Tom Sun had an electric car and a problem that the car could not solve. He had nowhere to charge it at home. Buying into the future of transport had left him with a rather old-fashioned chore: finding somewhere to put the thing, then waiting. For an engineer accustomed to making software do useful work, this was an invitation. Somewhere nearby, another person's charger was sitting idle. The electricity existed. The equipment existed. The arrangement between people needed work.
In 2018, he co-founded AmpUp to help make that arrangement. Its early proposition was easy to explain: let people share their private chargers with drivers who needed them. The familiar comparison was Airbnb. A driveway would become a small piece of public infrastructure, available on its owner's terms. It was a good opening idea. Sun would have to become comfortable changing it.
Today, as AmpUp's CEO and co-founder, he works on the less photogenic parts of electric motoring: permissions, payments, charger diagnostics, electrical capacity. These are the details that determine whether somebody gets home with enough charge. His career has become an extended argument for paying attention to them.
The engineer leaves the building
Sun's route to charging software ran through financial markets and large technology companies. He studied electrical engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His earlier work included Goldman Sachs and Jump Trading, followed by Yahoo and Twitter. Algorithms and software were already his trade before electricity became his business.
He moved to the United States with his family at 12. Years later, describing his decision to leave a large employer, he spoke about wanting greater responsibility for what he built. Inside an established company, other people could choose the project and make the decisions. Starting a business meant taking those decisions himself, along with the consequences.
He left Twitter around the end of 2017. AmpUp followed in 2018, then joined Y Combinator's Winter 2019 batch. The accelerator supplied an early institutional vote of confidence. It could not supply the correct business model by return email. Sun still had to discover where charging actually fitted into people's lives.
The original sharing idea encountered an awkward fact: a car takes time to charge. Drivers gravitated toward places where waiting was useful or at least bearable. Access, lighting, and something nearby to eat mattered. A dot on a map could establish that electricity was available. It could not make the next two hours pleasant.
A parking space has a timetable
AmpUp moved toward the places where vehicles already stayed: workplaces, apartment buildings, campuses, hotels, and fleet depots. These locations came with their own complications. Employees might need priority during office hours. Visitors might pay a different rate. A charger could be private in the morning and available to others later. Sharing required a rule book, preferably one nobody had to read.
By 2020, Sun was explaining a business that gave site managers control over those arrangements. His objection was disarmingly reasonable: “something as simple as fueling your car shouldn't be so hard.” Behind that sentence sat the unglamorous work of making different chargers behave coherently.
“something as simple as fueling your car shouldn't be so hard.”
Tom Sun, 2020
The product that grew out of this work, Community Manager, put charging operations in one place. Owners could manage stations, set prices, make reservations available, and schedule access. Drivers could find a station and pay through the app. A New York state charging-network fact sheet also documented power-rate control, equipment monitoring, and usage reports. This was software with a distinctly physical assignment.
Powerhouse Ventures invested in 2021. Its account of the business emphasized the coordination problem among hardware providers, installers, property owners, utilities, and drivers. Sun and fellow co-founder Timotej Gavrilovic were operating among all those parties. The charger was the meeting point; the software had to keep the meeting civil.
AmpUp's Y Combinator description eventually settled on a pleasingly domestic ambition: charging as simple and reliable as LED lights. It also identified a particular setting: private commercial locations where cars remain for six hours or longer. That is a different rhythm from a roadside fuel stop. The vehicle can take its time because its owner is already doing something else.
Learning the jobs around the code
Sun's work expanded along with the product. He has described taking on sales, operations, and customer service during the early years. That progression helps explain the practical language he uses about charging. A software feature has to survive the person trying to operate it, the customer paying for it, and the equipment at the other end.
Community Manager launched in March 2020. By February 2022, Sun pointed to the team's ability to deploy thousands of charging stations while working largely remotely as an achievement. He also expressed interest in Japan, drawn to its automotive and energy businesses and its capacity to adopt new technology. That was an expansion aspiration, rather than a claim that a Japanese network was already in place.
When fresh capital arrived in August 2021, Goodyear, Foothill Ventures, and TechNexus Venture Collaborative were among the investment firms involved. The announced purpose was to expand operational and technical capacity as sales demand grew. Automotive investors had a reason to care about software outside the vehicle: a useful electric car still depends on somewhere useful to plug it in.
The organizational picture grew more formal in 2024. Michael DiNucci joined as chief revenue officer, bringing experience from ChargePoint and a remit covering global sales and field operations. Sun was building a company in which knowing the charger, the installer, and the customer could matter as much as knowing the code.
Fifteen million dollars, and the daily test
In September 2024, AmpUp raised a $15 million Series A led by Touchdown Ventures. The round brought in investors including Autotech Ventures and MUUS Climate Partners. The company planned to put the funding toward market expansion and energy management. The business had moved a considerable distance from a stranger's available driveway.
AmpUp reported subscription revenue growth of more than 700% over the preceding two years, along with a tripling of managed ports and charging-port utilization. These were company-reported figures for that period. They describe commercial progress; they also raise the stakes of getting ordinary charging sessions right.
The board additions included Touchdown's Greg Bergamesco, Autotech's Ivy Nguyen, and AmpUp chief operating officer David Jackson. A founder's job changes when more people acquire formal responsibility for the company's direction. Sun's public humor suggests he can see the comedy in the new organization chart. Promoting an appearance by Jackson, he noted that operations, product, and technology reported to the COO, then added: “Don't let that make you wonder what I do…”
A 2025 partnership with Roundtrip EV supplied a concrete test of the operation. AmpUp would provide fleet-management software and manage charging for a business focused initially on electric waste-collection fleets. The planned tools included route visibility, vehicle information, alerts, and a view of the depot. Sun put the requirement plainly: “trucks must be ready to roll daily.”
A refuse truck has an unusually effective way of exposing a failed charging session: it leaves somebody's bin uncollected. In this setting, reliability acquires an address and a morning schedule. Sun's promise to drivers without home charging had grown into a promise to organizations whose vehicles had work to do.
The useful art of finding the fault
By April 2026, AmpUp described a testing process involving more than 60 real-world charging scenarios per unit. Engineering staff examined weak and strong network signals, multiple vehicles drawing power, and the ways chargers responded when available capacity changed. The company reported a 98.5% charging-session success rate. That measure concerns whether sessions work, rather than simply whether equipment appears online.
This testing also made the people doing it more visible. Technical program manager Lenny Kloo and engineering vice president Ganeshram Nagarajan explained the attention paid to hardware behavior, firmware, and connectivity. A charger that passes a specification still has to manage the particular surprises of a car park. Specifications are useful. Car parks are inventive.
Later that month, AmpUp announced KlooBot, a diagnostic system built into its EV Cloud platform. Its intended task was to interpret charger states and help identify causes of trouble within the existing workflow. Site hosts would receive diagnostic information without first becoming charging engineers. The rollout began with PRO subscribers; further installer functions were described as forthcoming.
For Sun, the product carried a familiar aspiration: reduce the effort needed to keep the equipment working. He described it as “a foundational part of our EV Cloud.” Even the product's name keeps a human presence in a discussion that could otherwise disappear into error codes.
The same practical concern appeared in AmpUp's May 2026 announcement about California certification. Its supported certified hardware covered five manufacturers: Autel, EVSE LLC, Leviton, StarCharge, and Zerova. Sun argued for giving customers equipment choice while meeting the state's measurement requirements. Transparent pricing and accurate receipts are modest pleasures, until a machine gets them wrong.
First find a plug. Then find the right hour.
The later chapter of Sun's business concerns the timing of demand. A vehicle parked for hours may have flexibility about when it takes electricity. AmpUp's Adapt & Earn pilot in Connecticut paid participating drivers through app credits for allowing short charging pauses during peak periods. Eversource was the utility partner. The state program listed an award of $1.695 million for AmpUp's project.
In July 2026, AmpUp announced that Connecticut regulators had selected the project to move toward deployment at scale. The next step was a joint statewide program proposal with utilities. The completed pilot covered roughly 1,000 ports at about 200 locations; 91% of participating drivers reported no inconvenience from the pauses. Those findings suggest useful flexibility inside an ordinary parking session.
of participating drivers reported no inconvenience during charging pauses.
There is a recognizable thread here. Sun began with a driver unable to use a charger at home. He built tools for sharing equipment, then for managing the places where cars spend time. Now the same parked vehicles offer a way to adjust demand on the electricity system.
For the driver, a successful version of this story remains wonderfully uneventful. Park. Plug in. Go about the day. Return to a car ready to leave. Sun's work lives inside those intervals, attending to the arrangements that make a promise made by a car possible to keep.