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S2E11

How AI Turns Heat Pumps into Intelligent Energy Assets | Emanuel Jöbstl, Optima

with Emanuel Jöbstl· Optima· 56m

TL;DR

Energy management systems (EMS) that combine dynamic tariffs, heat pumps, batteries, and rooftop solar can reduce residential energy costs by up to 40%. The technical foundation relies primarily on classical mathematical optimization and differential equations, while AI functions best as an interface layer that translates system telemetry into user summaries. Distribution through installation contractors, rather than utility programs, offers the clearest commercial route to scaling residential behind-the-meter assets.

Synopsis
Emanuel Jöbstl, CEO of Austrian energy management startup Optima, discusses the orchestration of behind-the-meter assets including heat pumps, residential batteries, and EV chargers. Backed by strategic partner and heat pump retrofit installer Heizma, Optima manufactures a hardware controller paired with local optimization software that operates autonomously offline. Jöbstl details how classical mathematics outperforms large language models for physical dispatch, explains the integration of dynamic tariffs and local energy communities (Erneuerbare-Energie-Gemeinschaften), and contrasts installer-led distribution with utility-driven aggregation models across the DACH region.

Key metrics

by the numbers · 5
  • up to 40%
    Annual energy cost savings achieved by pairing an EMS with a dynamic tariff and fully electrified household assets
  • 50 to 70
    Estimated number of EMS solutions competing in the Austrian and German markets
  • half a workday
    Engineering time required by Optima to integrate and test a new inverter or battery model to production readiness
  • 40 and 90
    Data points tracked per customer household to model thermal loss, capacity, and usage
  • 1,000 to 2,000
    Minimum number of aggregated households required to effectively bid supply or demand response into Austrian grid flexibility markets

Topics

6 tags
heat pumpsenergy management systemsdemand flexibilityenergy communitiesdynamic tariffshardware
Stats
Duration
55m
Words
11.6k
Questions
111
Speakers
3

Daniel Schaub · Emanuel Jöbstl · Rahul Mishra

Timeline

10 chapters

  1. Mathematical optimization vs. LLMs

    Jöbstl explains why physical asset modeling relies on differential equations rather than generative AI.

  2. The genesis of Optima and the Heizma partnership

    How a fast-track technical due diligence led to acquiring an established Graz-based EMS provider alongside installer Heizma.

  3. System architecture and residential energy savings

    Optima's hardware-plus-software setup coordinates heat pumps, storage, and PV with dynamic wholesale pricing and local energy communities.

  4. Hardware supply chain and Shenzhen manufacturing

    Why Optima pairs Shenzhen PCB production with European firmware, assembly, and testing.

  5. Distribution models: Installers versus utilities

    Jöbstl contrasts Optima's installer-led channel strategy with utility-centric flexibility platforms like Podero.

  6. The Soly customer migration

    How the bankruptcy of Soly and the shutdown of GridX created an opportunity to onboard residential customers.

  7. Balancing end-user economics with grid stability

    Leveraging thermal mass and battery headroom to fulfill APG flexibility requests without disrupting domestic comfort.

  8. Cybersecurity on decentralized smart grids

    Risks stemming from default field credentials, insecure installation practices, and emerging software supply chain vectors.

  9. Regulatory barriers across DACH energy markets

    Differences in grid feed-in compensation, administrative processes, and Germany's lagging smart meter rollout.

  10. Technical stack and bootstrapping profitability

    Why Optima selected C# for hardware execution and achieved operating profitability without venture capital.

Key insights

4 takeaways
  • 01

    Core asset optimization relies on mathematics, not generative AI

    While LLMs and agents excel at developer productivity and synthesizing data for consumer dashboards, physical asset dispatch requires deterministic mathematical modeling. Accurately modeling a home's thermal capacity, buffer storage, and building heat loss relies on systems of differential equations to guarantee reliable real-time operation.

  • 02

    Installer distribution outperforms utility partnerships for residential EMS

    Homeowners rely almost entirely on heating and electrical contractors rather than utilities when selecting hardware. Positioning an EMS within an installer's standard packaged quote captures deployment at the moment of installation, yielding superior unit economics compared to utility-led rollouts.

  • 03

    Energy communities unlock new optimization loops for residential batteries

    Local energy sharing frameworks allow behind-the-meter batteries to discharge to neighbouring households within the community overnight. This multi-party dispatch increases overall battery utilization and delivers lower aggregate tariffs to participants than basic self-consumption schemes.

  • 04

    Thermal inertia provides zero-disruption grid flexibility

    Aggregating 1,000 to 2,000 homes provides sufficient reserve capacity to respond to Austrian Power Grid (APG) balance calls without degrading occupant comfort. Water buffer tanks and building envelope thermal mass provide wide operating margins that decouple electricity draw from instantaneous heating needs.

Pull quotes

6 quotes
  • The reason is that even in, you know, 2026, if you have optimization problems, you have modeling problems, and so on, well, I mean, throwing an LLM on everything is not, you know, going to get you anywhere. Sometimes, you just need mathematics.
    Emanuel Jöbstl
  • And Optima is exactly that piece that you can put in the middle, and everything is taken care of, right?
    Emanuel Jöbstl
  • Because the reason is, so it's it's a very big insight here, first of all, the end customer rarely makes the decision about which hardware gets in.
    Emanuel Jöbstl
  • Why is that the case? Because I believe energy management is a distribution game, right? And the best way to distribute is to make a great product for the homeowner.
    Emanuel Jöbstl
  • What would be my big dream would actually creating an energy tariff that allows us explicitly to trade with the users flexibility, but then again, use the earnings on that side that we do by trading the flexibility to make energy very cheap for the user.
    Emanuel Jöbstl
  • Yeah, I think the biggest bottleneck in all countries right now is legislation.
    Emanuel Jöbstl
Transcript363 cuesClick a timestamp to jump
  1. Daniel Schaub: Welcome to a new episode here in The Energy Bridge. Uh today we have the pleasure to have Emanuel Jöbstl.
  2. Emanuel Jöbstl: Jöbstl. Yeah.
  3. Daniel Schaub: Good?
  4. Emanuel Jöbstl: Well done. Well done.
  5. Daniel Schaub: Yeah. Great. Um and today we're going to dive into again the hot topic of the decade or maybe the century, AI and energy, but uh with an interesting approach of creating a operative system for energy, which we're going to explore. Um so, as a context for the episode, Europe is living an unprecedented uh vo- volatility. I mean, we have negative prices uh when the sun is in in the midday, and then we have a peak when the sun is set. And at the same time, we are installing a lot of EVs and heat pumps, which is uh changing the load profiles. And in this uh scenario, we have to kind of orchestrate millions of devices with different uh ages and manufacturers, so it's a complicated. And also, you are involved with energy community, so it's kind of seeing the bigger picture of controlling not only individuals, but also um communities. So, the question for this episode, it's uh for the last decade, we've be trained massive centralized AI models in giant data centers to write text and generate images. But to survive the energy transition, do we actually need millions of tiny, decentralized AI agents living in our basements, autonomously trading energy, controlling our heat pumps, and managing our local energy communities? Do we need it? So, thank you for coming today, Emanuel. And super looking forward for learning from you.
  6. Emanuel Jöbstl: Yeah, guys, thank you so much for having me. Excited to be here. It's a wide range of topics. I'm sure it's going to be quite exciting to talk about it.
  7. Rahul Mishra: Yeah, amazing. Tell us about your hat first.
  8. Emanuel Jöbstl: About my hat. Well, that's a wild one. Um you know, at Optima, we actually, we do quite a lot of math. Um so the reason is that even in, you know, 2026, if you have optimization problems, you have modeling problems, and so on, well, I mean, throwing an LLM on everything is not, you know, going to get you anywhere. Sometimes, you just need mathematics. You might need differential equations, um equation systems to optimize what your system is doing, and so on, right? And I mean, big part of building these systems is also to verify them. And a good way is visualization. So, um couple of months ago, I actually sent a picture of my work to a friend, like basically just a photo I took with my phone from the computer screen. And it had, um, all kinds of equations there, but also some graphs. And she just replied, "Hey, Emmy, math math is hot," right? And I found that so cool. I wanted to make a bit of company merch out of it, so I have a few caps that say math is hot um lying around because you know, I also think that, um, you know, it's it's it's good to um also brand mathematics as something very cool and useful right there. And um actually this cap is getting quite some good resonance also in the public when doing shopping, and so on, so.
  9. Rahul Mishra: And what did you study?
  10. Emanuel Jöbstl: What did I study? Um I did uh study computer science, actually. Um so I did that in Germany back in the day. So, after doing the um you know, high school in Austria, HTL in Villach, I decided to move to Germany to study computer science there at uh KIT.
  11. Rahul Mishra: Mhm.
  12. Emanuel Jöbstl: And then I also spent some time at Carnegie Mellon in the US to do some um research, specifically. And you know, when it comes to machine learning, when I When I started out with everything, I was not the biggest fan of machine learning.
  13. Daniel Schaub: When which year? Because we know that we have been from the beginning.
  14. Emanuel Jöbstl: Yeah. Yeah. Sure. So, um I mean, I got into machine learning like in the mid-2010s, right? But before that, I was really an algorithm guy. Like, I I always felt machine learning like back in the day, it wasn't even neural networks. You know, neural networks were not a thing. Um it was, you know, a lot of statistical methods, but it kind of felt a bit like, you know, a mix between statistics and mathematics, right? And I was more focused on algorithms, on speed, on algorithm optimization, databases, stuff like that. But then by the mid-2000s, I uh 2010s, sorry, um I co-founded a start-up in London
  15. Rahul Mishra: Mhm.
  16. Emanuel Jöbstl: stitching VR pictures on a phone. And we needed a bunch of computer vision there to make it work. And this is actually what got me into AI in the first place. So, back in the day, I was looking at all this computer vision, um you know, models. And then I started diving really into neural networks. And
  17. Daniel Schaub: Mhm.
  18. Emanuel Jöbstl: that led me to actually doing um a master's thesis at Carnegie Mellon in the US around natural language processing.
  19. Rahul Mishra: Mhm.
  20. Emanuel Jöbstl: Back in the day, we didn't use neural networks, but right as I was there, Google dropped this, you know, super impactful paper called "Attention Is All You Need" that, for the first time in, you know, science, academia described the attention mechanism that all the LLMs use today, so the basic architecture. And that was a super interesting time to be in the field.
  21. Rahul Mishra: So, you have done things in multiple places and it So, you this is your Optima is your second startup, right?
  22. Emanuel Jöbstl: Well, I mean, if you count the ones that failed, Optima is number eight.
  23. Rahul Mishra: Oh, I mean, every failure counts, right?
  24. Emanuel Jöbstl: Every failed one, yeah. Yeah, yeah, i- if you count the one that failed, then, um, it's startup number eight, actually. So,
  25. Rahul Mishra: Wow.
  26. Emanuel Jöbstl: did a bunch of stuff. Um you know, in the early days, you know, in my late early 20s, um like in my early 20s, it was way more, um, you know, like project. So, we had ideas for really really cool, um, you know, like products that we started to build.
  27. Rahul Mishra: Mhm.
  28. Emanuel Jöbstl: So, actually, you know, before I was 20, I was involved in a project that was um about ride-hailing similar to what you would have now with um Uber or BlaBlaCar.
  29. Rahul Mishra: Mhm.
  30. Emanuel Jöbstl: But back in the day, there was no apps. You didn't have a phone that could run apps. Like the first and second iPhone were just a thing in the US. Europe didn't have smartphones. So, we built it using SMS. And of course, like the user experience there is terrible because back in the day, you didn't have AI to pass your messages. You would have to come up with some parser logic. And, you know, it was ideas like this, right? Um but I think the first company that made it somewhere, it's a very curious one. Um we did it in collaboration with a huge corporate. And it's the corporate that is actually doing, um how is it called? Captain Morgan and uh Johnnie Walker, you know, this big
  31. Rahul Mishra: It's alcohol.
  32. Emanuel Jöbstl: No, no, the alcohol brand.
  33. Rahul Mishra: Yeah.
  34. Emanuel Jöbstl: You know, the drinks company.
  35. Rahul Mishra: The drinks.
  36. Emanuel Jöbstl: So, th- this this is a British company doing about 10 billion a year with alcoholic beverages, right? And um back in the day, the company would finance projects and startups related to responsible drinking with quite some money.
  37. Rahul Mishra: Mhm.
  38. Emanuel Jöbstl: And we decided to build an app that would recognize how drunk you are by looking at your step pattern using the phone sensors and then using machine learning. And we would have a UI like like an app that would basically show you a history of your past night: where did you go, like GPS position, how drunk were you,
  39. Rahul Mishra: Mhm.
  40. Emanuel Jöbstl: um photos, and everything in a timeline.
  41. Rahul Mishra: Were you inspired by Hangover or
  42. Emanuel Jöbstl: Yeah, maybe. Yeah. But you know, I think the concept was quite cool. And we also included notifications to tell you, "Hey, maybe drink a water now, or maybe get a cab home," and so on, right? But I mean, needless to say that doesn't really have a business model, right? So, I mean, we got some money for building that, but then it fell apart, right?
  43. Rahul Mishra: Mhm.
  44. Emanuel Jöbstl: And you know, after that came the VR company. Then I bootstrapped a company in Germany doing websites for journalists in a fully automated way. And there we also really used a lot of machine learning for doing the web scraping that we needed for keeping the websites up to date, the journalists prof- profiles up to date.
  45. Rahul Mishra: Mhm.
  46. Emanuel Jöbstl: Um and the company is still operating, right? I just stepped out as CEO about two years ago.
  47. Rahul Mishra: What What was it called?
  48. Emanuel Jöbstl: Um it was called Authory.
  49. Rahul Mishra: Okay.
  50. Emanuel Jöbstl: So, um I I built it together with a friend from Hamburg. He was from the media media tech ecosystem. And he had this idea of, um, basically creating a portfolio builder for journalists, but adding a web scraper to it to keep the portfolios up to date. So, whenever the journalist would write something online, let's say The New York Times, Washington Post, we would basically pull in the article, put it on the website, right? And as said, we did a lot of web scraping, machine learning there. Um and the company is fully bootstrapped, so I consider it quite a success,
  51. Rahul Mishra: Mhm.
  52. Emanuel Jöbstl: right? Um and at the same time, I was also really involved in Sigma Squared, scaling up the team, you know, to international from about 15 to more than 50 people.
  53. Rahul Mishra: What What does it does?
  54. Emanuel Jöbstl: Sigma Squared? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a community for founders below 26.
  55. Rahul Mishra: Mhm.
  56. Emanuel Jöbstl: Um so we basically bring together the most ambitious, young, impact-driven founders across the globe. The community's been doing amazing. Um you know, we have these flagship events now once a year with about 350-400 participants. Um the last two years, we were hosted in Valencia by the city. And we bring all these young people together from five continents: from Africa, from South America, North America, Europe, and Asia, right? Some of them on full sponsorship. And it's just always a blast to be around uh young and inspiring people, right? Well, and after that, I joined Optima. So,
  57. Rahul Mishra: Yeah.
  58. Emanuel Jöbstl: yeah.
  59. Daniel Schaub: So yeah, we have We knew when we were researching about you that you have had quite a long journey.
  60. Emanuel Jöbstl: Yeah.
  61. Daniel Schaub: And you started to code very young. We found some prize when you were 14, 15.
  62. Emanuel Jöbstl: Yeah.
  63. Daniel Schaub: So, so when you started with with coding and why, like, what was the motivation?
  64. Emanuel Jöbstl: Yeah. Hey, that's a very great question.
  65. Rahul Mishra: You're not even Indian.
  66. Daniel Schaub: Not not even Indian.
  67. Rahul Mishra: Not even Indian.
  68. Emanuel Jöbstl: Well, yeah. So, it's a bit of a curious story because my mom had a computer when I was like a kid, like really young, like six, seven, eight years, right? And um the reason she had it was doing PhD, writing her doctorate thesis, right? And I really like to play around with the computer. I figured out you can do all kinds of funny stuff even in like the regular office tools like PowerPoint. You can animate stuff, and so on. And you know, with this this, you know, even in this in these early days, with like 13 or so, I really wanted to learn programming. But, you know, like, being in middle school, countryside, in Carinthia, you know, my my teacher, my IT teacher was like, "Yeah, I can teach you Microsoft Office, but I'm not the right person to teach you programming." Also back in the day, like we are we are talking like really early 2000s, um internet was not a thing in every household in Austria, right? So, um I basically asked my parents to be sent to a school like the HTL in Villach that I mentioned where I would learn programming from the age of 14, and this is what I did. I had um great teachers there. They were very um experienced in the field. They did different things um in the in the field, like the even taught at university, taught at university before. And um yeah. Well, I mean, started to learn C when I was 14. I found programming back in the day super exciting. And the reason it was so exciting to me was basically that you can create almost anything as long as you can, you know, think it through. So, you know, with computer programs, technically, your memory is infinite. Your compute is just a matter of time.
  69. Rahul Mishra: Mhm.
  70. Emanuel Jöbstl: If you have it in your head, you can build it, right? And um yeah, I mean, that was for me like a big motivation to dig into coding from the start. And I loved it. I would also consider, you know, for my teens, specifically, coding was my biggest hobby, right? I did write a lot of things. And um it accumulated also in some quite interesting projects. So, you mentioned it before like winning a prize. I think I was like 16 or 17 or so. Um I actually managed to win an art prize with a computer program that I wrote. And um there's actually very personal story behind it because I had a classmate who was um quite negative about what I would do. And he would always say, "Well, computer programming can never be beautiful. It can never be art." And I had this idea of actually writing a program that would listen to the network traffic of your computer and create music out of it. So, it would basically look at which servers you talk to,
  71. Rahul Mishra: Mhm.
  72. Emanuel Jöbstl: and assign and, you know, like a tone, a note to every server, right? And as you would browse the internet, you would you would hear what the website is doing kind of, you know? You would have like a very lean website with no ads. It would be like a single note being played, right? And then you would have a website that pulls in a lot of content like the most news websites,
  73. Rahul Mishra: Mhm.
  74. Emanuel Jöbstl: and it would be like somebody mashing the keyboard, right? And then we also, um, you know, came together at school. We built a little network with a bunch of computers. And we had people deliberately
  75. Rahul Mishra: Mhm.
  76. Emanuel Jöbstl: send packages to my machine to play a song, right? And we sent that actually to the the Prix Ars Electronica, you know, the um the art prize of the Ars Electronica Center in Linz. And I actually won second place there in the category below 19, right, back in the day. So, turns out computer programs can be art after all.
  77. Rahul Mishra: Yeah, and
  78. Daniel Schaub: Yeah. Yeah, this were a funny fact that I had for the end because it was mixed with drum and bass, I think.
  79. Emanuel Jöbstl: Drum and bass? No, no, no.
  80. Rahul Mishra: No, no.
  81. Daniel Schaub: Or not any
  82. Emanuel Jöbstl: It It was piano sounds back in the day.
  83. Daniel Schaub: Piano.
  84. Emanuel Jöbstl: But synthesized, right? I wrote the synthesizer even. So, yeah.
  85. Daniel Schaub: Useful. Yeah.
  86. Emanuel Jöbstl: Thank you.
  87. Rahul Mishra: So, from all of this, uh getting to the energy field, Yeah. the super-regulated field, I mean, it's getting deregulated, but
  88. Emanuel Jöbstl: Yeah.
  89. Rahul Mishra: we're getting highly uh getting to the the the whole physical world of energy. Uh what What was the motivation and what How was the transition?
  90. Emanuel Jöbstl: Yeah, um to be super honest how it happened, it was so random. Like, it's so random, but it's a great story. Um
  91. Daniel Schaub: The best thing. Best thing are random.
  92. Emanuel Jöbstl: You know the company Heizma, right?
  93. Rahul Mishra: Yeah.
  94. Emanuel Jöbstl: Like, they are right now the biggest heat pump installer in Austria when it comes to existing buildings like in retrofit. Like, they are big, right? And they've grown very very very fast. Like, the company just celebrated two-year anniversary
  95. Rahul Mishra: Mhm.
  96. Emanuel Jöbstl: last Friday. Um so, wow, yeah, right? Two years in the market, and already the biggest heat pump installer in Austria. And one of the founders there, Mischa, Michael Kovatscheff, he's actually really good friend. So, we worked together in the board of Sigma Squared back in the day in the non-profit. And suddenly he was gone. Like he was building his company, everything was going crazy, I didn't see him for a year. And then I dropped by in Vienna. I was on the way to Greece for some climbing trip, but I dropped by at his. We had dinner, and he was like, "Emmy, I want to get you to Vienna and work with you. I don't know how, but I want I want to get you here." I was living in Berlin back back in the time. And my answer was like something like, "Yeah, Mischa, that's like unrealistic. I'm right now in Berlin. Like, why would I move to Vienna suddenly?" He's like, "Uh, it's going to happen, but I don't know don't know how," right?
  97. Rahul Mishra: Mhm.
  98. Emanuel Jöbstl: And then like a week later, I'm, um, you know, in a climbing gym.
  99. Rahul Mishra: Mhm.
  100. Emanuel Jöbstl: It's It's already after the session, just on sports. I have a beer in my hand, and then my phone rings and Mischa is on, and he's like, "Emmy, we need your help. We want to acquire a company building energy management systems. But you know, we need somebody to do the due diligence, the technical due diligence on the acquisition, and we need it to happen fast." I was like, "How fast?" He's like, "Tomorrow morning, 10:00 a.m."
  101. Daniel Schaub: With the beer in your hand.
  102. Emanuel Jöbstl: Well, I'm like, "Wait a second." So, I call my dad. I'm like, "Dad, hey, I'm so sorry, I know you're busy, but I would need your car tomorrow. Would you manage to go to work with with mom or whatever?" And he was like, "Yeah, sure, you can borrow my car, seems important," right? So, I borrowed the car of my dad on super short notice. I went to the office of this company. I sat down with the engineers for like 5 hours and went through the entire codebase.
  103. Rahul Mishra: Mhm.
  104. Emanuel Jöbstl: And afterwards, I called Mischa, I was like, "Look, Mischa, this company, I mean, it's not amazing, right? But it's also something we can work with. They have a lot of data and skill in-house, right? Um so, would be an okay acquisition if you move into that field, right?" And Mischa tells me, "Yeah, great. Then we're going to buy the company, but only if you run it." And you know, I I just told Mischa, "Look, Mischa, I've been building companies all my life, I'm a founder, not a hired CEO. Make me a good deal, and we do it." And we agreed. And uh that's the that's the way Optima was born. So, we acquired another company together, a company from Graz
  105. Daniel Schaub: Wow.
  106. Emanuel Jöbstl: that was in the field for about 10 years. We took in learnings, we took in um employees, and also a lot of data in the field, and specifically a lot of knowledge on the projects that the company did. So, we had like suddenly like a couple of 100, I think more than 800 different projects on our plate that were all in the energy sector, all energy management in industry, in commercial facilities, in private households, and the knowledge what works and what doesn't. And from that knowledge, we started building Optima. So, we took about six 6 to 8 months to completely rebuild the product, and then launched it to the market as a very lightweight energy management system
  107. Rahul Mishra: Mhm.
  108. Emanuel Jöbstl: meant for single-family homes at a very competitive price point.
  109. Daniel Schaub: Which year was it?
  110. Emanuel Jöbstl: Um so the acquisition happened in December 2024. This is when the phone call happened.
  111. Rahul Mishra: Mhm.
  112. Emanuel Jöbstl: And then I formally stepped in as CEO in uh March 2025, so it's been about a year.
  113. Rahul Mishra: Amazing. Wow. So, let's get into this uh last while What Has it been wild, last one year?
  114. Emanuel Jöbstl: Yeah, I I I have to admit it was very wild. You know, the the thing is I'm a software guy, right? I did software like software development for close to 20 years, and 15 of those like commercially, professionally as a founder or contractor.
  115. Rahul Mishra: Mhm.
  116. Emanuel Jöbstl: Um and you know, the software ecosystem, you can build things, you can easily verify things, you can, um, you know, redeploy if things go wrong. If you have a bug in a website, you can just, you know, roll it out to the server, all is good. But now with Optima, we are suddenly doing hardware, right?
  117. Rahul Mishra: Mhm.
  118. Emanuel Jöbstl: And we are doing hardware at a price point that's suitable for consumers. We work with installers every day. We have people in the field using our product, putting it into the households, connecting it. We have to verify these installations, and then every house is so different. Like this is something that I generally didn't expect,
  119. Rahul Mishra: Mhm.
  120. Emanuel Jöbstl: that every house electricity, but also heating system is incredibly unique. And then finding good optimization schemes for all these households that work generally and create savings for the homeowner, that was a very very hard task. But I mean, luckily, we had a lot of data, and also with Heizma, an incredibly strong partner to get to our goals.
  121. Rahul Mishra: So, you acquired the uh this company?
  122. Emanuel Jöbstl: Yes.
  123. Rahul Mishra: Uh, you you built a product on top of that, and you released it into the market. So, what exactly is that uh that Optima doing?
  124. Emanuel Jöbstl: Yeah.
  125. Rahul Mishra: It's You you explained it as a energy operating system for energy and uh EMS,
  126. Emanuel Jöbstl: Yes.
  127. Rahul Mishra: but uh but just to hear from you, how would you explain Optima, what exactly are the products, and how is it going to change uh something for average household?
  128. Emanuel Jöbstl: Yeah, absolutely. So, what Optima does is it's basically a hardware and software product. So, a little hardware controller plus the entire software including an app
  129. Rahul Mishra: Mhm.
  130. Emanuel Jöbstl: um that you install in your home. And then it measures and manages all your big producers and consumers, right?
  131. Rahul Mishra: Mhm.
  132. Emanuel Jöbstl: And all that in accordance with the energy market. So basically, if you own like a battery, a PV, a heat pump, uh maybe even an electric vehicle,
  133. Rahul Mishra: Mhm.
  134. Emanuel Jöbstl: we can make sure that we control all these things in a way that maximizes your savings.
  135. Rahul Mishra: Mhm.
  136. Emanuel Jöbstl: And the potential here is quite big. For example, by adding a dynamic tariff and running an EMS, you can easily save up to 40% of the year's energy cost, given, you know, if your household is equipped the right way. And, um, you know, the interesting bit here is why we decided to build this solution, because right now, I would say there is between 50 and 70 different energy management solutions available in the market in in Austria and Germany, right? Um but the key thing here is that a lot of these solutions, they are pushed by individual, you know, um companies, and they are very focused on a certain bit of the equation, right? So, for example, in the in the field out there, you have energy manage- management solutions built into your inverter, but all they do is battery and inverter control. Then you have an energy management solution that comes with your heat pump, right?
  137. Rahul Mishra: Mhm.
  138. Emanuel Jöbstl: And it only manages the heat pump according to the price, but it ignores your battery and solar system, right? But what you want to have is you want to have a piece in the middle that coordinates everything including the energy market, you know dynamic prices, but also energy communities.
  139. Rahul Mishra: Mhm.
  140. Emanuel Jöbstl: And Optima is exactly that piece that you can put in the middle, and everything is taken care of, right? And we do it in a way that the customer doesn't need to worry. The installer puts it in, it's it's sold as a complete package by our partners, and then the end customer gets a nice app and doesn't have to worry. And you know why that is so important? Because I know customers out there in the field. If you look what your regular customer is doing, for example, I have a heat pump customer here in Vienna who is always ready to test with us, what he's doing is he opens the app of the heat pump manufacturer, and manually increases the temperature of the buffer during noon because he wants the heat pump to use his solar surplus to heat up the warm water. And he does that every day. And people do the same thing with electric vehicles. They race to the garage and, you know, unplug it when the sun goes down. And you know, why is that not that not automated? Why is that not completely hands-off, right? And this is what we are supplying with Optima.
  141. Daniel Schaub: How does it work physically? Do do you have a hardware in- installed next to the uh meter, or how does it work? Or or or or you have to connect all the devices to one place, or is
  142. Emanuel Jöbstl: Yeah.
  143. Daniel Schaub: wireless with Wi-Fi? How does it work?
  144. Emanuel Jöbstl: That's a very good question. So, it's a hardware module, right? We have two different ones. We have one that can do Wi-Fi only. It is very inexpensive, and the customer can put it into the network themselves. And we have one that's a bit more sophisticated um and has a bit more connectivity options. And the reason is that not every heating system, every heat pump can be controlled via Wi-Fi, right? You
  145. Rahul Mishra: Mhm.
  146. Emanuel Jöbstl: You might have heard the term "smart grid ready," which is essentially two switches that are electronically controlled, right? And for example, our larger hardware module can deal with those as well, so we have two hardware lines. Um but what is important is that we basically put it into the customer's house,
  147. Rahul Mishra: Mhm.
  148. Emanuel Jöbstl: right, to basically be able to control everything in very fast and offline. And that's important to make it work in a reliable way.
  149. Daniel Schaub: I mean, we are having this question with other companies here in Europe that are building hardwares. What is your vision for the future? Do you want to build it here like made in Europe or or you are building somewhere else, and then bring it here to sell it?
  150. Emanuel Jöbstl: That's a very good question. I mean, we are already doing the end assembly in Europe, and parts of the components are also from European companies. So, it's our own hardware that we developed. But specifically for the PCB manufacturing, we have a hardware partner in China right now. Um he's actually a friend who acquired the VR company that we built in London a couple of years ago. So, we've pretty good ties. I visited him a couple of times, he's a great guy. Um and he's helping with the hardware supply chain from that end. So, we basically we we um have them produce the PCBs for us, and then we ship them to Europe. We test it here, we assemble it here, and we build the software here. And I believe for a hardware company, this is generally not a bad option to have European um software with hardware that's manufactured abroad, because, I'm not going to lie, um the ecosystem in China, specifically Shenzhen, is incredible with hardware manufacturing when it comes to speed, experience, and unit price. But then again, we have incredible product and software engineers in Europe, and I believe this symbiosis is building really really really good products.
  151. Daniel Schaub: Yeah, we went to China recently in October last year. Now, we are recording this in April. They have the same feeling that the symbiosis with um Europe is collaboration with software and hardware from them, and like the engineers from here from Europe to design, but build there. So, it's a good uh good match.
  152. Emanuel Jöbstl: Yeah. I I think so too, yeah.
  153. Rahul Mishra: And you were talking about how uh initially Heizma as a uh the person Mischa
  154. Emanuel Jöbstl: Mischa, yeah.
  155. Rahul Mishra: from Heizma uh persuaded you to to come on board. So, what is your the relationship between Optima and Heizma now? It's a It's a separate entity, right?
  156. Emanuel Jöbstl: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, we are two separate companies. And Optima is also allowed to sell to other installers and everything, which I'm actually doing.
  157. Rahul Mishra: Mhm.
  158. Emanuel Jöbstl: There's a lot of interest there in um small commercial and then residential homes, specifically.
  159. Rahul Mishra: Mhm.
  160. Emanuel Jöbstl: Um so the relationship there is that Heizma is basically our biggest partner
  161. Rahul Mishra: Mhm.
  162. Emanuel Jöbstl: um and a partner that's also fully committed to our system.
  163. Rahul Mishra: Mhm.
  164. Emanuel Jöbstl: And also the Heizma founders are shareholders in Optima. This is a very powerful combination, so I believe that if you want to build an energy management system at the moment, um you will either need a lot of funding
  165. Rahul Mishra: Mhm.
  166. Emanuel Jöbstl: or you need a constellation like this. And the reason is that you need to collect the real-world experience and show that your product is actually working and worth it.
  167. Rahul Mishra: Mhm.
  168. Emanuel Jöbstl: Um and in that sense, finding your first customer is incredibly hard. And I'm just going to be very honest with you guys, like without that offer, I would have never done this, right? It would have been way too complicated to get a company off the ground. But together with Heizma, Optima was there for a jump start right from the beginning.
  169. Rahul Mishra: And And so, basically, uh what you're saying is that uh I don't know how many uh how many installation they're doing every month, but it's growing uh growing a lot,
  170. Emanuel Jöbstl: Mhm.
  171. Rahul Mishra: and they're the biggest one in Austria. So, every installation that's is done by Heizma is already having Optima as its default
  172. Emanuel Jöbstl: Yeah.
  173. Rahul Mishra: energy management system.
  174. Emanuel Jöbstl: Absolutely. Almost Almost every installation, like there's a few cases where it doesn't make sense to have an energy management system,
  175. Rahul Mishra: Mhm.
  176. Emanuel Jöbstl: but you know, mainly due to compatibility of existing devices, but almost every installation gets it. And I believe the what's really interesting here is that by doing that, we are not only, you know, giving the user a good add-on, a good product that helps them to use their, um, you know, their entire installation to the full extent,
  177. Rahul Mishra: Mhm.
  178. Emanuel Jöbstl: we are also opening the door to actually provide energy services. So, as you know in the Austrian energy market, dynamic tariffs and also energy communities are a really really big topic. And Optima is one of the few energy management systems on the market that can actually include energy communities in the optimization. So, for example, what we can do is if you have a local energy community, um we can make sure to use your battery if you're the battery and PV owner to supply our other households during the night. So, you basically get more utilization of the community, and usually for all involved parties, a better energy price for these hours, right? And this is something customers actually ask a lot about. Yeah, and we make that quite effortless.
  179. Daniel Schaub: Also, understand the new wave now this year is AI agent. Now is in the hot topic.
  180. Emanuel Jöbstl: Yeah.
  181. Daniel Schaub: Uh especially after Peter, which is Austrian, created OpenClaw with open source. So, would you say that what you are building is going to turn into a AI energy agent in your house earning money well while you are sleeping and
  182. Emanuel Jöbstl: Yeah.
  183. Daniel Schaub: also to know for the owner, how much can they save using your your software?
  184. Emanuel Jöbstl: Yeah, absolutely. So, if you have Let's start with the savings first. I mean, if you have a household that has, you know, everything, fully electrified: battery, PV, a heat pump, and an electric vehicle, we are seeing up to 40% savings in energy costs, specifically if you combine it with a dynamic tariff. I mean, the biggest lever here is really that we can shift all your demand to the hours where the energy is cheap or even negatively priced, while we basically make sure to supply to the grid either to an energy community or when the energy price is high. And that's the biggest lever, right?
  185. Rahul Mishra: Who are you clientele right now? Like, do you go to directly to the homeowners or do you go to a utility and they are your clients, or an energy community?
  186. Emanuel Jöbstl: That's a very good question. So, we at the moment go directly through homeowners. I believe that if you want to do energy management at scale,
  187. Rahul Mishra: Mhm.
  188. Emanuel Jöbstl: you need to sell it through the installer. Because the reason is, so it's it's a very big insight here, um first of all, the end customer rarely makes the decision about which hardware gets in. Why? End customer is not an expert. You have like 50 companies out there that are building whatever PV, heat pumps, and so on, right? And they all have nice marketing material,
  189. Rahul Mishra: Mhm.
  190. Emanuel Jöbstl: and customer doesn't really know. He They have to go to the installer, right? They get a few offers, then compare them, right? Part of this offer is the EMS, so it's installer-driven. Um why not utilities? I believe that the unit economics for all parties are best if an EMS is installed when the installer is there, right? And then utilities don't really have an incentive for rolling this out.
  191. Rahul Mishra: I I ask you this question because we uh and it's a it's a bit of bench-marky question as well, because just two days ago, we were in the office of Podero.
  192. Emanuel Jöbstl: Yeah, yeah.
  193. Rahul Mishra: I know Chris, he's a great guy. He's a friend. Hey, Chris.
  194. Emanuel Jöbstl: And and uh they have a different approach.
  195. Emanuel Jöbstl: I know.
  196. Rahul Mishra: They go directly to the utilities and and and we asked uh him a question as well like uh how how does that work. So, so it's very interesting and just go on. Please tell us like
  197. Emanuel Jöbstl: Yeah. Yeah. Hey, I mean, you can do like a special edition, Optima versus Podero, do it side by side, yeah? No, but hey, let me let me explain it like this. I believe Podero is fundamentally, even if it looks similar, it's a different product. Um what I believe what Chris is doing, and I'm sure he can give you a way better answer there, is to actually drive remote access control also for flexibility cases, right? And their utilities have, um you know, a big advantage
  198. Rahul Mishra: Mhm.
  199. Emanuel Jöbstl: or a big incentive, let's put it like this, right? Like because if you look at a big energy supplier, they actually have a very big incentive to make, let's say, the heat pumps stick to their price predictions, right? And if you can do that with a system like Podero, it's like a, you know, big thing to roll it out. What we do with Optima is a bit different. We want to be independent of the utilities. We want to first and foremost do a good service to the homeowner,
  200. Rahul Mishra: Mhm.
  201. Emanuel Jöbstl: and then being able to offer flexibility trading and working with utilities is an additional business case that we're looking at, but not the primary one.
  202. Rahul Mishra: Okay.
  203. Emanuel Jöbstl: Why is that the case? Because I believe energy management is a distribution game, right? And the best way to distribute is to make a great product for the homeowner.
  204. Rahul Mishra: We will put this section out and then ask Podero to to comment on it,
  205. Emanuel Jöbstl: But It's a interesting take.
  206. Daniel Schaub: Yeah. And just you are orchestrat- orchestrate orchestrating
  207. Emanuel Jöbstl: Yeah.
  208. Daniel Schaub: uh different hardwares. And some of them speak different languages, different protocols, and they are different ages. They can be 10 years old
  209. Emanuel Jöbstl: Yeah.
  210. Daniel Schaub: or 20 years old um electrical equipment with new digitalization and So, how do you orchestrate this uh mix of different electronics, different protocols, different years?
  211. Emanuel Jöbstl: Yeah, that's fun. I mean, it basically ties down to having great software architecture, right? So, I'm actually very grateful for my engineering team. They are some of the best engineers I've ever worked with. And um I mean, what we basically do is we we build um a very abstract device orchestration framework. Like, it's basically a stack where we can easily integrate new devices, so to give you a benchmark, integrating and testing a new inverter or battery model to production readiness takes us about half a workday, like a single engineer, half a workday.
  212. Rahul Mishra: Mhm.
  213. Emanuel Jöbstl: Um with heat pumps, it takes a bit more time. The challenge here is that heat pumps are all very different, so every manufacturer has different control approaches, right? And then on top of that, there's system models that basically describe the behavior, and all gets put into a gigantic optimization model. And you know, I actually want to come back to the thing that you said earlier around AI, because you asked me about an AI agent that does that does does things here, right?
  214. Rahul Mishra: Mhm.
  215. Emanuel Jöbstl: I believe that um most of the optimization logic here is mathematical, and it's going to stay mathematical. But we use AI in the company quite heavily. What specifically, you know, works really well with AI is actually making the data understandable to the user. So, instead of showing them 20 numbers and metrics and diagrams, we generate AI summaries that are also giving a bit of, you know, How do you say? Explanation to what's going on, right, which users like a lot. And the other thing is we heavily use AI for internal processes and coding, energy community setup, right, document generation, um but then also the entire software development stack. I mean, I mentioned I've been in software development for ages. I was in engineering leadership positions and CTO positions. And AI is just a gigantic game-changer right now when it comes to productivity.
  216. Daniel Schaub: Do you still code or not anymore?
  217. Emanuel Jöbstl: Um I do, but um the thing is that right now, it's way more um telling an agent what to do and reading. I mean, I have the experience, my team too, they also have the experience, to look at a file and see the weak spots, see the mistakes in the architecture. So, I believe that programming fundamentally changed for great programmers to a bit to be a bit more high-level, right? And there's not much typing involved anymore, right? And what is also crazy is how verification and testing changed, because suddenly it became so cheap to produce tests and more code, and so on, right? So, you can have almost everything. I think the art right now is way more building the right thing and keeping the entire stack clean, right? Um so it doesn't explode, right, in in terms of volume. But typing and code has become incredibly cheap.
  218. Rahul Mishra: Coming back to It's a It's a silly thing to say, but uh you you guys acquired Soly.
  219. Emanuel Jöbstl: Yeah.
  220. Rahul Mishra: So, I think uh Podero got Alexander as their CCO, and you guys got the clients of Soly.
  221. Emanuel Jöbstl: Yeah, that's
  222. Rahul Mishra: How How How How did the acquisition go? And how challenging was that, and how how were you able to integrate all the clients?
  223. Emanuel Jöbstl: Yeah, that's a very good question. So, first of all, Heizma acquired Soly, right, not Oh yeah, sorry. Yes, Heizma. Yeah. Um, but um for us, that has been going nicely. So, it's mainly about um having more customers in the portfolio, support, and so on. But specifically for Optima, as you probably know, Soly had their own energy management solution called Soly Brain,
  224. Rahul Mishra: Mhm.
  225. Emanuel Jöbstl: right? Um which is based on GridX. And because we also looked very closely at competitors before deciding to build Optima, right? I mean, there is solutions out there like GridX, right? Why why don't we take their product? The the way of working together with GridX is actually that the company has to be pay monthly fees.
  226. Rahul Mishra: Mhm.
  227. Emanuel Jöbstl: Um so the system keeps running. And because Soly was bankrupt, um GridX also shut down the entire operations. So, all these Soly customers were basically in need for a new um energy management system.
  228. Rahul Mishra: Mhm.
  229. Emanuel Jöbstl: And what we basically did together with Soly is we checked the hardware that these customers were being sold, checked the compatibility with us.
  230. Rahul Mishra: Mhm.
  231. Emanuel Jöbstl: And the majority of the customers, I would say more than 96%, are fully compatible with Optima.
  232. Rahul Mishra: Mhm.
  233. Emanuel Jöbstl: So, we basically offered these customers to get the Opta Optima energy management system at a at a discounted price.
  234. Rahul Mishra: Mhm.
  235. Emanuel Jöbstl: Um it's the, you know, Wi-Fi controller that I mentioned that customers can put in themselves.
  236. Rahul Mishra: Mhm.
  237. Emanuel Jöbstl: And a large part of the customer base ordered that instantly. And we are going to ship to these customers within the next 2 months.
  238. Rahul Mishra: Okay.
  239. Emanuel Jöbstl: Yeah. So, I'm quite excited about this because it means big portfolio growth for us. And I think it's an incredible way to offer these customers some of the energy products we have in the portfolio.
  240. Rahul Mishra: And i- if you uh if you can put a number to it, how many customer are you already in the data that you're I- if you can uh speak about it, that you're already dealing with.
  241. Emanuel Jöbstl: Uh-huh. With Optima?
  242. Rahul Mishra: With Optima, yeah.
  243. Emanuel Jöbstl: Yeah, so I mean from the mayor side, we acquired a bit more than 800, right, legacy customers. New Optima customers, it's in the mid three-figure range
  244. Rahul Mishra: Okay.
  245. Emanuel Jöbstl: that we are dealing with right now.
  246. Rahul Mishra: To think of an uh how many data points that occur just just from a system point of view?
  247. Emanuel Jöbstl: Well, that's a lot, and I'm bad with mathematics in my head, but um for each customer, we track between 40 and 90 data points.
  248. Rahul Mishra: Yeah.
  249. Emanuel Jöbstl: So, the reason is that we keep track of a lot of things including the thermal properties of your home,
  250. Rahul Mishra: Mhm.
  251. Emanuel Jöbstl: electricity, um different usage patterns, but also prices, weather data, and market data, right? Why do we need this? Because it's um required for actually doing good optimization. So, if you want to do a great heat pump optimization, you kind of have to know what's the thermal loss of the house, right? What's the thermal capacity? What's the buffer sizes? And that's all things that you cannot really, you know, measure easily, so you have to estimate them from the data. And you just need a lot of data points for doing that.
  252. Daniel Schaub: How can you balance the the need of the end user to save money, but also keeping the grid safe to no blow up transformer, for example, because you can give a sign of when in in in the same moment to turn on many devices at at at
  253. Emanuel Jöbstl: Yeah.
  254. Daniel Schaub: at the same time? And uh yeah, how How do you deal with that? Because you are creating a new peak demand in one certain point with So, what is the balance there?
  255. Emanuel Jöbstl: Yeah. Well, I mean, I I I think we're not creating peak demands, we are doing, you know, naturally quite the opposite, because the reason here is also that the price signals that the market gives you, they are aligned with grid stability.
  256. Daniel Schaub: Mhm.
  257. Emanuel Jöbstl: So for example, if you look at the EPEX spot price, then during noon, it's, you know, cheapest or even negative. And the reason is that they want to incentivize consumption when solar production is highest, right?
  258. Rahul Mishra: Mhm.
  259. Emanuel Jöbstl: Just to give you an example. And when it comes to the flexibility markets, um I believe what's important there to understand is it's just a matter of cost, right? So, you have a market for flexibility out there. And flexibility basically means that at any given point of time, you're holding a certain reserve. And if the Austrian Power Grid tells you, "We now need let's say 5 MW for 30 minutes,"
  260. Rahul Mishra: Mhm.
  261. Emanuel Jöbstl: you have to supply that, right? And that's the entire deal. And you know, everything there is market-based. So for example, you have battery parks which can offer that service relatively cheap,
  262. Rahul Mishra: Mhm.
  263. Emanuel Jöbstl: but then you could also power up gas turbines, which is more expensive. And this is also driving, you know, the grid and energy prices out there, right? And if we say we participate in these markets, then it's more about, you know, controlling supply and demand of the households of a large group of households, like we're talking 1,000 to 2,000 minimum, to actually, you know, um supply or drain energy from the grid. And you can actually do that without destroying a user's comfort, because you have certain buffers in your house. Your battery has a capacity, um your heating buffer has a capacity that you can leverage for that. And you can actually compute what your window of flexibility is that doesn't change the outcome for the user. And then when it comes to pricing, all energy that you put into flexibility services is actually subtracted from your energy bill anyway, so um we are good on that front. Like, I'm very very confident that we can not only make both groups happy. What would be my big dream would actually creating an energy tariff that allows us explicitly to trade with the users flexibility, but then again, use the earnings on that side that we do by trading the flexibility to make energy very cheap for the user. I mean, think about how cool would it be that you know, let's say you have an Optima device, you can opt in to get a $0.04/kWh um energy tariff um just, you know, for allowing us to control your devices to some extent.
  264. Daniel Schaub: After listening to you, it's a uh is great to know that people coming from um IT, let's say, from like developers, and understanding so well, and be able to explain so well a super uh complicated topic as energy, so congrats, because it's a
  265. Emanuel Jöbstl: Thank you.
  266. Daniel Schaub: for sure is not easy. But uh yeah, it's super interesting.
  267. Emanuel Jöbstl: Well, I mean, I had great people to talk to as well, right? Like I have great mentors in the sector that also encouraged me to go into the field.
  268. Rahul Mishra: Amazing. Just uh getting back to the security security topic that you briefly touched upon, you also uh worked at AIT for network routing. I I By the way, I'm also I started my career as a network engineer.
  269. Emanuel Jöbstl: Uh-huh.
  270. Rahul Mishra: I worked as a network operation center.
  271. Emanuel Jöbstl: It It's such a cool field.
  272. Rahul Mishra: Yeah. And uh but as we decentralize the grid, and and then we are putting AI agents and uh more uh more of such things into our critical infrastructure, how concerned we should be about cybersecurity coming from a cyber expert, uh IT expert? Will we need uh some a- some sort of a encryption and to protect the smart grids, or
  273. Emanuel Jöbstl: Yeah.
  274. Rahul Mishra: what What's your view on that?
  275. Emanuel Jöbstl: Well, I mean, I I I I really really hope for the love of God everybody is using encryption already right now, right?
  276. Rahul Mishra: Actually, there was one thing I I have to tell you. In in uh In our forum last time,
  277. Emanuel Jöbstl: Uh-huh.
  278. Rahul Mishra: um there's someone uh who worked for AIT, Bharat. He's He's a He's all about smart grids. He's a rookie about grids. And he was telling us that every inverter just has a default encryption, 1 2 3 4, still.
  279. Emanuel Jöbstl: Could be, yeah. So, but uh you know the thing here is that I think it's very feasible and possible to build technical systems that are quite safe, right? I mean, you have your like in our case, like a hardware controller. You can be very strict with which network connections you accept, how you store the data, what kind of certificate you use to communicate with the server, and everything. Um and I believe it's also absolutely necessary. The problems that we are really seeing in the field is exactly what you said, but that's human problems, right? Why is the password, 1 2 3 4 5, or whatever? It's because, you know, like installation personnel wants to have it easy, right? And I think, you know, that's also you they shouldn't be judged for it, right? Like they want to have easy work, it's good to have like a standardized password from that perspective, because it's easier to service and rotate your staff, and everything, right? And I get it. It makes things simple. But I mean, then, of course, it's very very easy for an attacker, if they really want to, to get into your system, and that's the danger. And I believe what we really have to do here is, you know, to have some sort of training.
  280. Rahul Mishra: Mhm.
  281. Emanuel Jöbstl: Um also when it comes to AI, I mean we touched AI agents before, we use Cloud Code and uh OpenClaw heavily in the company. I believe it's all great tools,
  282. Rahul Mishra: Mhm.
  283. Emanuel Jöbstl: but if you use them recklessly, there is a big big big danger of information being funneled out, and so on. And you also see that in the entire ecosystem right now. There's crazy supply chain attacks going on at the moment, right?
  284. Rahul Mishra: Mhm.
  285. Emanuel Jöbstl: Um and I believe that you know, like understanding of, you know, what safety and security means, right, and how easy it is for an AI tool or attacker to exfiltrate your data if, you know, there's access, right? I think that's the real key here.
  286. Rahul Mishra: Did you see um the recently the Gmail of the FBI chief from US got
  287. Emanuel Jöbstl: No, no, I didn't see that.
  288. Rahul Mishra: No?
  289. Daniel Schaub: What happened?
  290. Rahul Mishra: Yeah, it's a It's a Indian Indian-American dude called Kash Patel.
  291. Emanuel Jöbstl: Mhm.
  292. Rahul Mishra: His data got uh uh leaked, but he was dancing. He was a good boy. Smoking cigar and dancing, so all good. But uh yeah.
  293. Daniel Schaub: Yeah. Now, just going to the Central and Eastern Europe region,
  294. Emanuel Jöbstl: Uh-huh.
  295. Daniel Schaub: how how do you see it in the recent years and how how is the potential there to to implement the solution that you are bringing?
  296. Emanuel Jöbstl: Mhm. I mean, I think that generally, in every country there is good potential. Um I just think we are sometimes on a bit of different timelines, right? Um the reason is that one of the main drivers for having an energy management system and actually having this flexibility is, well, you know, having electric heating in form of a heat pump, and also having like a PV and, you know, so uh battery system, right, or an electric car.
  297. Rahul Mishra: Mhm.
  298. Emanuel Jöbstl: And there are certain countries in Europe that are definitely forerunners. I think, you know, uh Spain and Portugal are incredible when it to when it comes to solar. Um the UK is doing bi- big pushes. The Nordics definitely, right? And also the entire DACH region is making huge steps. Um I believe we are going to see the same thing in Eastern Europe as well. And um we also already have, you know, a lot of these concepts and market dynamics in, for example, Czech Republic, in Slovakia. That I definitely know.
  299. Rahul Mishra: And what's your primary market right now to
  300. Emanuel Jöbstl: Oh, we are very focused on the DACH region. Um the reason why we have strong geographic focus is that some of the things that we want to do, specifically when it comes to energy services, um you have to keep a lot of legislation in in mind, right?
  301. Rahul Mishra: Mhm.
  302. Emanuel Jöbstl: So, for example, the Swiss, German, and Austrian energy markets, they are similar, but not the same, right? For example, in Germany, you have very different rules when it comes to putting power to the grid.
  303. Rahul Mishra: Mhm.
  304. Emanuel Jöbstl: Um for example, in Germany right now, you know, in in Austria, we have OeMAG, right? They are basically paying every PV systems owner and they are subsidized, right? And in Germany, that program just stopped, right? So, right now, if you want to have a solar system in Germany, and you want to feed energy and sell energy to the grid, you actually have to find an energy supplier that purchases your energy, right? And that's a new legislation change that makes everything more difficult, right? And I think there's a lot of these nuances in markets. And to be very honest, three countries is enough for me for now. But we have other countries on the radar for the future.
  305. Rahul Mishra: Amazing.
  306. Daniel Schaub: Yeah. And just um taking advantage of your entrepreneurial experience, which because you just mentioned the gap with uh the region Central and Eastern Europe, which learnings from the startup ecosystem here in Austria and Germany uh that the region could learn from to to accelerate energy transition and decarbonization?
  307. Rahul Mishra: Or even Vienna could learn from Berlin, your your experiences.
  308. Emanuel Jöbstl: Um hey, to be very honest, I think Vienna is actually doing pretty well, right? So, I mean, I I left Austria 15 years ago to study in Germany, right? Because back in the day, I I I ran a business in Carinthia. Like a a couple of weeks after my 18th birthday, I I went to WKO and Finanzamt and I registered my first business selling websites. And I have to admit, when I was a teenager, I had very hard time getting off the ground, right? Um so, I left to Germany. I lived in London, Berlin, the US, did my company stuff. And now, I come back to Vienna. And what I'm seeing here is actually very flourishing startup ecosystem that's not gigantic, but the people who are in it, they are serious about it. There's some impressive companies in Vienna. And I think the the only thing that I would love to see a bit more is positivity. I think this is something that really sets apart great ecosystems is that people there are very very positive, they listen carefully, and they're very kind. Um and I think this is also coming up now in Vienna, and it has gigantic potential.
  309. Daniel Schaub: And which learning could be used in Central and Eastern Europe to to get to improve the startup ecosystem, what which advice?
  310. Emanuel Jöbstl: Successful companies, right? Successful founders, um they need a few things. I mean, capital is one of them, but I think capital is okay available, right? You can also raise from investors outside of your country. Uh but I think what's one of the most important things is having an ecosystem, like people around you specifically, that allow you to be a bit crazy, right? Because one thing that I've seen about great founders everywhere is that in the beginning, they stand very alone with their opinion in many cases, until they force this opinion, these ideas into reality, and then suddenly everybody believes in it, right? But for that first step where you are alone and you're a visionary, you need people around you who also let you. And I think this is something that I've seen in incredible startup ecosystems like San Francisco, like Berlin, like London, and so on, right? Um and I think we can also have it here if we bring the right people together.
  311. Daniel Schaub: We are aiming to contribute to accelerate energy transition here, and in our forum, we are in- inviting startups from the region to meet here in Vienna and to meet other co-founders, so maybe crazy people with crazy people, they can support each other and move forward, so.
  312. Emanuel Jöbstl: Yeah. I think you're doing great there. I think it's all about getting the right people into the room. This is, you know, it's not something that you can quantify, but I would say it has incredible impact. It's It's maybe even more important than easy access to capital, like selecting the right people, putting them in an around room, and then, basically, you know, having them push each other up.
  313. Rahul Mishra: Uh on that note, you're invited for uh our meet-up again in April, and then the forum in June.
  314. Emanuel Jöbstl: Yeah, excited for that one.
  315. Rahul Mishra: Yeah. And getting to our last uh round that we call quickfire, but it's never quick. But
  316. Emanuel Jöbstl: Wow.
  317. Rahul Mishra: So, what you uh you were just uh touching upon uh that you think that people are are more asset than a capital, but what do you think the code is bigger or the capital is bigger? What what's the bigger bottleneck right now in the energy transition: software engineers or a lack of bold venture capital?
  318. Emanuel Jöbstl: Wow. Tough question. Um can I give a third answer?
  319. Rahul Mishra: Yeah, sure. You see like it's never never two.
  320. Emanuel Jöbstl: Yeah, I think the biggest bottleneck in all countries right now is legislation. Because if you look what, for example, is making us in Austria slow, it's, for example, certain processes with, um you know, other stakeholders, you know, like energy providers, grid operators, whatever. Uh what's really hindering Germany is smart meter roll-out, right? I mean, sure you can throw venture capital at it, a lot of it, you might solve it if you, you know, pay everybody their smart meter, but at the end of the day, this is a political problem, right? Um and I think we have to also tackle it on that level.
  321. Daniel Schaub: From your IT experience, I think you started with the OS maybe, uh writing, then you use C, C++ or Python or uh Java or Java in English, Java.
  322. Emanuel Jöbstl: Much Java, yeah.
  323. Daniel Schaub: Um which language would you use to save the electrical grid from the scratch?
  324. Emanuel Jöbstl: Uh you're asking what we're currently using, huh? Um definitely, C#. So, I know that, um you know, there's a big ecosystem out there doing JavaScript, and there's Rust, and there is, um whatever, Go, you know, and all these cool web languages. But I I tell you, um if you want to do anything in hardware, you want a language that's close to the hardware, so you want to go for one of the C's. But then again, C or C++ is not so easy to develop, and Rust is also not easy to develop. It's a great language, it's just not easy to write a big system in it. Um and then C# can offer you that. You can go super close to the hardware. You have a lot of control. Yet, it's a very modern, garbage-collected language with a lot of benefits, and that has insane ecosystem support. So, I was I was very surprised like um previous projects were all in JavaScript, TypeScript, and so on. Was a cool ecosystem, but C# really solved a lot of the things that are painful in a very very very good way. So, I can highly recommend doing that when you're doing anything with hardware or real-time capabilities.
  325. Rahul Mishra: Have you Have you already uh raised some money on Optima? Is it bootstrap, uh Optima, or you've raised some money or what
  326. Emanuel Jöbstl: Uh that's a very very good question. So, we didn't raise any capital yet.
  327. Rahul Mishra: Mhm.
  328. Emanuel Jöbstl: So, what what we basically gi- did is we got um money from Heizma, so Heizma gave us like a loan, but by now we are profitable, right? So, we are selling enough hardware and software every month to finance the entire team and operations, right? So, the unit economics of Optima are generally great, because the hardware supply chain is working super well, um and the software is also bought, right? Um and I have enough The I think the remarkable thing is that I have enough capital in the company to actually continue growing it, right? So, I have enough capital to pay my developers and push the software, and that's quite a good situation to be in.
  329. Rahul Mishra: So, on that note, if you don't require any capital, but if you're given 1 billion, what are you going to do with that money
  330. Emanuel Jöbstl: Yeah.
  331. Rahul Mishra: to accelerate energy transition or in your field?
  332. Emanuel Jöbstl: Um you know, It's It's It's a great question. Um you know, I believe that if you want to drive change in the world, right, one of the best ways to do so is to build like a flywheel, you know, like a system that basically drives the change and also grows while it's doing so. And to be honest, a company is actually very good way of doing that. I know building impact companies is not easy, but if you can build a company that is profitable by doing something good,
  333. Rahul Mishra: Mhm.
  334. Emanuel Jöbstl: right, um that's great. And I think what I would do for that very reason with a billion euros or US dollars or whatever is, you know, to find the most ambitious, impact-driven entrepreneurs around me and finance them.
  335. Rahul Mishra: Amazing.
  336. Daniel Schaub: Cool. We want to be in the in that room. Okay, so looking into the future, let's say 2030 that it's around the corner,
  337. Emanuel Jöbstl: Yes.
  338. Daniel Schaub: how do you see the future bills? That they're going to be like a flat rate like like a Netflix subscription, or we're going to be trading energy by our phones daily?
  339. Emanuel Jöbstl: Well, I mean, I hope that the energy trading is working fully automated, because this is what we are working to.
  340. Daniel Schaub: Okay, so you think um energy grid operated with agents in the future kind of?
  341. Emanuel Jöbstl: Yeah, kind of. Like big optimization problem, agents to make the human interface, I think that's the thing. But to be very honest, I think this is going for every field. Um you know, Sequoia had a very nice essay recently. And what they basically said, it's it's no longer the time of, you know, software as a service. With AI agents, you can do service as a software. And I believe the biggest changes in any sector that we are going to see with AI agents is at the user interface.
  342. Daniel Schaub: That is something to look upon. Yeah. Cool.
  343. Rahul Mishra: Getting to our last question which is more personal. First, I want to ask you you you're a rock climber.
  344. Emanuel Jöbstl: Uh yeah, I love it.
  345. Rahul Mishra: And and hiking, of course, is a
  346. Emanuel Jöbstl: Yeah, hiking, rock climbing, mountains.
  347. Rahul Mishra: Yeah. And what is a 7a route that you did?
  348. Emanuel Jöbstl: Well, 7a, like I did a few. I mean, 7a is not super crazy, but it's like it's like if you're a hobbyist, it's a good goal, right? Well, I did a few of them with friends, had a good time.
  349. Rahul Mishra: Yeah, bu- but what exactly it means? Why is it called 7a?
  350. Emanuel Jöbstl: Uh it's a rock climbing grade, so it's a scale that that starts by at at roughly like people start counting at five and then 6a, b, c, 7a, b, c. And the world's hardest route is a 9c route. Um and, you know, like it's like three, four, five people in the world that can do 9c's, and the scale is also exponential. So usually, it takes a rock climber more and more time to progress a single level.
  351. Daniel Schaub: To climb, it's like a team effort, but also lonely. So, which learnings can you could you learn from that experience into the startup ecosystem or entrepreneurial spirit?
  352. Emanuel Jöbstl: Um you know, I think when you climb, what's really important is to stay in the moment and stay calm,
  353. Rahul Mishra: Mhm.
  354. Emanuel Jöbstl: because climbing is less about strength, it's more about doing the right thing and staying relaxed. When you climb a hard route, right, like when I climb a 7a, it's very unlikely I'm going to do it on the first try. I fall. I get up and try again. And I think the third thing is that with climbing and with startups, in both cases, you need to have a great partner.
  355. Daniel Schaub: What would you say that is more difficult right now: to make differential equations to optimize a battery or to convince people to use AI in their houses, in the energy system?
  356. Emanuel Jöbstl: Definitely, the second one. But I think it is the core of all consumer products at distribution, and user interface and communication are usually the hardest bit, but also the key.
  357. Rahul Mishra: On that note, uh Emanuel, or if we can also call you Emmy.
  358. Emanuel Jöbstl: Please do.
  359. Rahul Mishra: Yeah. So, Emmy, it's been a pleasure. I think you you've been way efficient with the time. We we had a very long questionnaire for you, but you managed it within the time.
  360. Emanuel Jöbstl: Excellent.
  361. Rahul Mishra: So, thank you very much. I hope you enjoyed it as much as we did.
  362. Emanuel Jöbstl: Oh, I did. Thanks for the questions, guys. Thanks for having me. Good luck with the forum.
  363. Daniel Schaub: Wow, thank you. I'm looking forward to see you there. And also, all the community in June in the forum. Thank you for watching the episode and keep tuned for future interviews. Ciao.