How EV charging network ChargePoint accelerates its global go-to-market strategy

ChargePoint has a long history of helping EV drivers charge their vehicles.

If Jyothi Swaroop, the company’s new marketing and growth officer, is successful, ChargePoint won’t just be known for its EV charging business.

Swaroop joined ChargePoint in May after working for decades in tech and AI, with previous roles at Oracle, Dell EMC, Veritas, and others. Swaroop joined the company as ChargePoint is implementing a three-year transformation strategy; he’s responsible for leading its “global go-to-market strategy, including marketing, go-to-market operations, sales enablement, growth initiatives, partner monetization, and new market expansion,” according to a news release.

“ChargePoint is now no longer about the old-school EV charging. It’s a lot more than that,” Swaroop told Morning Brew. “It’s about our software business, which goes beyond just our hardware into other hardware and manageability, and leverages AI and delivers the value of AI to our customers. It’s about expansion of our driver base beyond our day-to-day drivers—to fleets, to companies. And last but definitely not least, the expanding TAM and the new use cases that are cropping up that are so exciting.”

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

How are you thinking about the role of partnerships in the broader effort to expand ChargePoint’s market and generate revenue? You mentioned a partnership with power management company Eaton.

Eaton is a big one. They’re a behemoth. Their stock just hit an all-time high. Eaton’s product portfolio and ChargePoint’s product portfolio and roadmaps are extremely complementary. Eaton’s in the hardcore, large-scale deployment business for controlling the energy grid for its largest customers, and we are the endpoint business of that…So the use case is extremely simple and easy to understand—the value is easy to understand for the customer.

Now, in terms of how do we actually execute it, Eaton is trying to get into the clean energy business in general. It’s a new expansion market for them, and we are the leaders in this space…That is going to provide a massive growth trajectory for both companies. The interesting nuance, however, is unlike the world of AI and Nvidia, where the returns are immediate, these things are actual physical products that have to be sold, installed, procured. There’s a lot of physics involved. The deal cycles tend to be longer. So it’s not like…we’re going to see revenue tomorrow. It’s going to take a few months to a year to start seeing the big deals land, because that’s just how this works.

How would you define ChargePoint’s total addressable market today, and what are some of the areas where you feel like you can do a better job of tapping into that?

We’re already operating at scale. So the growth is going to be twofold. We already have an installed base that we can maximize and upsell and cross-sell with our new products. That’s the short-term expansion plan.

The longer-term use case is obviously autonomous vehicles; you look at all the robotaxis and Waymos and Ubers, everybody is investing pretty heavily into that, and that’s going to be here sooner than people think…And those people don’t want to be in the charging business; they want to be in the business of transporting people and making money off that, as opposed to building out infrastructure...That’s multiple billions of dollars in TAM for autonomous vehicles. Then there’s the robotics stuff. If you listen to the Elon Musks of the world and others that are investing heavily into humanoid robots and others, these robots are not going to run on gas. They’re all going to need electrification.

The third aspect is drone fleets…We’re gonna have fleets of drones that need to be charged for various purposes. So our addressable market in the next five years will expand 10x, 20x, very quickly beyond just electrifying ICE cars or trucks and fleets.

How do you take advantage of those opportunities, and where is ChargePoint at in terms of building relationships in new markets like AVs and drones?

Autonomous vehicles are happening now. We’re in deep discussions about how to make that happen when it goes mainstream. Things like robotics and drones are more future-state—let’s call it two, three years from now—and fleets are current. It’s happening already. Electric fleets, large trucks, semis, that’s happening already with large Fortune 500 customers.

Where are these prospective customers landing in ChargePoint’s sales funnel?

ChargePoint is traditionally a very partner-driven business. We have our distributors and partners like Eaton who have their own distributor network that we leverage and we enable to help us scale the business out, but when it comes to these really large accounts, one of the things that I personally will change is an account-based targeting approach. So we will start going after large Fortune 500 accounts in a more direct fashion, targeting the highest check-signing personas and influencing these accounts top-down, as opposed to the distributor bottoms-up with the contractor and the facilities person and then going up. We’re going to try to influence this top-down, as well, because we’re noticing with our largest customers, electrification, sustainability, these things are becoming a priority. Not just because it’s a government policy or not, because it’s just economically better…The war has just proven the EV use case out even more for everybody.

How does the plateau in EV demand in the US inform your strategy, and what makes you optimistic that it will go up again?

It’s the data. It doesn’t have to be a philosophical optimism…Used EV sales are up significantly, because it just makes economic sense for buyers to buy them. And that will eventually translate to new EV purchases, as well, because the costs of new EVs are coming down drastically…The charging infrastructure and everything that supports that will obviously have to meet that demand, as well.

What are the biggest headwinds and tailwinds that you see right now?

Headwinds, definitely policy. Government policy and rhetoric and stuff like that. That’s definitely the No. 1 headwind. Tailwinds are everything I just talked about. The economics have now pivoted, not just for used EVs, but for new EVs. All of the future use cases of mobility are now electrified. They’re not gas-powered. Whether it’s autonomous vehicles, robotics, drones, others, even AI data centers—everything runs on electrification, not on gas. So the future TAM is 100x bigger than the current TAM, which excites me a lot.