David Kim

Every week, somebody announces a number for electric vehicles. More chargers. More megawatts. More billions of public money waiting to be spent on plugs in parking lots. David Kim spent years inside that world - working with utilities and energy companies, designing EV charging programs, deploying smart grid infrastructure, planning energy efficiency initiatives - and he kept noticing the part that never made it onto the celebratory slide.

A contractor wins a lead. Then the slow part begins. Someone drives to the site. Someone sketches a layout. Someone digs through manuals to size the wire. Someone builds a bill of materials in one tool, a cost estimate in another, a proposal in a third, and emails the whole thing days later - by which point the customer has cooled off or gone elsewhere. The charger never got built because the proposal took too long. That is the unglamorous truth at the center of Monterra, the San Francisco company Kim co-founded in 2022 and runs as CEO.

Monterra is software that does the design before the engineer shows up. Feed it a site and it generates a layout, an infrastructure configuration, and a cost estimate in minutes. It auto-produces the deliverables that used to eat days: proposals, bills of materials, electrical schematics. It manages the back-and-forth of vendor quotes. It lets a field crew capture site data on a phone instead of a clipboard. The pitch is almost rude in its simplicity - the fastest way to build more chargers is to stop making people do the paperwork by hand.

The numbers Monterra reports are the kind that make a contractor lean in. Customers cut their lead-to-proposal cycle time by 50 to 75 percent. Win rates on those proposals climb by up to half. Throughput goes up two to five times. More than 2,000 projects have been designed on the platform. Kim is careful to frame all of it in the contractor's language, not the investor's: "By getting quotes and proposals in their customers' hands faster, our customers are increasing their sales velocity."

If you wanted to design a founder for this exact problem, you might draw up Kim's path on purpose. A graduate degree from MIT Sloan. Stops at Accenture, Boston Consulting Group, and The Cadmus Group - the kind of places that send you deep into the operational guts of an industry and pay you to find where the time leaks out. Then the years spent close to utilities and energy companies, watching how charging programs actually get planned and how smart grid infrastructure actually gets deployed.

Consulting teaches you to see a process as a series of handoffs, each one a place where a day disappears. Most people who learn that lesson write a deck about it and move on. Kim built a company to delete the handoffs. He did not do it alone. His co-founder, Kelson Reiss, serves as Monterra's chief product officer and brings the other half of the equation - the experience of shipping software to millions of users at leading technology companies. One founder knew exactly where the industry bled time. The other knew how to build the thing that would stop the bleeding.

In November 2023, Monterra stepped out of stealth and announced a $2.5M pre-seed round led by Base10 Partners, with Future Climate Venture Studio, Very Serious Ventures, and a handful of angels - including some of Monterra's own early customers, which is the kind of vote of confidence that does not show up in a press release headline but matters more than one. The plan for the money was exactly what you would expect from a founder who hates wasted steps: accelerate the deployment of charging infrastructure with automation and AI.

The reception in the trade press was warm. By August 2024, Monterra was being profiled as a platform empowering the builders of EV charging infrastructure, with a roster of contractors and developers - names like EV+ Charging, Harmon Electric, Solo Energy, Income Power, BT2 Energy, and ProCal - trusting it to design their work. Twelve or so people inside the company; thousands of projects flowing through the software.

There is a tell in how Kim builds. Monterra's team speaks daily with EV charging contractors - the field is the research lab. That is not a marketing line so much as a discipline. The temptation in climate tech is to fall in love with the macro story: gigatons, mandates, curves bending. Kim keeps dragging the conversation back to the person standing in a parking lot trying to figure out where the transformer goes and how much the trenching will cost. Solve that person's afternoon and the gigatons take care of themselves.

It is a useful reminder that the most consequential climate software does not always look like climate software. Monterra is, at its core, a tool that turns a slow proposal into a fast one. The fact that each fast proposal nudges the energy transition forward is the point - but it is the contractor's win rate, not the planet's, that closes the sale. Kim seems entirely comfortable with that. The mission and the spreadsheet are, in his telling, the same thing.

Plenty of climate startups begin with a technology looking for a use. Monterra began the other way around - with a problem Kim had watched up close for years, and a refusal to accept that "design and planning takes days" was a law of nature rather than a habit. The difference shows up in the kind of company he built. Monterra does not sell a flashy consumer gadget or a moonshot. It sells the removal of drudgery, priced in hours saved and proposals won. That is a deeply operator-minded way to enter an industry, and it tracks with a career spent finding the expensive inefficiencies inside other people's businesses.

It also explains the company's unusual relationship with its own users. When some of your earliest customers also write angel checks, it means the people who feel the pain most acutely have decided to bet on the cure. For a founder, that is the cleanest signal there is. The macro tailwinds - booming EV demand, public charging mandates, billions allocated to infrastructure - are real, but they are also the easy part of the story. The hard part is the contractor who needs to get a credible proposal out the door before lunch. Kim built for the hard part, and let the tailwinds do their own work.

What makes him distinctive is not a single dramatic insight. It is the discipline of staring at an unsexy workflow until the value falls out of it. The EV transition will be won and lost in a thousand small efficiencies like the ones Monterra automates - and Kim is one of the few founders who decided that the boring middle of the process, the design and the quoting and the paperwork, was worth a company.