Electric vehicle (EV) charging installation software provider Jumptech has had a busy year, with deals signed by Good Energy, YESSS EV & Energy and most recently, Pod Point.
The company’s founder and director Phil Nunn spoke to Current± about developing the platform, enabling installations at scale and building the company’s momentum.
Where did the idea for Jumptech come from?
My previous business, Qton Solutions, provides a specialist field service management platform for metering that was used for the smart meter rollout. Our customers were the likes of National Grid and OVO Energy etc. After the business was acquired by SMS plc in 2016 I bought an electric car which is when I discovered that having a charge point installed was a complete nightmare.
It was clear that there was no way that installs could ramp up for the volumes that were necessary to meet the net zero targets without scalable systems and processes in place.
So I left SMS in 2018 and set up Jumptech with some of the original Qton team and used our experience of working in metering to build a highly scalable platform that enables a seamless customer journey.
Our first customer was The Phoenix Works; I got on well with Thomas Newby who has a great reputation for his expertise and from there we signed up several of the larger installers in the UK like BMM, Elmtronics, Joju, etc.
What does the Jumptech Platform do exactly?
For installers using the platform, there’s a self-survey piece where they send a customer a text with a link to a simple to use form. It makes it really easy to upload the required documents, take the photos of the meter, consumer unit, fuse cut out and driveway etc. The form sends it back to the installer where they review it, before building up and sending a quote from the platform. The system automatically generates all the documents for the grant for OLEV and the ENA form for the DNO.
Once the customer has approved the quote the installer can book the appointment on Jumptech and schedule the job. This job then appears on the engineer’s mobile app along with all the information from the survey and the time and location of the appointment. The mobile app will guide the engineer through the install, ensuring it’s compliant and all the necessary data and photos are captured. The app has also been integrated to enable it to carry out the commissioning.
We also have our Connect product for companies who need to use installers to install chargers on their behalf. Connect enables them to manage, track and make sure that the job is done the right way. Companies like Pod Point, YESSS Electrical and Drive Electric use Connect to manage and track their installs. The jobs get assigned from Connect to the installers environment. The benefit to Connect customers is that they can see in real time exactly where that job is at, they can see if the survey has been sent back, if it has been quoted, see the quote and approve it if needed and view the completed job and all the photos and completion data.
So essentially we provide an end to end seamless journey for the customer, and ensure all of the information is visible to all the stakeholders. We also enable the risk assessments and methodology the engineer uses onsite to be defined by the customer owner and to be appropriate for the charger being installed.
Our purpose is to enable chargers and other low carbon devices to be installed at scale as efficiently as possible by providing a seamless end to end customer journey where all the stakeholders have the required visibility and control.
Were there many technical challenges in developing the platform?
A good proportion of what we designed and developed is very similar to what built at Qton, so that experience of supporting engineers doing over 1,000 jobs a day has proven invaluable. The team are all senior experienced engineers so when we set out we looked at all the challenges we had at Qton, particularly in relation to sharing data across multiple parties and managing subcontractors, and ensured that capability was easy to implement and configure. We also learned at Qton that simple integration with third party systems such as CRMs and ERPs is key so have also made that really straightforward.
The greatest challenge with building a platform like Jumptech is ensuring it’s always easy to use but also its performance doesn’t deteriorate as numbers of users, jobs and features increase. We’ve seen this slowdown in similar products and it can be a tough one to fix if the design wasn’t right at the start, so we invested heavily in the latest cloud services that benefit from automatically scaling so our infrastructure grows with us.
What’s next for Jumptech?
We’re really feeling the momentum build now both in the industry and in the demand for the capability we’ve built. The clearest evidence of this is even the largest players in the space now such as Pod Point looking to leverage our platform to enable them to scale up and accommodate the anticipated growth coming from increasing EV car sales.
We’re also getting great traction from companies installing domestic battery storage with our platform being used by sonnen for their rollout recently announced with Shell.
We’ll soon be announcing more energy suppliers joining Good Energy on the platform who are working with us to build propositions with car dealers and lease companies.
The challenge of rolling these technologies out at scale is very much a global one so our growth plans for early next year include the Nordics and Western Europe ahead of venturing further afield.
For the last couple of years, we have focused on building a robust scalable platform and an experienced team who love what they do, that’s what I really care about, and then working closely with our customers to help them grow and be successful.
