Fleet electrification specialist Flexible Power Systems secures first external investment round bringing e-fleet management platform to market

Published on March 18 2024

UK based electric fleet software specialist, Flexible Power Systems (FPS), has completed a £2.7m financing round to accelerate commercialisation of its ground-breaking, real time EV and charger management platform for commercial vehicle fleets, ‘FPS Operate’.

Originally developed for the John Lewis Partnership but expanded to address the needs of all commercial vehicle fleets, ‘FPS Operate’ uniquely integrates and operationalises charge points, vehicles, building energy management and logistics software systems. The data is used for automated vehicle-task matching, smart charging, reporting and managing uptime, improving EV RoI.

“Every day there are press stories about EV range variability or charge point failures disrupting commercial vehicle operations. ‘FPS Operate’ has been developed over the last 4 years to allow fleets to cope with this variability, dynamically and in real-time, to get-on with the day job”, said Michael Ayres, Managing Director, FPS.

The financing is supported by a combination of equity investment and a £1.49m innovation loan from InnovateUK to support industrialisation of the ‘FPS Operate’ Platform and its application to an expanding range of commercial vehicle use cases.

“Innovate UK innovation loans help to deliver growth and scale of businesses through innovation and we are pleased to make this funding available to a business with high growth potential in the net zero economy of the future”, said Scott O’Brien, Chief Investment Officer, Innovate UK.

FPS has previously invested more than £4m in technical development of its unique software platforms.

“Many fleets are only now getting to grips with significant challenges like power availability, variable range and increased scheduling complexity that can come with an EV transition. We foresaw many of these issues several years ago and began investing in FPS Operate to provide fleet operators with the solution to address them.  As the market matures, we have decided that the time is right to enter debt and equity markets to fund commercialisation”, said Allan Gray, Chief Financial Officer, FPS.

‘FPS Operate’ – Automation to Improve EV RoI and Uptime

The platform has been built bottom-up for commercial vehicle operations and so is highly integrated with the systems that fleets use to manage their vehicles. The platform couples with EV charge points, vehicle telematics, building metering and a range of Transport Management Systems to provide a ‘whole system’ solution.

The benefits of this approach are:

  • Clarity – all relevant data in one place enabling automated reporting and alerts
  • Efficiency – with automated vehicle task matching, charger selection and smart charging
  • Resilience – remote and automated monitoring of vehicle and charger condition enables maximum operational uptime, visibility and performance monitoring.

The platform has been applied successfully to van and transport refrigeration fleets starting with the John Lewis Partnership and Waitrose with first truck deployments expected by Summer 2024.

“We have been working with FPS since 2020 on a range of electrification topics, from our van fleets to transport refrigeration unit hook-ups. Currently, nearly all of our commercial vehicle EVs and the majority of our transport refrigeration hook-ups are on their FPS Operate platform and FPS has become a key part of our transport decarbonisation journey”, said Justin Laney, Partner & General Manager Central Transport, John Lewis Partnership.

Proposed commercialisation activity will see FPS address EV adoption challenges in both the UK and EU.

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