Flipturn builds the software control center for EV charging - so the buses, vans and big rigs going electric actually leave the depot in the morning.
It is not yet light over a freight depot somewhere in North America. Forty electric trucks sit in rows, each tethered to a charger. No driver is watching. No dispatcher is pacing. Last night one charger silently faulted, another tried to pull more power than the site could spare, and a third quietly negotiated its rate down to dodge a demand charge. By the time the first driver clocks in, all forty trucks are full. Nobody will ever know how close that was. That invisible save is the whole product.
Flipturn is a New York software company with around two dozen employees and a deeply unglamorous obsession: making sure electric fleets are charged. Not selling chargers. Not pouring concrete. Just the layer of software that sits above the hardware and refuses to let the morning go wrong.
"Flipturn marries our vehicle data and EV charger data to provide a view into our charging ecosystem."
- Chris Wiley, Fleet Director, City of SeattleEveryone loves the idea of electric freight. The brochures are beautiful. The press releases practically write themselves. Then the trucks arrive, and reality sets in: chargers are made by a dozen different manufacturers who barely speak to each other, electricity bills spike when too many vehicles pull power at once, and a single dead charger overnight can strand an entire route. The hardware was the easy part. Keeping it running was the part nobody wanted.
Fleets had spreadsheets. They had a manufacturer app for one brand of charger and a different app for the next. They had no single answer to the only question that mattered at dawn - is everything charged? - until something didn't charge, and a truck sat idle, and the math on going electric started to look a lot less friendly.
Without real-time visibility into charger health, fleets risk vehicles not being fully charged by morning - which means lost revenue. Without control over charger power output, they overpay for electricity or blow past the site's capacity. Two failure modes, both expensive, both happening while everyone sleeps.
Katie Siegel ran engineering teams at Samsara, the fleet-telematics company, where she watched operators wrestle with the operational mess of going electric and saw regulation pushing the whole industry that way whether it was ready or not. Sashko Stubailo ran engineering at Stripe, building payment systems that moved billions without falling over. One knew fleets. One knew how to make boring infrastructure reliable at scale. In 2022 they decided the missing piece wasn't a better charger - it was better software.
Their bet was almost contrarian in its modesty. Don't build hardware. Don't pick a side in the charger wars. Build something that talks to every charger through the open OCPP standard, sits above all of it, and answers the dawn question automatically. In an industry addicted to announcing new chargers, they decided to make the existing ones actually work together.
"Fleets ultimately care about their bottom line and their cost per mile. There are a lot of problems that people immediately run into."
- Katie Siegel, Co-founder & CEOFlipturn connects to any OCPP-compliant charger, regardless of who manufactured it, and pulls the chaos into a single screen. From there the software does the unglamorous work: it watches charger health with AI-powered diagnostics and flags faults before a driver finds them; it balances load and mitigates demand charges by controlling how much power each charger draws - often squeezing more vehicles onto the same grid connection without an expensive transformer upgrade; it handles driver payments and third-party billing with no app to download; and it ties charger data back to vehicle telematics so a fleet can see range, schedule, and cost-per-mile in one place.
Real-time charger health with AI diagnostics and remote troubleshooting. Catch the fault before the driver does.
Automated load balancing and demand-charge mitigation - lower bills, no blown capacity, often no transformer upgrade.
Charger data meets vehicle telematics: charge scheduling, range prediction, and cost-per-mile in one view.
Driver payments and third-party billing with no app required, plus access controls and utility cost reporting.
Hardware for load management at large depots - dynamic power management across many chargers at once.
Flipturn doesn't manufacture a single charger. That's the point. By staying hardware-agnostic, it makes the chargers fleets already bought - from any brand - cooperate. The boring middle layer turns out to be the valuable one.
The strongest evidence Flipturn offers isn't a feature - it's a number that means nothing happened. 99.99% reliability, proven at sites with hundreds of chargers. The customer list reads like the trucks you never think about: Republic Services hauling waste, Purolator running last-mile delivery, Swift Transportation and Werner Enterprises on the long haul, the City of Seattle's municipal fleet, and grocery logistics for Loblaws. These are operators who measure success in routes completed and pennies per mile, not press releases.
The customer roster, plus the people writing the checks, tells the same story twice.
"Flipturn offers an innovative, fleet-first solution crucial to accelerating EV adoption."
- Caitlin Bolnick Rellas, Partner, CRVThe pitch is not idealistic in the usual way. Flipturn isn't asking anyone to care about the planet to make the math work - though the planet is the eventual beneficiary. The argument is simpler and harder to refuse: a diesel fleet works because filling up is trivial. An electric fleet only works when charging becomes equally trivial. Until the software makes charging boring, electrification stays a pilot project. Flipturn's job is to retire the pilot.
The trucks keep coming - last-mile vans, school buses, refuse trucks, and increasingly autonomous fleets that can't tolerate a human improvising at the charger. Each new electric vehicle is another plug that has to be full by morning. The software layer that guarantees it isn't a nice-to-have. It's the difference between a fleet that electrifies and one that gives up.
Return to that depot. The sky is lighter now. The first driver unplugs a truck that is full, climbs in, and leaves. Then another, and another, forty in all, on time. The faulted charger from the night was caught and flagged. The demand charge was dodged. The site never tripped its limit. None of it required a person, because the software did what diesel never needed software to do - it made the energy show up, quietly, on schedule.
That is what Flipturn sells. Not chargers, not hardware, not a slogan. A morning that goes right. Do it once and it's luck. Do it 99.99% of the time, across hundreds of chargers, for fleets that move the country's freight, and it stops being luck. It starts being infrastructure.