What inspired you to build exnaton’s platform for energy sharing, dynamic tariffs, and intelligent EV charging?
The idea for exnaton started during our PhD research at ETH Zurich and the University of St. Gallen. My co-founders, Arne and Anselma, and I were working on the Quartierstrom project in a small Swiss town called Walenstadt. We set up Switzerland’s first local energy community – around 40 households producing solar energy and trading it with each other.
That experience was eye-opening. People weren’t just consuming electricity anymore – they were actively shaping their energy future. Seeing that shift in mindset made us realize: the energy system doesn’t need to stay top-down and centralized. It can be local, participatory, and smarter. But the digital tools to support that just didn’t exist.
So, we built exnaton.
Even the name reflects our vision – it’s a mix of “energy” and “exchange,” and a nod to Akhenaten, the Egyptian pharaoh who elevated the sun to a central role. With renewables, especially solar, becoming so important, we wanted to give people a real, active role in this new energy world.
Our goal from the beginning has been to empower prosumers – people who produce and consume energy – to participate meaningfully. That means simplifying the legal and technical complexity, enabling local energy sharing, dynamic pricing, and smart charging. We started with one Swiss village, and today we’re supporting over 50 utilities in five countries, reaching more than 10 million metering points with our product.
How does exnaton’s technology enable dynamic tariffs to process 35,000 data points per customer per year in real time?
The reality of modern electricity billing is that it’s no longer just a flat rate per kilowatt-hour. A typical bill today includes taxes, grid fees – which cover the cost of transporting electricity – and the energy price itself. What’s changing with the energy transition is that both grid fees and energy prices are becoming dynamic, adapting in real time to supply and demand. That creates a powerful opportunity for cost-efficient, demand-responsive consumption – but only if you have the right systems in place to handle the complexity.
Traditional ERP systems simply weren’t designed for this kind of granularity or flexibility. And that’s exactly where exnaton comes in.
Our platform is built from the ground up to process dynamic tariffs. Either we calculate those dynamic price incentives ourselves or we base them on data from exchanges like EPEX, MIBEL, or Nord Pool. We forecast or pull in day-ahead and intraday prices via API, integrate them with time-of-use grid charges, and process consumption data every 15 minutes. That adds up to more than 35,000 data points per customer annually – and our system handles it seamlessly.
What sets us apart is that we don’t just process the data – we make it useful. End users see their real-time energy costs visualized clearly in our white-label web app, so they can shift consumption to cheaper, greener hours – like sunny midday when solar is abundant, or late at night when demand is low. For utilities, we automatically generate volume-weighted average prices for each billing period, ready to feed directly into ERP systems like SAP or Powercloud.
Can you explain how intelligent EV charging works in practice and how it benefits both drivers and the grid?
Absolutely. One of the most exciting parts of the energy transition is how electric vehicles can shift from being just consumers of energy to becoming real assets for the grid – and that’s exactly what we enable with exnaton.
Here’s how it works in practice: users simply connect their EV – no extra hardware required, just the vehicle manufacturer’s user credentials – to our platform. From there, they set two preferences: the minimum charge level they want and the latest time the car needs to be ready. Our system takes care of the rest.
Behind the scenes, our platform connects to availability of local production and real-time electricity prices – like day-ahead spot market prices from EPEX. It then schedules charging sessions for times when energy is green, abundant, and cheap. That might be midday, when solar power floods the grid, or overnight, when demand dips. It’s fully automated, optimized, and controllable via smartphone.
This creates a win-win: for EV drivers, it means lower charging costs without sacrificing convenience. For the grid, it means less peak load pressure – EVs charge when it’s best for the system, not when everyone else is plugging their cars in.
And the best part? It’s already working in the real world. Utilities like Naturstrom in Germany are using our smart charging solution to offer dynamic EV tariffs based on EPEX prices. We’re also collaborating with E.ON/Bayernwerk to implement community-based energy forecasting – so EVs charge not just when prices are low, but when local solar or wind is at its peak.
Our platform is compatible with over 900 EV models from 30+ manufacturers, so large-scale adoption is simple. And because everything is integrated with our white-label customer portal, utilities can provide users with full visibility into charging costs, times, and savings – making clean mobility both smarter and more user-friendly.
In what ways does energy sharing through your platform help balance supply and demand in local networks?
Energy sharing isn’t just about sustainability – it’s about solving one of the most pressing technical challenges in today’s grid: balancing decentralized supply and demand at the local level.
With exnaton, prosumers – households generating their own renewable electricity – can share surplus energy directly with neighbors. Our platform dynamically matches production and consumption within communities, optimizing energy flows in real time and reducing dependency on the central grid. It transforms neighborhoods into active energy ecosystems.
This becomes especially powerful when viewed through the lens of the Duck Curve. As solar generation peaks around midday, wholesale electricity prices can plummet – sometimes even turning negative. But during evening peaks, when solar output drops and demand rises, the grid comes under intense strain.
By enabling local energy sharing, exnaton allows communities to consume clean solar energy when it’s produced and store or shift usage to avoid peak-time grid stress. For example, EVs can charge midday from community solar, and homes can draw from shared or individual batteries during expensive evening hours.
We also provide community-level forecasting that enables smarter decision-making – so the right flexibility resources are deployed at the right time. The result: flatter demand curves, higher self-consumption rates, lower costs, and stronger, more resilient local grids.
In essence, energy sharing helps communities take control of their energy – economically and structurally – while directly supporting a more stable, efficient grid.
Why are dynamic tariffs and smart charging essential for achieving Europe’s energy transition goals?
Because renewable energy isn’t controllable – it’s variable. And if we’re going to base our future grid on solar and wind, we need to make demand just as flexible.
Dynamic tariffs and smart charging do exactly that. They send clear price signals to end users and automate consumption at the right times – when energy is clean, cheap, and available.
The Duck Curve shows us the challenge: solar drives prices down at midday, but demand still peaks in the evening. So, we need people – and devices – to shift consumption into the low-cost windows.
With exnaton, this isn’t theoretical. We help utilities implement real-time tariffs, integrate them with smart devices like EVs or home batteries, and empower users to make smarter, greener decisions without needing to think about it every day.
What makes agile startups like exnaton better partners for utilities than in-house innovation teams?
We completely understand why many energy providers want to build their own digital solutions. The desire for full control, tailored functionality, and internal competency development is very real – especially in such a critical, regulated industry. But the hard truth is that most utilities aren’t structured to build and maintain software the way tech companies are.
Energy providers excel at energy retail, infrastructure, and reliability – not at fast-moving, user-centric software development. Agile product cycles, modular design, and scalable architectures just aren’t native to how most utilities operate. And the energy market today is incredibly complex. You need platforms that can handle dynamic pricing, EV integration, energy sharing, regulatory shifts – while also being intuitive for end users. That’s a huge technical lift.
In our experience, in-house projects often get bogged down in long timelines, integration issues, and maintenance challenges. Even when the first version is delivered, keeping it compliant, secure, and evolving with user expectations becomes a massive ongoing investment.
This is where startups like exnaton come in. We’ve built a platform specifically for these challenges – with flexible APIs, real-time data processing, and compatibility with ERP systems. . Instead of starting from scratch, utilities can launch digital products like dynamic tariffs or smart charging in weeks, not years.
We bring deep expertise, from regulatory nuances to energy data processing, and handle everything from hosting to updates to compliance. That reduces both risk and internal workload. Our clients shift from heavy CAPEX investments to predictable OPEX models, scale at their own pace, and stay competitive without the tech debt.
More importantly, we future-proof their digital offering. As new trends emerge – like bidirectional charging or flexibility markets – our platform evolves with them. That’s something very few in-house teams can sustain long-term.
The strategic path forward is clear: utilities should focus on their core strengths – grid management, customer service, energy delivery – and partner with technology providers like us to deliver the digital layer that today’s energy customers expect.
How do you ensure seamless integration of your AI-driven platform with legacy billing and IT systems?
Integration is absolutely critical when working with utilities – and it’s something we take very seriously at exnaton. That’s why we’ve designed our platform from day one to be cloud-native, modular, and fully interoperable with existing IT infrastructures.
Our software is a white-label SaaS solution hosted securely on AWS in Frankfurt, Germany, and we operate exclusively in the energy sector. That focus allows us to deeply understand the customized systems that energy providers rely on. We’re a certified SAP Business Partner and have extensive experience integrating with both SAP IS-U and modern tools like SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP). For powercloud, for example, we are offering a full-fledged integration via a third-party integration layer from one of our partners.
Depending on what our customers need, we can offer everything from lightweight file-based data exchange (via SFTP or AWS S3) to robust, bidirectional REST API integrations. We’ve also successfully worked alongside top SAP integration partners, so we know how to adapt to diverse technical landscapes.
In real terms, this means utilities don’t need to rip and replace their core systems. exnaton plugs in as a flexible add-on – enhancing existing ERP or CRM platforms and enabling new products like dynamic tariffs or energy communities without disrupting the backbone infrastructure.
Because we deliver multiple releases per week, we’re able to respond quickly to evolving regulatory, market, or customer requirements. That speed, combined with our proven integration approach, means utilities can move fast – without taking on the technical risk.
Simply put, we meet you where you are – technologically and operationally – and ensure our solution fits your environment, not the other way around.
What have been the biggest challenges and lessons learned from rolling out your solution in four different European markets?
Each market we’ve entered has brought its own set of challenges – and its own lessons.
One key takeaway is that dynamic tariffs are still far from mainstream, even though many European countries have now introduced the legal framework or are preparing to. Unfortunately there is a major implementation gap between policy ambition and real-world execution.
A big reason for this is infrastructure. Limited smart meter coverage – especially in Germany – and legacy billing systems still make it difficult for many utilities to offer dynamic, real-time products at scale. In contrast, the Nordic countries, particularly Norway, are much further ahead. There, dynamic pricing is the norm thanks to nearly universal smart meter rollouts, high EV and heat pump penetration, relatively low price volatility, and strong public sector support.
We’ve also learned that integration unlocks the real value of dynamic tariffs. Simply exposing spot market prices isn’t enough. The most successful implementations – like those by Tibber, aWATTar, and 1KOMMA5° – pair dynamic tariffs with smart home devices, user-friendly apps, and automation. That’s exactly what exnaton supports traditional utilities with: integrating dynamic prices into EV charging, battery optimization, and household energy management, making participation seamless and intuitive for the end user.
Beyond technology, we’ve faced the more classic hurdles in the utility space: long sales cycles, integration complexity, and regulatory uncertainty. But we’ve learned how to address these through strong partnerships, flexible APIs, and a modular platform that adapts to local needs – whether we’re working with a municipal utility in Austria or a nationwide energy provider in Germany.
Finally, we’ve seen that consumer readiness varies widely. What resonates in one country might fall flat in another. That’s why we invest in user research and local onboarding processes – because energy innovation only works when it’s understandable and valuable at the individual level.
The bottom line? Success in this space requires deep local context, agile technology, and a platform flexible enough to meet users where they are. And that’s exactly what we’re building with exnaton.
How do end-customers experience and benefit from your dynamic tariff offerings – both financially and environmentally?
End customers benefit from exnaton’s platform in a way that’s both tangible and empowering. At its core, our software helps people become active participants in the energy system – not just passive consumers – while saving money and reducing their environmental impact.
Take the SAP Energy Community in Walldorf as a real-world example. It’s part of SAP’s flagship sustainability initiative and runs on exnaton’s software. Individuals and buildings across the campus can now produce, store, and trade renewable energy with each other in real time. What was once excess solar energy sent into the grid with minimal financial return is now actively traded within the community – maximizing self-consumption and improving economic outcomes for everyone involved.
This model isn’t just for large enterprises. Whether it’s a household in an energy community or an EV owner on a dynamic tariff, our users can:
- Save money by shifting usage to times when electricity is cheaper – often when renewables are most abundant.
- Reduce their carbon footprint by consuming local, green energy instead of fossil-based grid power.
- Make smarter decisions with real-time data and personalized alerts, from automated EV charging to smart appliance scheduling.
- Feel more connected to the energy transition, knowing that their individual actions are part of a larger collective effort.
For utilities, this translates into stronger customer engagement, lower churn, and a clear pathway to offer new, value-added energy services. For customers, it means being in control – financially and environmentally.
Looking ahead, which new features or markets are you most excited to tackle next with exnaton’s technology?
The next 12 to 18 months are going to be a very exciting chapter for us at exnaton. We’re focused on scaling across three key dimensions: product development, market expansion, and organizational growth – all aligned with our vision to become Europe’s leading platform for digital, flexible, and customer-centric energy products.
On the product side, we’re investing heavily in expanding our self-service tools – giving utilities more control over how they configure and manage dynamic tariffs and energy communities. We’re also enhancing our predictive analytics to better support energy procurement and trading teams, and developing new customer-facing features like smart alerts, gamification, and personalized insights that make energy engagement simple and rewarding.
We’re also building additional plug-and-play integrations with leading home energy management systems (HEMS) to improve interoperability, and incorporating more AI into our internal processes to accelerate iteration and scalability.
Geographically, we’re excited to deepen our presence in our current markets by expanding within existing utility groups and forming new partnerships. At the same time we are looking into the potential of further European and overseas markets.
Organizationally, we’re scaling the team with key hires in sales, customer success, and market development, and we’re establishing a local presence in priority regions. We’re also building strategic partnerships with consultancies, industry associations, and integration specialists to strengthen our ecosystem and accelerate adoption.
Longer term, we’re already exploring future expansion beyond Europe – especially into the US and Asia, where the pace of the energy transition is picking up and the demand for flexible, digital energy solutions like ours is growing fast.
It’s a big vision, but one we’re executing step by step – with a clear focus on impact, scalability, and value for both utilities and end customers.
