Hitting the Accelerator on Fleet Electrification

Investing in Synop

By Andrew Beebe and Christopher Cheng

At Obvious Ventures, we have long believed in the electrification of transportation. Over the years, we’ve been fortunate to partner with category-defining companies that have created billions of dollars of value by doing just this, including Proterra ($PTRA), Lilium ($LILM), and Amply (now part of $BP).

With our new early-stage fund Obvious Ventures IV, we’re excited to announce our very first investment: Synop, the operating system for commercial EV fleets.

“Fleetification” is taking hold across the country. Moving overland freight in America drives over $700 billion gross freight value and employs over 7 million people. Over 600,000 medium to heavy duty trucks are purchased every year and the logistics companies that purchase these vehicles are rapidly moving towards electrification. Major cities like New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Houston have made commitments to transition their bus fleets to electric. Even Jeff Bezos is tackling this industry, making a $100 million donation to the World Resources Institute to spur the electrification of school transportation.

The largest fleet vehicle makers like Daimler, Volvo, Ford, and BYD, along with newer entrants like Tesla and Nikola, are focusing their resources on producing electric trucks and buses, which have been shown to have a lower total cost of ownership versus traditional internal combustion engine vehicles. Rising oil prices, severe carbon emissions, and increasing government regulation have all driven companies to reimagine how fleets will look in the near future. Aside from the clear reduction in fuel costs, companies can benefit from significant reductions in operating costs and repair costs by switching to EVs.

But challenges can quickly arise when making the transition to electric. Businesses need an entirely new infrastructure, including the vehicles themselves, chargers, and charging depots. When this infrastructure is built, all of these products from different providers need to be able to talk to each other, which can be complex.

Furthermore, fleet managers need flexibility. They don’t want to commit to one vehicle vendor, and they certainly don’t want to be locked into a software platform to manage their assets which is tied to one specific vendor.

Enter Synop

Synop is the first purpose-built software solution designed to holistically orchestrate the operations of an electric commercial fleet.

Co-founders CEO Gagan Dhillon and CTO Andrew Blejde have been long-time friends and collaborators. After college, Gagan sold insurance in the fleet space at REIN and Volvo. Andrew became a software engineer at JP Morgan and AWS. Working with Volvo, Gagan learned about the challenges fleets face when electrifying their assets and how far behind the software was to support them. He saw an opportunity to build Synop and teamed up with Andrew, leaning on his experience building data streaming products, which has set the foundation of Synop’s operating software.

Synop’s software provides customers with modern EV fleet operations at scale. Through API connectivity, Synop unifies chargers and telematics sources and operationalizes an electric service fleet in minutes with no code. It is hardware agnostic and interoperable across vehicle and charging OEMs, a key feature for fleets, which need the flexibility to use different brands of vehicles and chargers across their network. Connecting a fleet to the Synop platform allows operators the ability to manage their entire fleet operation.

Using Synop, companies can holistically understand fleet operations, charge operations, and energy management under a single platform. They can analyze telematics, chargers, and energy rates in real time to create interoperability across systems and dynamically plan routes, schedule charging, and manage energy consumption across sites to ensure a fleet is maximizing its cost savings.

The Synop team is building the distributed operating system we need today in order to power the next generation of fleets on which our economy will run. We’re thrilled to partner with this team in service of this critical mission.

Let’s roll.