Hi, everyone. Welcome to day two, early morning session of the 28th Annual Needham Growth Conference. My name is Chris Pierce, covering transportation technology stocks at Needham. Part of that purview is EV charging. It's my pleasure to have the team from ChargePoint here. We have Rick Wilmer, CEO, Manzi Katani, CFO. I'd love to give you guys a quick 30 seconds or so, just high-level introductions, would you like any message you want to convey about the company, then we'll move into some Q&A, and we'll take some questions from the audience as well.

Sure. Yeah, I'm Rick Wilmer. I'm the CEO of ChargePoint. I've been in the role for a little over two years now Joy took this job right when you know the the things started to change and it kind of went into negative mode And I see us now, you know re-emerging into a more productive less competitive Situation where we should see you know steady reliable growth with a narrower competitive landscape, and I really expect us to come out on top as As we deliver a lot of new innovation in the market over the coming year and a half or so Hi, I'm Mansi Khaitani been with charge point for a little over seven years now Been CFO for the last two years started with with Rick and in my current role

In my focus over the last I want to say year year and a half has been cash management capital structure improvement, which I'm happy to say we've achieved a lot. We did a big debt restructuring recently, eliminated almost half of the debt on our balance sheet, and we've been really mindful of cash usage and seen significant improvement there. So excited to get to profitability soon.

And with the calendar turn, although I know you guys are on a December 31st year end, but I'd love to just kind of let you guys kind of start with some accomplishments, things you're proud of from 2025, some challenges, industry, maybe the Eaton partnership, just kind of level set for investors after the last year?

Yeah, 2025 was a pretty eventful year. We've taken our OPEX down substantially, even prior to last year, from a peak of close to $90 million a quarter down into the mid-50s now. We've delivered a lot of new innovation to the market, also formed a very important strategic partnership with Eaton, a company that builds the grid. I'll come back to that in a second, along with really forwarded some major partnerships with auto OEMs. So if you look at electrified transportation, I really view it as kind of four major pillars. You've got charging hardware and charging software, which we develop and sell to customers that want to provide EV charging services to their driving community. Then you've got all that charging infrastructure that plugs into the grid. And there are very clearly opportunities to dramatically lower the cost of EV infrastructure, lower the cost of operations, including the cost of electricity, by partnering with people that build the grid like Eaton. So this is a very significant partnership for us, I think, both in the D.C. fast charge space as well as the home charging space. We've, with Eaton, already announced some really significant innovations that create a big mode of differentiation for us versus our competition. And then you've got the electric vehicles themselves that plug into the chargers. And having the chargers plug into the grid and the vehicles plug into the chargers and expect it all to just work seamlessly and easily is a bit optimistic. So having close partnerships with the vehicle OEMs to make sure charging works seamlessly, and even beyond that, you can make for better driving experiences than you could ever get in an internal combustion vehicle, for example, by closely partnering with the auto OEMs is a very important part of our strategy. And we've made a lot of good progress with a variety of different OEMs where we're playing some role in how their drivers experience finding, using, and paying for charging. The fourth big pillar in the ecosystem, which is next up for us, is the energy sector. Obviously, energy is what goes into the grid, then goes into the vehicles. And there's a lot of opportunities within the energy sector to form partnerships to bring value to the market. So that's going to be a big priority for us this year, along with delivering a lot of the innovation that we've announced and will be announcing as we go through the year.

Okay. So off of that 25, you sort of ended there in 26. Think about momentum into 2026, whether it's with the EVOEMs, grid partners, what should investors sort of look for? Not specific announcements, just what's exciting for this year, for 2026 for you guys.

I think one is a return to growth. We returned to growth last quarter. We expect that to continue as we move through the year. I think we'll be looking forward to some significant customer wins that we'll be announcing, along with, again, some big partnerships that we could be potentially announcing.

Okay.

And if we think kind of top down, you know, how should investors think about, I know you talked about hardware, software, the EV vehicles themselves, but you also talked about the grid infrastructure and the energy sector. Should investors still be focused on EV adoption or sort of less so? Or like, what's the right message around EV adoption, sort of where we're at when it comes to your business?

Yeah, it's way more than just EV adoption. I mean, EV adoption is obviously very important. And, you know, you see this chicken and egg is the lack of charging infrastructure or charging anxiety, preventing EVs from selling, or are the EVs too expensive and the selection isn't good enough? I believe it's more that than the EV infrastructure, but there's always room for the EV infrastructure to improve, you know, to drive the business forward. But the things people don't think of often is that all the plug-in hybrids, which seem to be a very popular transitional platform from internal combustion to plug-in hybrid, or excuse me, to full electric, those all plug in, right? Chris and I were just talking, his wife's got a plug-in hybrid and she plugs it in. So we see a lot of utilization being driven from PHEVs, not just EVs. The other innovation that appears to be on the brink of starting to ramp up into some volume is autonomous vehicles. If you come out to where we live in San Francisco and spend a day out there, you'll see more Waymos driving around with no people in them other than passengers. It's amazing to see the scale that Waymo is achieving in certain areas with, you know, apparently Tesla coming along and, you know, Uber and their partnerships coming along. and there will be no autonomous vehicle that's not electric and that all requires charging infrastructure so how are those cars being charged i mean there's no human inside those so they pull into a depot and they have a human being that runs around and cleans them and plugs them in yep now can that be automated absolutely there's definitely some uh innovation out there to both automate the the charging process as well as even the vehicle cleaning process And are those the people who are charging those Waymo cars, are they sitting in a Tesla supercharger, at a Charcon charger, or at a Waymo center? No, it's typically what we would call a behind-the-fence. It's a dedicated charging depot where all the Waymos will pull in and park there for however much time they need to be there to get charged and cleaned, and then they go back out and do their work. So it's a dedicated charging site for the autonomous vehicles.

Just since you kind of asked a few questions on that topic, is it something where they can charge level two overnight, or do they need fast charging to get right back out on the road, or is it a mix?

What's the right way to think about it? More fast charging is what we're seeing. Most of the autonomous is fast charged to keep the asset utilized by getting it back out on the road. Okay.

And you hit on it in your own common rocks. I'd love to hear sort of how the competitive landscape has changed and what that means for ChargePoint's business and win rates and sort of the path forward. Sure.

I mean, the last two years have been brutal. First, I think the adoption of EVs fell short of what everyone had been expecting back in 2022, and that caused things to slow down. And then, you know, you had the Trump administration come in with their kind of anti-global warming, climate change, you know, forget all the subsidies for anything clean energy related, which was a double blow. The net result of that is that you've seen the competitive landscape thin down, and it'll continue to thin down. It's just been a brutal space to attract investors. And a lot of companies that were private that needed funding weren't getting the funding they needed, so they've been sold or are in the process of being sold. So I think it's a fairly typical normalization as you go through. If you remember the Gartner Hype cycle, a trough of disillusionment, that's when a lot of consolidation happens and you start to emerge into a plateau of productivity. And we're in the beginning stages of emerging into that plateau of productivity now with, I expect, plenty of consolidation already and more coming.

And just to kind of think about where you guys are versus these smaller players, can you just kind of talk about the level two share you guys sort of market share you enjoy just broadly versus the long tail competitors?

Yeah, in North America, I think we have 70% market share on level two and a substantial market share on level three. Some of the innovation I alluded to earlier is around both level three and level two charging, and all of it has been purpose-built to be global, which means we will have a very competitive offering in Europe, which has got a much better macro environment than the North America or the U.S. does today, and we expect to deliver a lot of our next-gen DC and level two charging to Europe and really expect to see that region grow as a percent of our overall revenue.

And can you kind of segment customers for the group as well? Just you've got your commercial, fleet, residential, sort of how does that break down? Any shifts you're seeing there, any momentum, sort of lack of momentum kind of broadly as things kind of level set against each other?

Yeah, again, I think we've, you know, we return to growth despite all the negative news about the EV industry, which tells you that there's still EVs, you know, being sold. Not only are new EVs being sold, but as I alluded to, PHEVs are selling well. Those want chargers. And then you've got, you know, a big secondhand market of EVs. And the EVs aren't going into the scrapyard. they're getting resold and they're staying on the road. So if you think about the markets we serve, you can divide it at a very high level into two big segments. One is fleet, where delivering goods or people with an electrified vehicle is mission critical to the business. The charging has to be highly reliable, and it's a totally TCO value prop. If I can prove to a customer that they can deliver goods or people for less money with an electric delivery vehicle than they can with an internal combustion delivery vehicle, they'll switch. That math is dominated by the cost of the vehicle, the cost of the charging infrastructure, and then the cost of the fuel. Thus, the energy partnerships will be really important for us because I think we can have a big influence in terms of reducing the cost of fuel. The other big market we serve is commercial. And commercial, you can divide into non-retail and retail. Non-retail, think of workplaces, libraries, schools, municipalities, and then retail is any place people will go and spend money. It could be a hotel, parking garage, shopping mall, restaurant, you name it. That's retail. The thing that ties all commercial together, unlike Fleet, is that it's a discretionary purchase. No one needs to put a charger in the front of a Starbucks store or a Target store or a Marriott hotel to operate their business. They're doing that as a discretionary choice to attract people they care about to come to that institution. So what we're seeing now is that EV penetration, especially on the coast, is high enough that if you're in retail and you don't offer EV charging, you're going to lose a significant percentage of your addressable market to your competitors that do offer EV charging. So that continues to drive our business. I think the next big wave of innovation that will help deliver into retail is more deeply integrating a better guest experience through EB charging at that place than they would than just pulling in and plugging in. You know, for example, if I'm taking my family on a road trip to a theme park and it exceeds the range of my vehicle, I want to know I'm going to get a charger when I arrive at that theme park so I can get home with my family at the end of the day. Can we offer the ability to reserve a charger? And can we get a driver to pay for that? We've got proof cases, for example, in Europe where that very use case is extremely lucrative. There's a whole myriad of ideas and opportunities to help the retail space drive their core business through charging that we're working on with a lot of our retail partners and with our own feature development.

And then just lastly, sort of, again, you alluded to it earlier, the Eaton partnership. Let me sort of hear how it came together, how you communicate the benefits to potential customers and the cost savings and the time to sort of get things set up and how that can be a competitive industry, I guess.

Yeah, so the Eaton partnership, for those of you who are familiar with Eaton, they build the grid. So you hear the term the grid, we kind of all know what it is, but what is it really made of? There's a lot of equipment that makes up the grid, and some of you may follow that space and be familiar with it. But what we had developed was, I'll get slightly technical here, is a next-gen DC charger. And all the historical DC chargers from all the competitors and including our legacy products, they plug into the grid, which is alternating current AC. You convert that AC current to DC, and then you convert the DC voltage to the DC voltage that the car wants. That's a bunch of expensive power electronics that are combined into one module, converting the AC to the DC, and then the DC to a different voltage. In our next gen product, we separated the AC to DC conversion from the DC to DC conversion. They're separate modules within a cabinet. If you remove all the AC to DC conversion and put DC to DC conversion in there, you've built a box that needs to plug into a DC grid, but you've essentially doubled the capacity and cut the cost per watt of that box by about half. I mean, it is a dramatic reduction in the cost of charging infrastructure by building a DC-only solution that plugs into a DC grid. Well, unlike the grid we all use every day in our lives, DC grids aren't laying around standards-based. You need a partner that's building DC grids as bespoke projects for factories, AI data centers, and large charging depots. Autonomous vehicle charging depots would be a great use case for this. So that was the catalyst for partnering with Eaton. We needed someone that was building DC grids that had real market presence worldwide that we could partner with to deliver the value that this next-gen architecture that we developed could deliver to the market. So that was innovation number one. After talking to Eaton, we got so interested in working with one another, we unlocked an equivalently impactful innovation on the home side where I, for example, have an old house that has 125 amp service and I have two EVs and no home charger. That's because where I live, it would cost me 10 grand and nine months from PG&E to get a service upgrade to 200 amp service. So I could charge my two EVs. I just charge at work. With Eden, they have a smart breaker and a smart panel technology, along with our next gen home charger, which allows you to intelligently manage the energy that's being consumed in your home and avoid that panel upgrade, avoid that service upgrade. And this is all very retrofittable, low-cost technology compared to what's available today it also fully enables vehicle to home and the big use case here today is power outages i was at home at christmas we had big storms i had three power outages on christmas day it was miserable and you know went out for a walk because couldn't sit in the house and you hear a few homes with big generators blaring but everybody else is dark with this technology we've developed collaboratively with eden you can now power your home from your EV when the power goes down. We're rolling that out as we speak. We've announced it. The architecture is available. We'll probably be launching it in partnership with some big vehicle OEMs as well as on our own. But yeah, we've talked about this.

And does anyone, do you have any patents around that? Or does anyone else have patents around that?

Yeah, Eaton has patents and we have patents both. But this is a, both examples are exactly what we hope to get out of the partnership, which is a one plus one is greater than two. We can unlock innovation that we could not unlock on our own, nor can our competitors unlock by themselves. So we've really got a competitive advantage through this partnership with Eaton. On the commercial side, we also now have access to a company that's thousands of times bigger than us in terms of market cap and hundreds of times bigger in terms of Salesforce. So we've got access to a very large go-to-market engine that we didn't have access to before, both in Europe and North America, and quite frankly, other regions around the world, if we want to take advantage of it, that can bring our technology to market and capture opportunities we would not have had the sales coverage to capture on our own. So there's a lot of positive benefits to this partnership.

Okay.

And so, Manzi, if we sort of take the big picture, kind of what Rick's talked about, and just still down to the financials, when you guys do report, what are the KPIs investors should be looking at is it ports under management is it the growth of software revenue kind of break those down for us and give us sort of what is like what's the KPI the investors will show the growth that you guys have been speaking about yeah so the we think that the key KPIs for the model that we look at are the number of active ports under management there as of last quarter was about 400,000 and why it's important is because these active ports give us recurring revenue that's the second KPI the subscription revenue and the subscription revenue growth. As of last quarter, we are at about almost $170 million of annual recurring revenue in that subscription line. If you just take annualized Q3 revenue, which is, you know, we get paid up front for these two-year contracts. It's very sticky with low churn. So it's a key component of our overall business model. And the margins, and the gross margins Associated with them on a gap basis. It was 63% on a non-gap basis. It's even higher than that So and the margins have been consistently growing Because the cost don't need to scale along with revenue. These are all you know pretty stable costs And the last KPI that I'm significantly consistently focused on is cash usage And getting to cash flow breakeven as soon as possible.

We've reduced the the average cash burn to half in these this year compared to last year and we're gonna continue to make progress on that okay so it'll be as you talk about these win rates the fitting out of the customer the competitive set the net ads on a quarterly basis we see should start to move up and to the right especially against the easier comps you talked about that's sort of the power of the model correct okay okay every hardware piece that we sell comes with a subscription okay and can you talk about you know pricing power versus Is inventory sort of where you guys are at? So how do those sort of play together? What are the competitive dynamics around pricing in general across the space?

So I think pricing has been pretty stable. You know, I think the bigger knob in the equation we have in terms of gross margin is reducing our product cost, which, again, a lot of the innovation we're delivering not only differentiates our products, but also reduces the cost of our products, which will move our gross margin up. So I don't think we have a lot of power to increase pricing.

But we're also not seeing a lot of pressure to decrease pricing Okay, okay, perfect and then since months since you talked about balance sheet and cash management Why don't you give us kind of walk us through the debt transaction you did recently?

Yeah, so it was a huge Transaction for us. We did a debt exchange with our existing lender We had about three hundred and forty million dollars of outstanding debt as of the beginning of October We exchanged that for we brought it down by more than half to about one hundred and fifty seven million we extended the maturity from 2028 to 2030 so that gives me more time to to figure out what what we need to do there it reduces interest expense on an annualized basis by about 10 million cuts it in half and there was a conversion premium associated with change of control at about a hundred and twenty five percent with the older note that goes away. So it's significantly better for us, gives us a lot more flexibility from an operating standpoint, and we got about a 33% discount or write-off on that loan in exchange for kind of making it from a convertible note to a senior secured. So overall we think this is this is a great transaction for us and gives us a lot more financial flexibility.

Okay.

And Rick, you talked about leveraging cost of revenue can you kind of talk us through is it asian manufacturing that you sort of the change you've made or like what are the inputs to or where do you have leverage there in cost of revenue yeah so part of its asian manufacturing um you know when moncy talks about cash management one of the things we'll continue to leverage is this release of inventory we've had on the balance sheet to generate cash and in our when i took over as ceo we had a very aggressive demand forecast with our manufacturing partners, and they weren't the lowest cost manufacturing partners. We've now worked through all those commitments. So the inventory we're holding now, we expect that to deplete and release cash onto the balance sheet. And we've now redone our entire manufacturing strategy to move to much lower cost regions with lower cost manufacturing partners that also do some of the co-development work with us. So EV charging equipment is expensive to develop. You've got a lot of prototype costs, a lot of regulatory approvals. We've now got manufacturing partners that have capabilities to do some of the more routine work in those areas and take that on on our behalf. So we've got a kind of what I call a capital light hardware development model coupled with the same partners that manufacture that equipment and volume production. The other big lever we have on gross margin and product cost is the parts that go into a charger, what we call the bill of materials. And our next-gen chargers are all significantly less expensive on a cost-per-watt basis than anything we've built historically. So you combine the fundamental cost reduction as a result of a better design with this low-cost manufacturing, and we've got a lot of opportunity to drive gross margin up on the hardware side of the business as we move through this year and into next year.

And Monty, what's the latest There's a second half of next fiscal year investors should start to see that step up the step up.

Yeah, so overall step up. Yes But but we expect to you know The subscription line should continue to improve like I said There's a lot of economies of scale there and leverage that we can we can get it take advantage of But on the hardware margin side a big step up is Some later next year.

Cool. And then if we move down think of statement R&D you talked about maybe, you know, asset light or capital light development. What makes up the bulk of that R&D line? Is that your engineers? Will there be leverage there? Or is it more sales drives the leverage there? What's the right way to think about those costs?

So R&D definitely won't scale with revenue. I think we're at a pretty steady state position there now. And I can't give you the exact, maybe Motsy can, but it's split between software development and hardware development. And on the software side, it's almost all head count driven whereas on the hardware side it's probably about half head count driven and half NRE, non-recurring engineering cost, prototype cost, regulatory approval cost driven. And I expect that to stay pretty constant with where we're at today.

Okay and then if we look at sales and marketing you know incentives there and then G&A if we think about like how do you think about fixed versus variable cost there and that how does that get you to adjusted to leave it a break-even?

Yeah, so G&A is a small portion. It's about 10%. Most of it is headcount. There is some fixed component in terms of audit fees and listing fees and obviously public company expenses and things like that. Sales and marketing is one that we think we can get a lot more leverage out of as we use channel to scale and our Eaton partnership to scale. So that level, that piece will also not have to grow. So with sales, with revenue, we'll be able to get a lot more leverage there.

We've got about 10 minutes left. If anyone in the room has any questions.

How many, back to your R&D discussion, how many engineers do you have? Are they onshore?

So we've got engineers in Europe, North America, and some in Asia, mostly Europe and North America. And I would say probably about 400 total engineers in the company between hardware and software. And I think, again, the majority of those, I think about 250 of those are in software and the balance are in hardware.

Yeah. A large portion of the software engineer is out in India.

Oh, excuse me. Yeah, how could I forget? Yeah, we have a, I think the majority of our total employment base is in India now. And we expect to continue anything we do growth-wise in terms of headcount, which won't drive the op-ex expense up, will largely be focused in India.

And are you selling any, what percent of your revenues are outside the U.S.?

15% are in Europe, 85%.

And I expect that to change significantly as we move into the late part of this year and next year as we bring all these new products to Europe that we haven't had available to address the European market in the past.

I read recently that PYD a couple months ago announced or showed a demonstration of a very fast charging system. Is that a threat? Are they close to rolling that out? like China.

So we can do the same thing. That's megawatt charging. So that big power box I alluded to earlier, that can deliver megawatt charging. And quite frankly, I don't think the use case is passenger vehicles. I think the use case is large trucks that need to charge on the road. And this is a good example of where Europe is far ahead of North America. And we've got absolutely, we've got engaged partners there that are very familiar with this next gen architecture that are, you know, very interested in deploying it to charge big trucks that are on route that need to charge between their point of origin and destination. I think that's the killer use case.

And can you touch on the business in Europe versus the business in the United States? Because I think Europe was, you kind of got there by acquisition. Is it software on other chargers plus sales coming online now? And is that software model something you can kind of port to the U.S. as other providers?

Absolutely. So our presence in Europe was partially organic and then through two acquisitions that happened before Monsi and I took these roles. One was a software company that provided solutions to manage public DC fast chargers. And then the other was focused on the fleet space, specifically metro buses, telematics for electric buses. So we've now taken all that software and integrated it into one modern, scalable, hybrid cloud platform that's available to all of our customers, and we haven't had hardware solutions to address the European market until the new innovations I've been alluding to come to market, which is all going to happen this year. then I would expect to see us really drive some growth in Europe, just because the overall government support macro conditions policy regulatory are more favorable in Europe than they are in North America right now.

And what's the competitive landscape like in Europe versus the U.S.? If the regulatory environments are a little better, are competitive then it's more difficult because there hasn't been the thinning out of competition?

It's different. So if you look at the competitive landscape, there's almost nobody like us that does both hardware and software. And if you look at industries where a proprietary hardware software stack has won, we look a lot like those industries. And I'm firmly convinced that EV charging will be a case where a proprietary hardware stack delivers the most value. But you have a market today where you've got standalone software companies that manage chargers, and you've got standalone hardware companies that just sell chargers that can be managed by whatever software the customer happens to choose to manage those chargers. You're clearly, on a standards-based model, not unlocking the value you can unlock if you do what we do, which is deliver both hardware and software. With that said, our software can manage any make-up charger. So if our customers want to multi-source charging hardware from different vendors for whatever reason, they're free to do that and still use our software to manage those chargers.

What extent do tariffs take the bottom line?

Excuse me, sir? Yeah, tariffs are a, yeah, they've hurt us, no question. It's a definite issue. So it affects it.

If you deploy in Europe, are the goods being imported directly?

Yeah, yeah. We don't go through U.S. tariffs if we're selling in Europe, absolutely.

To the extent that the business grows in Europe.

That's less impacted, absolutely, yes.

And you talked about inventory, kind of sell down, sell through, cash flow. How should investors think about what's in inventory? Why is inventory sort of kind of flatlined where it is versus your expectations? Like, what's the right way to think about what's in there, customer demand? What should we see in the next couple quarters?

Yeah, so back in the 2022 timeframe, you know, COVID days, all the hype around EVs, the company drove the supply chain really hard and made a lot of big commitments. and we've been working those through for the last two years. We've been trying to slow down the incoming inventory. We've been trying to not take inventory if we can without damaging our relationships with our key partners. We are at the end of all the inventory coming in. In fact, just recently, we've been having conversations about needing to build more of specific products to meet demand and that's been quite refreshing because we haven't had to do that in a while. So we've now lived up to all of our commitments with our supply chain partners. The inventory is no longer flowing into the company, especially for products where we have enough inventory already. So now we expect to start to see that inventory released onto the balance sheet of the form of cash as we sell it down. And the new commitments to inventory will almost exclusively be for the new products, with a few exceptions, where we've got demand for some of the older products where we've actually run out of inventory.

Okay, and that gets you to positive you could you could be positive cash flow before positive adjusted EBIT. What's the timing of those?

Exactly. Yeah, so we haven't talked about the timing of adjusted EBIT up positive But we make steady progress each quarter to get there And we've said before on our earnings calls that We will need to see some level of revenue growth for us to get their margins are improving. OPEX has been pretty steady However, because we're a capitalized business model, as Rick alluded to earlier, we really don't have much capex at all. And we have the ability to really generate cash from our working capital by bringing down our inventory. We can actually start generating cash and become cash flow positive before we get to EBITDA break-even. And we've been making steady progress towards that as well. Mostly because of, you know, really high inventory levels and the subscription piece of the business which generates cash flow Before so we get paid up front for for the entire two-year worth of contracts So that actually helps with working capital as well.

Okay, and just lastly you talked about a return to growth in the most recent quarter You know, there's some one time maybe they drove that with the EV tax credit $7,500 going away in the home business But how should investors think about growth going forward the comps you guys have set a place these your comps What sort of and the business wins you're talking about in Europe? Like how does that all come together?

So the guide we had for this quarter that ends on January 31st was another growth quarter and we expect that trend to continue Okay, one last call anything from the room. Okay, why don't we leave it there? Yeah, thanks for your time Thank you Chris. Thanks for having us. Everybody wants to track us down and ask more questions. We're around all day