As government and business leaders met in New York City this week to discuss climate change, one thing was clear: electrification is inevitable. The question is how long it will take.
Deftpower, a Dutch scale-up, aims to speed up the process. It has developed an AI-powered white-label SaaS platform for electric vehicle (EV) charging that integrates mobility service providers, charge point operators, and car manufacturers into an orchestrated ecosystem.
By making charging smarter, Deftpower aims to lower charging costs for EV drivers, improve the business case for charge point operators, and support a more flexible energy system.
“We are enabling a new generation of e-mobility service providers to turn EV charging into grid flexibility,” says co-founder and CEO Jacob van Zonneveld.
Deftpower is one of 10 finalists in the World Economic Forum UpLink Challenge “Powering Tomorrow: Electricity Systems,” announced September 16 at the Energy Forum in Geneva. (The Innovator’s editor-in-chief, a member of the Forum’s Future Council on Energy Technology Frontiers, was one of the contest judges.)
Deftpower’s platform gives EV providers a branded app, back-office tools, and connected systems to help drivers find, manage, and pay for charging more easily. It links with cars and chargers to automate billing and uses AI to shift charging to cheaper, less busy times.
The company, which has so far raised €20 million, was founded in 2020 by van Zonneveld, Marc Diks, and Remco Tjeerdsma. Van Zonneveld has 15 years of experience in the e-mobility sector. Before Deftpower, he co-founded Plugsurfing and served as its CEO from 2012 to 2019, staying on after Finnish energy company Fortum acquired it in 2018.”The company grew from a two-person garage startup into one of Europe’s largest e-mobility service providers.
Diks worked at Allego, a major European charge point operator, from 2014 to 2019 as CIO and IT project manager, giving him direct operational experience with charging infrastructure before co-founding Deftpower. Tjeerdsma founded ReDo Domotica, a home automation company..
With support from venture capital and the European Union, Deftpower has developed a smart AI model that automatically forecasts and runs public charging sessions, delivering what it says is maximum flexibility for the grid without any cost to the driver experience. Based on a driver’s planned departure time and required battery charge, the system can spread the charging session smartly across the full parking window. For every kilowatt-hour shifted to off-peak hours, drivers receive cashback. The cashback is funded by the price difference between peak and off-peak hours on the energy market, with no subsidy required.
Cashback also reaches lease drivers, for whom tariff discounts often have no effect. Fleets account for 60% of the EVs in the Netherlands, for example, yet business drivers usually do not pay their vehicle’s energy costs themselves. As a result, a discount on the charging tariff stays invisible to them. So Deftpower designed cashback differently for fleets: the reward goes straight to the driver rather than to the company that pays the energy bill.
Traction to Date
Deftpower reports 200% year-over-year growth for the past three years, with paying EV drivers growing 8% month over month on average.
The rollout has moved quickly. In February 2025, working with charge point operator Equans, Dutch motoring association ANWB, and the city of Amsterdam, Deftpower launched what it describes as the first cashback rewards for public smart charging, paying drivers between €0.20 and €10 per session. Allego followed, letting drivers shift sessions from evening peaks to overnight at an initial 4,500 AC charge points. In December 2025, Shell-owned Ubitricity activated the service on 407 connectors in the province of Utrecht and the city of Almere, and later expanded that collaboration to 1,500 public charge points.
The most significant deal was with a grid operator. Dutch distribution system operator Liander launched a pilot in Gelderland with Deftpower, charge point operators Vattenfall and Allego, and service providers ANWB and Athlon, covering around 12,000 public charge points and running until January 2027. Liander says it is the first time a Dutch grid operator has procured flexibility through service providers, and the results will feed a joint advisory report to guide other grid operators and e-mobility companies. Rather than capping charging power by regulation, the pilot pays drivers to wait. “We started with day-ahead tariffs, but eventually we will use real-time tariffs that are location-specific and based on need,” says van Zonneveld. “The important thing is to ensure that drivers are rewarded for their flexibility.”
Fleets are another important target. Athlon Nederland, a leasing company formerly owned by Mercedes-Benz Mobility, has become the first to offer fleet drivers cashback for grid-aware charging, across more than 16,000 public charge points through its Athlon Charge app. Deftpower is also expanding beyond the Netherlands: German utility MAINGAU Energie has picked Deftpower as the partner for its Autostrom charging service, and the company has also partnered with Volue to advance smart charging in Norway.
Competitive Environment
Competitors in the smart-charging and EV software space include ev.energy, Monta, and AmpUp. “Our differentiator is we don’t manage infrastructure and we don’t sell electricity contracts,” says van Zonneveld. “We sell flexibility with the aim of making electric car charging as cheap as possible.”
Deftpower’s focus is mainly on Western Europe. The company has offices in Berlin, but Germany has been slow to roll-out smart meters, so are not reaping “the cost reductions that other European nations will see,” van Zonneveld says. Although each country has a different grid and regulatory regime, he says he is confident that Europe will harmonize regulations, making charging systems more interoperable.
