#PowerToTheElectrificationChampion — Charging Into the Future and CRV’s Investment in Flipturn
By Caitlin Bolnick Rellas and Veronica Orellana
Amid the rising number of Audi e-trons, Tesla Model Ys and Toyota Priuses you likely see on the road, there is a surge in the adoption of commercial electric vehicles. From EV buses and trucks to vans — these vehicles are the backbone of our economy, routing packages where they need to go, picking up trash and transporting employees. With this new wave of commercial electrification, new software is needed to manage these fleets and ensure a seamless experience. Enter Flipturn, which enables fleets to gain unprecedented control over their operations. The company’s EV charger and fleet management platform helps customers save on charging costs, control how and when chargers are working, provides detailed diagnostics to ensure charger uptime and is built from the ground up for commercial fleet specific needs.
In record time, Flipturn has been able to sell and close top tier commercial fleet customers. This is largely due to their deep understanding of the market, their ability to ship products quickly and the founders long history of being friends and co-collaborators. Flipturn’s co-founders, Katie Siegel (CEO) and Sashko Stubailo (CTO), have been friends for more than a decade. They met in the dorms at MIT — and fun fact — their dogs are even siblings. One of Flipturn’s biggest differentiators is that they ship incredibly quickly — customers are seeing the product evolve almost daily to meet their ever changing needs. Katie, Sashko and the team’s unique ability to nimbly adapt helps Flipturn stand out in a space that is notoriously slow to evolve. This is also rooted in both Katie and Shashko’s prior experience. Katie spent years working on fleet software solutions at Samsara as a senior engineering manager and Sashko was at Stripe building products that power billions of dollars of payments as a senior engineering manager. Those experiences help this fledgling startup punch above its weight in terms of the customer logos it has secured. Flipturn customers include the likes of the City of Seattle, Purolator, Republic Services, Swift Transportation and Zeem Solutions.
Today we’re electrified to announce our investment in Flipturn. At CRV we’re big fans of giving power to the person and giving individual people more control over their day-to-day lives and the freedom to determine how they work. Switching to EVs at scale is one of the keys to unlocking sustainable mobility across a multitude of industries. The reason we backed Flipturn is simple: What could be more powerful than giving power and energy back to people and companies who leverage it the most, so we can build a better future for all of us? Combine that with the ingredients that this uniquely equipped team has to tackle the space and investing in charging the future was a no brainer for Team CRV.
If you’re passionate about building a cleaner, brighter future and changing the world for the better via technology, our team would love to hear from you. The world needs more people who are passionate about building the markets that they want to see exist in the world and we’re incredibly proud to back entrepreneurs of that caliber.
