In this episode of Smart Charge by RiDERgy, Claudio speaks with Jürgen Mayerhofer, CEO and Co-Founder of Enspired, one of Europe’s fastest-growing AI-driven battery optimization companies. From his early days in Austria’s liberalized gas market to scaling Enspired across Europe and Japan, Jürgen shares how software, data, and automation are reshaping energy markets.

We trace his 20-year journey from gas logistics and power trading to leading a fully automated optimizer managing over 1 GW of grid-scale batteries. Jürgen explains how Enspired helps asset owners maximize revenues across day-ahead, intraday, and balancing markets—and how the company’s transparency initiative with KPMG-audited performance indexes is bringing new trust to the fast-moving storage sector.

Key topics include:

• Scaling Enspired from Austria to Europe and Asia with a tech-first, fully automated platform
• Why Europe struggles with venture capital and boldness in software compared to the US and China
• The rise of the software-defined energy world and why flexibility is the new grid infrastructure
• Lessons from Visotech on scalability, speed, and growing beyond the German-speaking market
• How AI handles 10M+ intraday price updates per day and the shift to real-time optimization
• The future of long-duration storage, grid constraints, and flexibility at TSO vs. DSO levels
• How transparent data and auditing can mature the still-young battery storage market
• The convergence of fleets, EVs, and grid-scale optimization

Jürgen also reflects on the culture of entrepreneurship in Europe, the challenge of scaling deep-tech energy startups, and why he believes the 2020s will be remembered as the decade when the decentralized energy system was built.