Inside the story of Pionix CEO Marco Möller: from drone pioneer to the founder behind the open-source stack making EV charging as reliable as filling up.
Electric vehicles are scaling faster than charging networks can keep up. The world now has five million public charging points, twice as many as in 2022. And yet, for millions of drivers, the experience still feels like a coin toss.
Roughly one in seven charging attempts in the U.S. fails, and parts of Europe see similar numbers. Behind those failures aren’t broken plugs — they’re mismatched software stacks that can’t understand one another.
It’s exactly the kind of problem that drives an engineer mad.
And for Marco Möller, it did: “You’re standing there, low on charge, and it just… doesn’t work.”
Marco had already built a startup big enough to catch Intel’s eye. His first company, MAVinci, developed precision surveying drones, a venture he grew from scratch and sold in 2016.
But it was at Intel, inside the civilian drone operations software division, where the seed for his next venture Pionix was planted — in failure.
We realised too late that the drone industry had shifted to open source,” Marco recalls. “The ecosystem evolved faster than we did. We couldn’t catch up.
That bruising lesson, that closed systems lose to open ecosystems, stayed with him.
Years later, while consulting for mid-sized companies experimenting with EV charging, that lesson resurfaced in the most mundane setting imaginable: a charger that wouldn’t charge.
Every EV driver knows this moment. You’re on the road, low on battery, you plug in — and nothing happens. You try the app, the card, reboot the charger… It was obvious this wasn’t a hardware issue. It was software fragmentation.
Standing beside a dead charger on a cold, grey day, frustration hit Marco…he felt the MAVinci déjà vu hit him with force:
This can’t be how we scale e-mobility.
That was the moment Pionix began, not as a business concept, but as a refusal to accept a broken status quo.
“People won’t switch if charging feels unreliable,” says Marco. What he saw wasn’t a hardware failure, it was a coordination failure. A broken conversation between car, charger, and backend. And it sparked the idea that would become Pionix: Marco applied the concept of the ‘open ecosystem’ to disrupt the EV charging industry and create one of the world’s largest open-source initiatives in e-mobility.
Pionix’s software stack, EVerest, now powers hundreds of thousands of chargers around the globe and is maintained by 600+ contributors from more than 70 organisations under the Linux Foundation Energy. Earlier this year, the company secured an €8 million funding round led by Ascend Capital Partners; capital that will fuel its next phase of growth as it expands EVerest’s capabilities and scales its commercial products, ChargeBridge and Pionix Cloud.
Take us back to those early Pionix days. how did the first version of EVerest take shape and who believed in the vision first?
The first version of EVerest was built the way many transformative technologies begin: three founders in a small office, surrounded by whiteboards full of protocol diagrams, reverse-engineering the messiness of EV charging standards line by line. “We wanted to prove that open source could be the solid foundation the industry was missing,” Marco says.
There was no guarantee anyone would care. But something remarkable happened. Developers from Europe, the U.S., and Asia started contributing code. Early believers like Pale blue dot and Vireo Ventures recognised that a shared operating system for EV charging, the Android of e-mobility, wasn’t just useful, it was inevitable. “That was the turning point,” Marco recalls. “It gave us confidence that we weren’t alone in this.”
When you donated EVerest to the Linux Energy Foundation, it was a rare move for a young startup. Why choose that path?
“For us, open source was the only sustainable path,” Marco says. The industry had spent years introducing standard after standard, only for each to be interpreted differently, creating a new generation of incompatibility. Proprietary systems weren’t the solution; they were the problem.
Donating EVerest to Linux Foundation Energy, a neutral nonprofit, meant giving up control of the core. That was emotionally difficult. But it also unlocked trust. “If we kept it proprietary, no one would adopt it as a shared foundation,” Marco explains. “By placing it under open governance, the industry could build on it without fearing lock-in.”
Today, EVerest has more than 600 contributors, 70+ organisations, and an estimated ecosystem value of $500 million: and it’s powering hundreds of thousands of chargers worldwide.
The IEA says charging points are doubling, but interoperability remains the Achilles heel. What’s causing the fragmentation?
Marco describes the ecosystem as a patchwork of brilliant but isolated engineering teams, OEMs, operators, backend providers, each building slightly different interpretations of the same standards. These differences create countless small mismatches that only become visible in the real world: dropped sessions, frozen screens, errors that no one can reproduce in the lab.
“It’s not that people don’t want to collaborate,” Marco says, “it’s that everyone has been building in their own silo.” That fragmentation is why failure rates remain stubbornly high; sometimes up to 25%.
How does EVerest make chargers ‘just work’?
EVerest turns the world’s EV charging standards, thousands of pages of them, into working code. Everyone uses the same foundation, the same protocols, the same interpretations. It’s a universal translator for chargers.
That transparency has an additional benefit: bugs get discovered and fixed faster, not just by one team but by an entire global community. “It’s a ‘better together’ effect,” Marco says. “Innovation compounds instead of fragmenting.”
We’re seeing governments push for open systems and digital independence. Why is this trend accelerating now?
Companies are realising that they don’t want to be locked into single-vendor solutions when building long-lived infrastructure. Open source provides freedom: anyone can audit, improve, customise, or fork the code. It also reduces cost and time-to-market. “A global open ecosystem always out-innovates any proprietary team,” Marco says. “It’s not even a fair fight.”
How do Pionix’s commercial products fit into the open-source model?
EVerest remains free and open. But deploying chargers at scale still requires enterprise-grade tools. That’s where Pionix Cloud and ChargeBridge come in. Cloud handles diagnostics, updates and monitoring, while ChargeBridge provides a plug-and-play module that cuts engineering time dramatically.
“Think of it like Android,” Marco says. “The core is open, but companies still need strong products on top.”
What’s been the toughest part of scaling Pionix — and what kept you going?
Marco doesn’t romanticise the hard parts. There were long stretches when investors struggled to see how open source could become a business. There were technical challenges that took months to unravel. And there were days when the team wondered if they were too early, or too idealistic.
What kept us going,” Marco says, “was the ecosystem. Seeing people all over the world contribute. Seeing companies build products on our stack. That’s when you realise the idea is bigger than you.
How would you describe your leadership style?
Energetic, hands-on, and deeply involved in the product. “I like moving fast and inspiring people to take on ambitious challenges,” he says.
Do you have a daily ritual that keeps you grounded?
“Automate what can be automated. It gives me the headspace to focus on what really matters.”
What’s a guiding belief that’s shaped your entrepreneurial journey?
Spread your idea widely and relentlessly. If you’re met with resistance, it usually means things are just getting started.
If you could share one piece of advice, what would it be?
“Build with collaboration in mind. The climate challenge is too big for one company. Shared solutions scale faster, create more trust and deliver more impact. And never take ‘no’ as the final answer.”
If every charger ran on open source, what would that mean for drivers, operators and the planet?
Marco imagines a world where charging is boring; the good kind of boring. It just works: any charger, anywhere, any car. Reliability becomes the norm. Infrastructure scales faster. And EVs integrate seamlessly into the grid, enabling vehicle-to-grid services and smarter energy systems.
“The future of EV charging,” he says, “will be effortless; open, intelligent and seamlessly connected.”
