ROCSYS enables charging robotaxis without humans: Crijn Bouman, CEO & Co-founder at ROCSYS

0:00Scaling Europe:Hello and welcome back to the Scaling Europe show. I'm Seb Johnson. Thank you for following along. Today we've got a great conversation from our time at Slush and the conversation is supported by Databricks, whose unified platform power source on everyone's FY2026 target, becoming a truly AI-driven company, and Harmonic. Harmonic is the startup discovery engine used by leading VCs across the world to find their fund returners. Check them both out. Thank you. Hello and welcome back. I'm here with Crijn, who's an amazing European entrepreneur, building a really cool company here from Europe. Can you talk a bit about what you've built and how it's gone so far?

0:34Yeah, so maybe I can start with where the why, how the company came about. So I'm a repeat founder. I've previously founded a company called Appion and we made charging equipment for electric cars. That company was acquired by ABB and in my last year there I had the experience that we had a customer who was very secretive about what they were doing with or equipment and so I had to go to San Francisco and I booked an extra day and I visited them and it turned out to be a self-driving company so and this was 2017 so it was the first time I came to a warehouse and they built like an indoor test track and it was the first time I saw automated mobility and it's like super amazing yeah they were using our chargers to charge the car still by hand and that sort of in the end inspired the whole concept of Roxas or current company

1:22Scaling Europe:Amazing. And yeah, I guess like what is the problem that you're solving, right? You were kind of building EV charging, but for the new wave and, you know, kind of rooted in robotics, right? Yeah, correct. So the problem actually comes from the origin story that I realized, okay, first of all, autonomous mobility is really cool and important to the world. And secondly, if we take the driver out of the vehicle, the built world or the infrastructure is not compatible. The interface is broken because everything in the built world is built from the assumption that there is a driver behind the wheel.

1:55So charging, which was my background, of course, but also entering a parking garage, going into a car wash. The interface is broken if you take out the driver. So if you want to make autonomous mobility succeed at scale, you basically need to fix the interface. So there needs to be a company that fixes the interface. And that's Roxas. So starting with charging, so keeping the autonomous vehicle fleet charged in a hands-free manner.

2:19Scaling Europe:And what stage are you at of product development commercialization? Early commercialization. So basically we have revenue, we have customers. We started in more of the behind-the-fence autonomous vehicle market, logistics and port terminals with automated vehicles. And last year, we actually won a first major contract in RoboTaxi space. And we are in multiple contract discussions after that. But it launched us into the RoboTaxi space, and we're a Series A stage, basically. Amazing. And when you look to the future, RoboTaxi has got to be the biggest opportunity, right? Or are you still looking at the early stuff that you saw traction with?

2:56So, autonomous mobility in general is like a gigantic opportunity. So, like summing up all the use cases, we come to like a 500 billion TAM for our product. But it starts with RoboTaxi at scale. So, I mean, we started in more like the behind the fence logistics where we're still active. That's a large market, but not as large as RoboTaxi. And RoboTaxi is about a 3 billion TAM. And that's happening since last year. Last year was sort of the chat GPT moment for RoboTaxi in the US and China. Hopefully coming to London soon. So, yeah, coming to Europe.

3:32Scaling Europe:What have you learned from your first time founding? You know, you built in this space, you built a new recharging company. What have you learned that you're now applying to your second time? There's probably like a thousand things. Yeah, so, I mean, like, validate as fast as you can. You know, get your product out there. Just learn from the market. I think that's super important. A lot of tactics, like how do you run a business, how do you build a business, how to deal with investment. As a founder, first time founder, you need to be an expert in like 20 domains in parallel, which you've never dealt with before.

4:08So there's all kinds of things. But I would say be agile, just learn, just go out to the market and validate. Validation is people paying for your product. So if people are paying for your product, that's the ultimate validation. Try to get there as fast as possible.

4:25Scaling Europe:And can we talk about your journey and experience building a hardware robotics company? It's very kind of frontier technology that we're talking about. Absolutely. And you've been building that from Europe, from the Netherlands. Yeah. Did you ever think about building anywhere else? Well, we didn't think at first, but our main customer base now is actually in the United States. But Europe has amazing tech talent. So basically our technology hub is really in Europe. Today our customer front end is more in the U.S. than Europe because autonomous mobility is just moving faster in the U.S. But it's a global play.

5:01Autonomous vehicles will be on any continent. And I think Europe can leverage the tech talent that's there. And that's also what we do. We have like a super amazing tech team in the Netherlands.

5:12Scaling Europe:And that's what I hear frequently from founders is that the product, the research, development, And those teams can be truly global, you know, standard leading from Europe. But the commercialization is often in the U.S. And, you know, generally true for like software, but it's interesting to hear that it's the same for you. Are you looking at China at all? Looking at China, but more for inspiration. China is probably maybe even ahead of the U.S. at the moment in autonomous mobility. But we're not looking at China as a market today because it's, you know, Europe and U.S. together is already pretty...

5:46It's already a pretty big market. China's really difficult. So in my previous role, I actually spent a lot of time on China. Been to China a lot. But to build in China from Europe is really tough. There's a very tight political connection in China often. It's not easy. So it's not the challenge you want to take on or play at this stage of the company.

6:09Scaling Europe:Yeah. And do you see yourself moving out to the US and kind of having a permanent position there? Not planned currently, but I'm in the U.S. roughly every six to eight weeks. Wow, okay, so frequently. Yeah, frequently. And what's it been like fundraising? Because this is a, yeah, it's a hard problem to solve, hardware, deep tech. We haven't seen levels of deep tech investment, especially in Europe compared to the U.S. I think they invest something like 20 times the amount of deep tech that we do in Europe. Yeah. How have you found that to date? I mean, the biggest difference I see is like the check sizes are larger.

6:43you know the outcomes are also larger if I look back since I've been in the space for quite some time like when we started Appion there was hardly I don't think there was any deep tech VC in Europe there just was like there were very few VCs and they were all software focused and and there were no deep tech VCs I mean today we are in much better shape I think there are a couple of really good deep tech VCs in Europe so it's improved a lot but still if you compare to the US especially like ambition level, ticket size

7:16Scaling Europe:it's larger, ambition level is higher What have been some of the most challenging things about building from Europe? From Europe with a front end in the US market I mean it's very difficult to run a company on two continents in my previous roles I also had that experience of like it's not like you get the thing right you spend one time effort to get it right it's like a constant attention so try to act as one team across the Atlantic it's a constant challenge it's solvable it's just it just as a founder you need to realize like this needs daily attention to make sure that the interface with two teams if it's US or China or somewhere else works and since we are in deep tech the the the front end operation is local right so in software sometimes you can scale with very minimal presence but in our case we need physical presence so yeah that's uh making sure the interface works is a it's a constant challenge but also a nice challenge you have it's uh and what about um has there ever been like regulatory hurdles either in this business or the last building yeah like i said like the forefront of technology and innovation ev charging is it's a relatively new technology but often requires a lot of like planning or permissions or making sure that you're compliant with the regulations how have you found that in europe um so yeah so i for autonomous vehicles on public roads uh open road legislation is like the key hurdle yeah u.s has cracked the nuts in like more than i think like 60 of the states they have some kind of framework uk is actually the first in the eurozone to have a nationwide yes autonomous driving regulation so that's why like waymo and and Wave and also Lyft, I think, is going to the UK next year.

9:01So in Europe, we are more fragmented, so it takes longer. But every country is working on that legislation, basically. In the US, it's mostly cracked. In China, it's very centralized, so it's easier not to crack. Europe is very decentralized with all our nations. Yeah, yeah.

9:20Scaling Europe:When you look at the autonomous vehicle market, people like Wave and Waymo, who do you think can come out on top? Who do you think is going to win? And do you have an advantage working with someone like Wave versus Waymo being European? Is there anything there? We work with everybody. I think there's not going to be one player wins all because there's so many segments, so many... RoboTaxis is just the first segment. There's autonomous delivery, which in China, by the way, is scaling like crazy already. Autonomous delivery. There's like a blends between car rental and autonomous mobility. there's automated valet parking also in China taking off so basically you get out of your car and the car will park itself in the parking structure those kind of use cases so yeah I think there will not be one winner I think in the end the end game is that there's going to be like a dozen of large like tech providers yeah but then there's also there's a it's a whole layered stack so basically you have the tech platforms you have the ride hail providers b2c then you have like the operations uh fleet financing operation stack the hub builders community so there are like companies like avis actually in the u.s are now stepping into the game of building hubs for robotex these service hubs so it's it's like uh there will be many players i think i mean when you look to the future of your business do you see yourself working more with those like hubs you know is your technology going to be deployed there or do you also think it will be you know on the road in people's homes do you have an area that you want to build and focus for first so the next five years we are based on we are focused on like the fleet application yeah which is mainly hubs so yeah that's a that's a key focus for now amazing and like what do you need to get right over the next couple of years to kind of take your business to the next level so what we need to get right is like um when when you're running a like an autonomous fleet money is earned on the road so the vehicle needs to be on the road all the time every downtime which is for example the time spent in a depot to get charged or to clean the vehicle it's just for robot actually it's a it's a dollar per minute roughly revenue loss if you spend so like getting the reliability right of the system like making sure that you know there's like 99.99 reliability of the solution vehicle comes in it comes out exactly after 30 minutes on the other side and and back to the road it's very predictable i think to get that right at scale like hundreds of locations with the exact same process at a really high reliability that's sort of the challenge we have to get right we are completely focused on that challenge yeah but it's it's it's not an easy yeah if it was easy there would be 10 other companies doing it so yeah and when you look at the you know you talked about like having the car cleaned and kind of maintained when you look at the future of these hubs of autonomous vehicles are you looking at other ways that you could solve it with robotics so you know not just the charging but also the cleaning the maintenance would you like to eventually be the full suite for maintaining a fleet or do you think it's better to focus just on the charging yeah so our product focus like five year out is like to be the complete technology stack for a lights out surface facility yeah so we start with charging it's the biggest problem they have you know that a vehicle is brought back to the depot because the battery is empty and because it's there they do like a quick clean or something like that a quick inspection of the vehicle but charging is like the crucial function so that's the first focus now that's we are 100 focused or i would say 90 focused on that and then on the inspection and interior clean so we have built like proof of concepts for automated interior clean etc so the vision is that within five years we'll have like completely lights out facilities where autonomous vehicles go in and come out cleaned, inspected and charged the other side.

13:11And that's sort of the concept of the fuel station of the future because if we look at the whole fleet in the world, you know, the step-by-step portions are going to be transitioned to autonomous mobility. Yes. And these three functions are going to be needed in any scenario. So it's sort of the tech stack for the gas station of the future.

13:30Scaling Europe:Amazing. Well, thank you so much for joining me. I think what you're building is like an amazing company, really at the forefront of cutting-edge technology. And it's amazing to see it being led by Europeans from Europe. Yes, absolutely. Thanks so much for having me.