why orchestrating best-in-class vendors beats trying to build everything in-house
• Smart charging today: why V1G scheduling is underutilized, and why V2G remains costly
• Orlin’s long-term vision: from consolidation of CPO markets to seamless plug-and-charge UX and the promise of wireless charging

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.