Steve
Kelley

When Everyone Else Is Waiting for the Utility, He's Already Charging

Six startups sold. One Engie acquisition. A decade of watching clean-energy ventures stall not because the technology failed, but because the grid moved too slowly. By October 2025, Steve Kelley had run out of patience for utility delays and had landed at L-Charge - the Sunnyvale company that decided the fastest path to fleet electrification was simply removing the grid from the equation.

Kelley's move to L-Charge wasn't a departure from his career arc - it was the logical endpoint of it. He spent his first twenty-plus years proving, company by company, that the bottleneck in clean energy was rarely the technology. It was the infrastructure gatekeepers. At Green Charge Networks, the company he co-founded in 2009, the pitch was energy storage that shaved peak demand charges without asking permission from utilities. When Engie bought an 80% stake in 2016, Kelley stayed on as Senior Vice President of e-Mobility - not to coast, but to scale.

Then came InCharge Energy. As Chief Revenue Officer, Kelley scaled revenues nearly tenfold and locked in partnerships with major fleet operators and OEMs. The playbook was recognizable to anyone who had watched him build Green Charge: identify the friction, remove it, scale hard. When L-Charge founder Dmitry Lashin went looking for a U.S. CEO to push the off-grid CaaS model nationwide, Kelley's track record had an obvious logic to it.

The Company He Now Runs

L-Charge was already doing something interesting before Kelley arrived. Founded on the insight that fleet electrification was failing at the power delivery step - not the vehicle step - the company built mobile, modular EV charging units that run on natural gas, CNG, or hydrogen. No utility hookup. No 18-month permitting process. A fleet could be charging in days.

The numbers that matter: over 189,000 charging sessions completed, 7.25 million kWh delivered, and more than 9 million electric miles powered - none of them dependent on a utility agreement. L-Charge crossed 1 million kWh in monthly generation capacity under Kelley's watch. The $10 million funding round closed in January 2026, led by Ultra Capital, validated what the company was building.

Ultra Capital partner Kristian Hanelt put it plainly at the time of the funding: "L-Charge is solving one of the most critical bottlenecks in fleet electrification today - access to power." Kelley's job is to make that solution ubiquitous.

The Career Arc Behind the Bet

Green Charge Networks is where Kelley's methodology crystallized. Founded in Santa Clara in 2009, the company used predictive software to help businesses reduce peak demand charges on utility bills. The first pilot went into a New York 7-Eleven in July 2011 - and survived Hurricane Sandy the following year. One store cut its utility costs by 56% during the 2013 summer heat wave. The Department of Energy noticed: a $12 million grant followed. Then $10 million from TIP Capital. Then $56 million from K Road DG. Kelley was there for all of it as SVP of Sales, contracting the company's first hundred customers.

Engie's acquisition in 2016 was validation and graduation simultaneously. Kelley transitioned into Engie Storage's leadership as VP of e-Mobility - a title that told you exactly which direction the industry was heading. He had already seen energy storage and EV infrastructure converge at Green Charge. What followed was a sequence of executive roles - at Socore Energy, DRI Energy, then InCharge Energy - each one pushing him deeper into the fleet electrification problem he now owns at L-Charge.

The Metric That Defines Him

Serial entrepreneurs accumulate exits. Kelley has six. But the number that characterizes his approach better than any exit is "nearly tenfold" - the revenue multiple he delivered at InCharge Energy as CRO. Not doubled. Not tripled. Ten times. In a sector notorious for long sales cycles and capital-heavy deployment, that kind of growth demands something specific: the ability to find fleet operators whose problem is urgent enough that the sell is obvious, and the infrastructure to fulfill rapidly.

That capability transferred directly to L-Charge. Off-grid charging targets exactly the fleets where the problem is most urgent: rideshare operators, last-mile delivery companies, port authorities, municipalities, and anyone else told their grid connection is 12 to 24 months away. Kelley has spent two decades learning that urgency is the only reliable driver of adoption in energy infrastructure. L-Charge has made urgency its entire product.

Twenty Years to This Moment

• Six successful startup exits across clean energy and mobility sectors over a 20+ year career
• Co-founded Green Charge Networks - raised $68M+ and acquired by Engie in 2016
• Scaled InCharge Energy revenues nearly tenfold as Chief Revenue Officer
• Led L-Charge to close a $10M funding round (Ultra Capital) within 3 months of joining as CEO
• L-Charge delivered 7.25M+ kWh off-grid, powering over 9 million EV miles
• Helped establish Green Charge Networks' first 100 commercial customers
• L-Charge surpassed 1 million kWh in monthly off-grid generation capacity