By Kurt Østrem, CEO at Zaptec
When we started Zaptec in 2012, the plan was not to build critical infrastructure for Europe’s energy system. We made a transformer. And it was going to solve everything. Yes, you read that right.
Zaptec CEO Kurt Østrem speaking at the Impact Summit in April 2026, sharing the company’s history and how lessons from the past are shaping Zaptec’s future. / Photo by: Ferskvare
In simple terms, a transformer is a device that changes the voltage level of alternating current. Most transformers are big and heavy, moving a lot of power but not very elegantly. Ours was extremely compact and could deliver very high voltage with fine control in a small space.
We started in oil and gas first, which was a natural starting point given our location on Norway’s rugged west coast near the North Sea.
So, we started with deep-sea drilling
Next, we worked with NASA,
and we explored high‑voltage energy transport,
and we even found ways to clean water more efficiently using plasma pulses.
On paper, it was visionary.
In reality, it was a classic drunken walk.
At one point we were more than 40 people, spending money on several parallel ideas, with almost no revenue. In total two local investors, employees, families and friends put around 150 million NOK into Zaptec before we had anything close to a real business.
EV charging first became a thing because Renault reached out to us. They needed help to charge their EV Zoe with the Norwegian grid. Then, this expanded to the idea of "why don't we make a smart EV charger that could charge just any electric vehicle?". So here we are.
This experience, from the early days of Zaptec, still shapes how I think about the company. And it is very relevant for what we are building now.
Around 2017, we were forced to ask a simple question:
What is closest to an actual product, with actual customers, in an actual market?
The uncomfortable answer was EV charging.
That was not obvious at the time. Investors were still asking whether electric cars would “really win” over hydrogen and other technologies. The easy choice, emotionally, would have been to keep the space projects, the water projects, the “big ideas” alive a bit longer. Not to cut them completely off, but continue the work.
Internally, it was painful. There were strong disagreements between employees, in the board, and among founders. We had invested a lot of identity in those projects.
But the conclusion was clear: if we wanted Zaptec to survive, we had to kill almost everything except EV charging. Focus the people, the capital and the attention on one thing. And then make it work.
Looking back, I think we should have done this much earlier. But that's easy to say ...
Most founders, including us, start out madly in love with their own idea. You see the future so clearly that you believe the job is to convince the market it needs this. It’s a much longer and harder path than starting with what the market actually needs and then building the product to match.
That shift, from “convince the world” to “serve a real need”, is what took us from a drunken walk to a real company.
Today, we are applying the same discipline of focus to something bigger: not the survival of Zaptec, but the role Zaptec will play in Europe’s energy system.
When people look at Zaptec from the outside, they still see boxes on the wall.
It’s understandable. A charger is a physical object. You can touch it. You can install it. You can compare prices and features.
But if we only think of the charger as a “product”, we are missing the point of what it is becoming part of.
Our job now is twofold:
Both of these are direct consequences of the focus lessons from our early years.
The first part is less visible, but at least as important: how all of these chargers actually connect to everything else.
We now have hundreds of thousands of Zaptec chargers in operation. For our customers and partners, those chargers are not standalone gadgets. They are connection points into a broader energy and software stack:
Again, the early Zaptec story is a good teacher:
You can improvise and be “ad hoc” for a while. But you cannot scale on it.
In the future, energy doesn’t just flow to the vehicle, but also from the vehicle, either back into the building or further, out to the grid.
Why does that matter?
Because the numbers are no longer theoretical. A typical EV battery holds something like one or more daily household energy consumptions. Multiply that across hundreds of thousands of cars, and you are talking about a resource that can actually help keep the lights on, keep costs down and make better use of renewable power.
That is why we have chosen to build the home charger Zaptec Go 2 with the hardware needed for bidirectional communication and accurate import/export metering from day one, even before the ecosystem is fully ready.
For me, this is the same kind of focus decision as in 2017, just at a different level:
We don’t chase every shiny opportunity. We design for the direction we are convinced the system is moving.
If I look back at our journey so far, the pattern is simple:
The EV charger is no longer a gadget. It is a gateway between your car, your building and the grid.
Our job at Zaptec is to make sure that gateway is:
We learned the hard way what happens when you try to do too much at once. The next part of our story is about doing fewer things, better, at a much larger scale.
That is how we intend to earn our place in Europe’s energy system.
We learned the hard way to focus on what really matters. In Club Zaptec, we share how that focus is shaping the future of EV charging and energy flexibility.