Episode 125: How Mitra EV is Electrifying the Working Fleet

Molly Wood Voice-Over: Welcome to Everybody in the Pool, the podcast where we dive deep into the innovative solutions and the brilliant minds who are tackling the climate crisis head-on. I'm Molly Wood. This week, the market for consumer EVs might be in a bit of a lull, at least in the US. But for businesses with fleets of vehicles, no matter how small those fleets might be, there's every reason in the world to electrify and all of those reasons are dollars and cents.

Electric trucks and SUVs save huge amounts of money on gas and maintenance, and if you're a small or midsize business, that can mean the difference between survival and extinction. My guest today is helping to electrify small fleets by solving two problems at once: the actual vehicles, and also the charging.

Galina Russell is the co-founder and CEO of Mitra EV and in an unusual twist, I am going to let her start with her origin story, because let it be an inspiration to all of us.

Galina Russell: I was adopted at age 12 from a Russian orphanage and arrived in Massachusetts. And, um, ever since that moment, which of course was a pivotal moment in my life, I felt that not only is this a place of opportunities, I really truly believe that America still is the land of dreams. Um, but also life has given me a chance to do wonderful things. And whenever I can, if I can build something that I think has a greater impact, um, it just feels really close to home for me. And so tying this back sort of to Mitra and why and how Mitra came to be, we've really started the business to help small and medium sized commercial fleets access new technologies like EVs.

As we saw the adoption into electric vehicles, which, in my opinion, is a precursor to autonomous vehicles, what we also noticed is there was a big, um, population or demographic that was being left behind, in terms of innovation and just solutions being established for them. And that demographic makes up a, a huge market share, we'll talk about as well.

And so our goal was really to build something practical for these small and mid-size fleet operators that make up the backbone of this country where they too can participate in, uh, this wave of technologies and, and as a result of that, also help of course, our environment.

Molly Wood: Right. Um, it is, that is such a detailed intro that has so many interesting parts that it's like a choose your own adventure story.

Um, let's, I wanna talk a little bit more about your background, what you were doing before Mitra, and then what kind of, what it was about this underserved demographic of small and mid-sized companies that made you think this is the solution. Like what, what was the path to getting here and having that realization?

Galina Russell: Yeah, so my background has been, I went all the way from big corporate, so I was, I started my career in consulting. I was working on transportation, travel and logistics projects oftentimes for big clients. And then I slowly went into rental, uh, working with rental fleets and helping them kind of think strategically through what does rental look like in the next decade and 50 years even.

Molly Wood: Mm-hmm.

Galina Russell: Of course, we saw the wave of shared mobility and then with that, what we also noticed was, um, EVs entering the, the, the marketplace. And so I worked with quite a few companies that were trying to understand, do these work for me? And a lot of these were larger fleets, had larger trucks.

And these were earlier days of EVs, so of course the cost, uh, parody was nowhere near where it is starting to be today, nor was the value proposition or the know- knowledge in general. And, um, so what, what I noticed with the transportation is that, um, although we have the tendency to focus on the biggest thing first, it's usually the smaller thing, um, like this, this two B two van kind of vehicles that, um, begin to make sense in the beginning because they're just less scary. There's less of a cost barrier to enter. And, um, they’re a practical use case.

And so again, me and my co-founders, we kind of noticed that everyone who's come up with an EV model or, uh, whether it was, um, on the infrastructure side and just building charging depots or they were offering some sort of, um, EVs for purchase or leasing. So automotive versus energy, right, industries. They were all sort of tackling these bigger players and they were doing so in a very siloed manner. So like you had charging companies building charging stations and hubs and saying like, yeah, we're gonna build these over here and like hopefully these fleets will come and charge.

Molly Wood: Hmm, mm-hmm.

Galina Russell: That’s not how the reality, how the world works. You have to understand transportation to know where to build.

Molly Wood: Right.

Galina Russell: And then you had automotive, right? Launching EVs and saying, okay, we have EVs available, commercial EVs available and lease at our dealerships, but we'll just give you a card to talk to a charging provider.

And also that's not how it works because a fleet doesn't typically have an infrastructure team to build gas stations.

Molly Wood: Right. Okay. And so then what is the Mitra solution?

Galina Russell: So the Mitra solution is to give a completely turnkey product to our customer. We lease an electric truck. We also figure out what level of charging they need at their Home Depot. Um, and then we build shared charging within the zone where we, our fleets drive. And so, yeah, it's, I think the, the underlying, um, value proposition of our solution is that it's practical for those fleets on day one.

Meaning your fleet, you have a fleet rotation cycle. We're not asking you to add anything new or do anything different. We're just saying, when is the next time you're retiring some of your vehicles? And at that time, we're gonna have an EV and a charger ready for you, just like you would get a laptop with a charger when you go to a store.

Molly Wood: Got it right, which seems, which seems so obvious when you say it.

Galina Russell: It does.

Molly Wood: Like, right. Of course you need both of those things because without, you know, with only one, you have to think about the other all the time.

Huh. Okay, so let's, let's walk through this like piece by piece because there's obviously, there's the, the specific fleets you're targeting, there's the leasing of vehicles, which we'll need to talk about which ones, and then there's the question of charging and whether that involves you building infrastructure.

Um, so I wanna take those like piece by piece. One, let's start with the fleets, because I think people, like this is an area where, you know, everybody knows about a UPS truck, but when you say fleets, it's not always clear what you mean, especially in terms of differentiating between like a Hertz-size fleet and something else. So first of all, who's the customer?

Galina Russell: Yeah. So our customer is typically a home services business actually.

Molly Wood: Oh, like a plumber?

Galina Russell: Plumbers. Electricians, disaster and restoration folks, it could, we also deal with parcel delivery folks as well. And, um, really the, the reason why we, we segment that particular industry is because that's where most of the small, mid-size businesses, business operators are.

And so a lot of times when you're in a city and you're seeing like these vans running around, the dry cleaners, right? The cupcake delivery people, whatever, uh, it's vans or pickup trucks.

Molly Wood: Yeah.

Galina Russell: They're not usually big class A trucks, but they're driving all day long in this regional area, and they're usually like mom and pop owned. Sometimes they're, they're slightly larger and somewhere between 20 to a hundred trucks per business.

Molly Wood: Got it.

Galina Russell: Again, very localized, very regional, 20 to a hundred trucks. Generally home services, parcel delivery kind of folks.

Molly Wood: Okay. Yeah, I mean, those are, like you said, on the street all the time. There's a, um, there's a mobile pet grooming service that is on my street all the time that I need to call. And also that could be them.

Um, okay. So, and then what are the, what vehicles do you work with? Like, let's go from, so we've identified the business, they're gonna need a new vehicle of some sort. Who makes those?

Galina Russell: Yeah, so we work with top tier OEMs, uh, for financing reasons also, it's just easier. Plus, unfortunately, in the world of EVs, we've seen so many companies pop up and shut back down.

Molly Wood: Yeah.

Galina Russell: Um, even, you know, models with top tier OEMs come up and shut back down. So we've had the General Motors Brightdrop, which is an excellent vehicle. Uh, we've worked with Ford, both the, the pickup trucks and now the transits, depending on the use case of the customer. The Mercedes E Sprinter, the Rivian vehicles with the RAM vehicles, so again, electric pickup trucks. Electric vans.

We’ll go up to a box truck in some cases. Um, and there are solutions for, for box truck, both, um, retrofitting to electric and brand new electric that, that makes sense. But yeah, it's mostly those, those top tier OEMs.

Molly Wood: Right. Okay. And then there's, and then there's the issue that if you were a company that just simply leased that vehicle, you would have to figure out charging on your own.

Galina Russell: Mm-hmm.

Molly Wood: So what is the solution then, that you offer there?

Galina Russell: Yeah, so we do a almost a one-to-one ratio. Every vehicle will come with an installed charger. Generally those can be level two chargers because most of these vehicles will come home to a warehouse and charge overnight.

So you don't really need that fast charge right away. But we do also install, uh, shared fast chargers on our customer sites. And this is kind of a game changer because in the past, the, the fast charging kind of hubs have been this big CapEx intensive projects that take like five years plus. And now with AI and data centers, gosh knows, you know, where you'll be in the queue.

Molly Wood: Yeah.

Galina Russell: So what we try to do is we really try to work within the constraints of the grid. Uh, and that means just adding a handful sometimes of these fast chargers. So our customers have both, they'll have their dedicated level two charger installed, activated, tested the day they get their vehicle.

So it's literally the whole laptop and charger analogy. And then they'll have a fast charger on their site that they can use to top off, and that we welcome other fleets to come in there as well. 'cause again, they have under most of these, these warehouses have underutilized or dead parking spaces.

Molly Wood: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Galina Russell: So now you're allowing others in the community that are looking for charging to come in, use that fast charger, and we give some of that money back to the host, to the fleet.

Molly Wood: So, okay. So when those people use the charger, they pay.

Galina Russell: Exactly.

Molly Wood: Yep. Yep. Wow. Okay. Um, and then how, talk about running a business like that because it's a lot of pieces.

It's like a multi-sided marketplace and it's infrastructure and installation. Um, how hard is this?

Galina Russell: I mean, it's not easy.

Molly Wood: Yeah, totally.

Galina Russell: You know, it was everybody would do it. Um, but also I. I, I should have mentioned this early on, but I come from a world of operations. I'm an operator by nature. I like optimizing, I love building complex things and then making them better and better and better, more, uh, automated, more efficient. So there's a lot of that, you know, there's a lot of having to align and these parallel things that are happening. Right?

So having to align the delivery and upfit of that vehicle. Mm-hmm. 'cause these are not just. A normal vehicle, this is a vehicle that may need some shelving, for example. Then at this, to, in parallel to that, you have a team working on infrastructure, working with the utilities, going through that standard, you know, whether it's pulling a new permit or, um, using the existing capacity to make sure those chargers are are ready and, and good to go.

And then there's a launch process on software testing. So what it took to do that is of course a lot of automation of our backend. So the first year, um, and maybe I'm grateful to my consulting days for this, but I spent a lot of time thinking about enterprise systems, even though we're a startup of, with three people.

I was like, let's make sure that we build this to scale. Let's automate the projects as much as we can. Let's build these almost like cookie cutter, um, launch templates.

Molly Wood: Mm-hmm.

Galina Russell: And then, you know, we'll pivot as as we go and learn, but let's work with what we have and let's build it enterprise level, uh, as much as we can from, from the beginning. So that definitely helps.

Molly Wood: so that each deployment and installation follows a a pretty sim it's, you're not trying to do like exactly a super bespoke process every time other than what the site might dictate.

Galina Russell: It's literally templatized with our software.

Molly Wood: Yep. Yeah. And then are you, do, you mentioned vehicle customization. Are you doing that too? Like are you buying these vehicles and then leasing them?

Galina Russell: Yes.

Molly Wood: And customizing as needed?

Galina Russell: That's right. So we purchased, and recently we, we had a, a series A announcement and, uh, we have a excellent partner that joined us, S two G with, with a facility that allows us to, uh, expand. And so we're purchasing these vehicles, then we are updating them according to our customer's needs.

Wrap, interior upfit, depending on what business they're using that for. Um, and then we're putting it out on a lease with that customer.

Molly Wood: Got it. Amazing. Um,

Galina Russell: Yeah.

Molly Wood: How do you quantify, like from a climate perspective, like certainly this is a, this feels like a sort of a brilliant Trojan horse to adoption, right?

Because it's very necessary. It's companies that might not have, uh, an easy solution available to them already. How do you quantify this from a climate perspective, like how does, uh, do a whole bunch of these small to mid-size fleets compare to, you know, electrifying UPS, let's say?

Galina Russell: Yeah. Well, first of all, I think one data point that people don't know is that 99% of registered fleets are small and mid-size businesses.

Molly Wood: Boom.

Galina Russell: And the tailpipe emissions are actually coming, are coming from those little trucks that are driving around in our communities. Because remember, they're in dense zones. They're not on some deserted highway going across state in a class A truck.

Molly Wood: Right, right.

Galina Russell: They are literally stop and go tailpipe in in our communities. So this is, it is. Fastest, the most practical and the most impactful way to do this. Yeah. And it, and it's, I I just wanna draw one parallel. If I have a minute.

Molly Wood: You have all the minutes.

Galina Russell: I have all the minutes. So, consumer EV adoption, when EVs first came out, it was a thing for the wealthy kind of. Say, right.

Molly Wood: Yeah.

Galina Russell: So it was very expensive. The Model S, the Model X, this is pre, pre 2017, um, pre model three release, and you had less than 1% adoption of EVs in this country. Then the model three gets released, affordable. Huge market uptake. Now by 2023, with that model out, you have seven to 8% adoption of EVs. So in the world of commercial fleets, it's very similar.

Most of the people are not your high net worth or high, uh, high income individuals. Right. You have the middle class and then you have a growing, uh, population of unfortunately lower income class. Mm-hmm. And. In the commercial EV world, it's kind of the same thing. You have your large fleets. Yes, you have some Fortune 100 fleets that own their vehicles and run those, and run those, those fleets.

But then you have this huge segment, this 99% registered fleets of small and midsize folks who don't have disposable cash, who are not going to invest all the upfront capital. And so our version of model three are the electric pickup trucks and electric vans. Mm-hmm. It's not the class eight. Your class eight is your Model X.

Molly Wood Voice-Over: Time for a quick break. When we come back, we'll talk about the cold hard incentive for businesses to electrify and how Mitra’s charging infrastructure is also, you guessed it, grid assets.

Welcome back to Everybody in the Pool. We're talking with Galina Russell of Mitra EV.

Molly Wood: What are you finding for these small and mid-size businesses—what are you finding is the incentive for them to electrify?

Galina Russell: It's cost savings.

Molly Wood: Yeah.

Galina Russell: It's always cost savings. Today specifically. You know, two years ago when we started this, the economy was slightly different. There was a little bit more disposable cash even in the hands of these smaller businesses. And if they didn’t have a truck that was ready to rotate out, they said, okay, I’ll try an EV. You know, I’ll try one EV.

But today, for sure, it has to make sense for their bottom line from day one.

And our number one cost saving to them is, first of all, there’s no added CapEx. You’re not spending anything out of pocket. You are getting on a traditional lease as you would with your typical lease product, and you're going to save on your fueling expenses somewhere between 50 to 75%, which is what we’ve seen.

We anonymize the customer data and we show it to them. Like, look, here’s a plumber in this area that has this many trucks. This is what they saved the last six months.

Molly Wood: Yeah. And that’s before you even get to the service and repair, because even though there’s—

Galina Russell: Exactly. Before the service, before the repair. Yeah. And all the other added benefits of, you know, the other sticky point is a lot of these businesses aren’t fully digitized. So all of a sudden, not only are they going to an EV, but they can see their entire fleet, all of their charging, all of their refueling, all in one platform. They can see graphs. They can see charts. They get all this data.

And once that business owner has access to see things that way, they don’t really want to go back to spreadsheets or filing folders. They’re like, no, I need this for my entire fleet now.

Molly Wood: Right. Totally.

I mean, that is one of the things I like so much about this, and you’ve talked about this, and you’re clearly just a very practical, hard-headed person.

There’s nothing ideological needed about this solution. It literally is like: would you like to save money, have a more modern bookkeeping approach to the expenses of your fleet, and also have a vehicle you don’t have to stop and fill up all the time that is nicer to drive and that people want in their communities? It seems really straightforward.

Galina Russell: Yeah.

Molly Wood: Yep.

Galina Russell: Yeah, it is. It was mind-blowing when we peeled the onion and looked further in this industry to see that there was such a gap in solutions being provided.

Molly Wood: Right. And then the other part of it, is that you mentioned that you're grid digestible. Talk about how you're also creating grid assets.

Galina Russell: Exactly. And that’s again another hurdle to adoption. If you have to wait three years to get your power, then you’re not going to have EVs on the road for three years.

Molly Wood: Right. And just to specify for people who don’t know, we’re talking about if you’re trying to build a really big Level 3 charging station, like a Tesla charging station. First you have to get power.

Galina Russell: Yes.

Molly Wood: And that is the least trivial part of that construction project.

Galina Russell: So a couple of things. You have to get power and enough power. And a lot of times when people select a location, because of the sheer size of it, you’re basically selecting a piece of land that had no power previously and you're asking for all that power to be put in.

What we’re doing is going to a customer who has a warehouse, most likely in an industrial zone that has been zoned to be industrial, that has been zoned to have larger power and leftover capacity.

And we’re not coming in and saying to the customer we’re putting 50 fast chargers. We’re going to look at your power, and see what’s available, first and foremost, so you can have their Level 2s, and whatever is left over, we’ll put fast charging. So it works well within, like, utilities love this because it’s not overly complicated.

And most of the time we’ve done quite a bit of research and just conversations with utilities, is that we’ll talk and we’ll say like what is your in-stock equipment in terms of transformers, in terms of gear, so if we do need to bring in new power, we’re going to go with in-stock assets that you already have. So we’re helping you offload those assets.

Molly Wood: Mm-hmm. Okay. And they don’t have to be at the whim of the supply chain for those transformers, which we understand is not a good place to be.

Galina Russell: Exactly. I call it the physical version of decentralized blockchain.

Molly Wood: That’s amazing. [Laughs] What I love about you, Galina, is you’re a legit nerd.

Galina Russell: Yeah, I am.

Molly Wood: Yep, yep. We could talk about a lot of fun things that we will not do right this second.

And so then how do you make money as a company?

Galina Russell: Yeah. So like a traditional lease company, we do have a margin obviously that covers, um, our expenses on the leases, the vehicle leases. We also place a margin on electricity cost, um, that we pay, which is also very traditional DC or a charging model. And that margin can actually be substantially larger when you add a storage asset.

We didn't talk about this earlier, but for those sites where we have DC fast chargers, um, we often look at if it's possible to add a battery, um, half a megawatt to megawatt, nothing. Again, nothing ginormous, right? Nothing unbearable, but just enough to store power and then allow us to do some peak shaving.

And what this means is, of course, you're buying electricity. At the lowest possible cost point. And then you are making that spread much larger throughout the day when folks are, you know, charging.

Molly Wood: And you’re evening out demand for the customer as well.

Galina Russell: Exactly. And you know, I used to talk about this a lot in my previous endeavor because I worked quite a bit with batteries and I was a, I've been a battery fan since seven, eight years ago before…

Molly Wood: God, we have batteries to geek out about too!

Galina Russell: Yes, we have batteries to geek out. I've always said like the distribute, the, the issue is not the generation so much or the resale, it's the distribution.

Molly Wood: Yep.

Galina Russell: And for distribute, in order to help distribution today, you have to have more storage to help, and now it's such a necessity because of AI. AI has put an insane amount of spikes onto the demand, uh, onto the grid that we, we just don't know how to, um, the gr, the grid operators don't know how to manage.

But on the, the battery side, the other thing I used to say, and I still wholeheartedly believe this, and we absolutely would, you know, I'll, I'll disclose this now as a first time disclosure on this podcast, we absolutely would consider this for the future. When we go into these zones, and let's say we have 50 warehouses that we work with, so 50 fleets within a specific city or an area, and if we can put a megawatt of storage in each one of those warehouses, you have 50 megawatts of backup power.

Molly Wood: Yep.

Galina Russell: That you're able to load onto the grid much faster because you're not going and putting 50 in one location, just going and putting half to a megawatt in each one. That's decentralized, de-risked by the way. You can use it in public private partnerships with cities.

Molly Wood: Yeah.

Galina Russell: For essential services for, you know, you, you name it. So there is, there's a real, again, practical benefit to doing that.

Molly Wood: I do wanna ask you, tell me about the name Mitra. Where does that come from?

Galina Russell: Yeah, I, I actually, I can't coin this one as my, um, I, I actually, I'm, I'm gonna give the fully honest story.

One of our co-founders, Brian. We were all thinking of what name to pick. And his wife actually had suggested, uh, Mitra, which also means, um, friend in, um, I think it's Hindu, so it's..

Molly Wood: Wow. Wait, have I been pronouncing it wrong? Is it Mee-tra or My-tra?

Galina Russell: It's “My-tra”.

Molly Wood: It's Mitra. I see, okay.

Galina Russell: We went with the pronunciation of “My-tra” because Mitra almost sounds like my truck, but not quite there. Mitra.

Molly Wood: I get it.

Galina Russell: But that's, that's, I know. It's, it's not really like, you know, anything crazy, but it was, uh, it came from one of the, one of the co-founders within, like the Mitra family and

Molly Wood: I love it.

Galina Russell: And it's, it seemed like a good word with a positive meaning. So we're trying to do something positive.

Molly Wood: Right. Good vibes.

Galina Russell: Yeah.

Molly Wood: What, what would you, if you could, sort of wave your magic wand and say this would be the ideal tailwind for us as a company, what might it be, or what do you know? What do you need to be successful?

Galina Russell: This is a great question. Well, I'm glad that we fulfilled the capital need for the time being.

Molly Wood: That's a big one. Yeah. That helps.

Galina Russell: That feels like it's an always a need and a need in a startup world. And that's a whole separate conversation we can have about capital for asset heavy startups and how there's definitely a gap in the ecosystem in my experience and opinion.

Um, I think what would be really helpful is, we're working really hard to help people understand that it's not just… supporting a cause is really important. Of course, supporting decarbonization of our planet is super important. It's important to me, um, maybe less important to others, but EVs are a good practical product. It is a great competitive alternative.

It's, it's, it is. So just having that knowledge widespread, 'cause there's so much that has been, I think, politicized, you know, when it, as it relates to EVs and it's like politics aside, this is just a great product.

Molly Wood: Right. Right. Yes. The more we can tell that story, the better. And I appreciate you doing your best at it.

Galina Russell is the CEO of Mitra EV. Thank you so much for the time. What an, what a remarkable story.

Galina Russell: Thank you, Molly. Such a pleasure to be here. Good to see you.

Molly Wood Voice-Over: That's it for this episode of Everybody in the Pool. Thank you so much for listening. This episode actually even comes with a book recommendation from Galina. It's called The Grid by Gretchen Blakke. It was written in 2016, and it explains how our grid came to be the way it is and how. Even a decade ago, it was obvious that it was not going to be able to meet the electrification needs of the future.

I've got more on this topic in the newsletter this week, including a little review of the book, which I'm reading now. You can subscribe to the newsletter at everybodyinthepool.com or read the latest and all the back issues at mollywood.co.

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