Our Story
Built by people who have seen the electricity bill after a bad charging night
Decade Energy started from a specific observation: logistics fleets electrifying their depots were getting the hardware right but not the schedule. The AI optimizer we built solves exactly that.
Origin
Why we started Decade Energy
Pepijn Verstraten spent years building scheduling systems for energy-intensive industrial operations. When a logistics client described watching their depot electricity costs double after adding their first 12 electric vans, the root cause was obvious: every driver plugged in at the same time, at the most expensive hour of the day.
Demand charges in the Netherlands and across much of Europe are calculated on the highest 15-minute power draw in a billing period. Twelve vans plugging in simultaneously at 18:00 can trigger a charge that stays on the bill for the entire month. The fix is not more hardware, it is better scheduling.
Decade Energy started with a simple premise: AI could read tariff schedules and fleet departure data and spread that charging load intelligently across the overnight window. Every van still leaves fully charged. The grid spike disappears. The electricity bill reflects the off-peak rates the tariff contract is built for.
The Amsterdam team has been running early-access pilots with Dutch logistics operators since late 2025. The results in reduced demand charges and departure readiness have validated the core hypothesis. We are now expanding the integration layer to cover more telematics platforms and charger hardware brands across the European market.
Team
The people behind the scheduler
A small, focused team with deep backgrounds in energy systems, distributed computing, and fleet operations.
Pepijn Verstraten
CEO & Co-Founder
Background in energy grid optimization and logistics software. Spent years working on real-time scheduling systems for energy-intensive industrial operations before co-founding Decade Energy after seeing how unmanaged depot charging was doubling electricity costs for early EV fleet adopters.
Lena Bakker
CTO & Co-Founder
Built distributed systems for industrial process control, with deep background in constraint-based optimization and real-time data pipelines. Leads all technical architecture at Decade Energy, from the optimizer core to the OCPP integration layer and the API that connects to third-party telematics platforms.
Marco Esposito
Head of Product
Former fleet operations manager who led electrification projects at a mid-size logistics company before joining Decade Energy. Translates the day-to-day reality of depot management into product decisions, making sure the scheduler output reflects how dispatch teams actually operate, not just what the data says in theory.