• Failory
  • Posts
  • One step away from Nasdaq

One step away from Nasdaq

How EO Charging collapsed before the IPO

Author

Nicolás Cerdeira
April 30, 2026

Hey - It’s Nico.

Welcome to another Failory edition. This issue takes 5 minutes to read.

If you only have one, here are the 3 most important things:

A huge thanks to today’s sponsor, Galactic Fed. Fix inefficient growth and scale smarter with a free expert marketing audit.

Overpaying for Growth? AD

Get a Free Marketing Audit from the team behind 600+ growth campaigns

If revenue increases only when budget does, you’re scaling cost, not efficiency. We'll help you fix the math before scaling it further.

As a Failory reader, you've been selected for one of our limited 20-minute executive review spots.

You’ll meet with senior growth specialists who will:

  1. Assess your strategy

  2. Identify smarter growth levers

  3. Deliver a custom audit + action plan you can execute immediately

This Week In Startups

🔗 Resources

How to use Claude for GTM and pricing analysis

How to Compete with Legacy Incumbents

When the Dashboard Says ‘Go’ and Your Gut Says ‘No

Finally build that app this weekend (no-code hackathon) * 

📰 News

X announces a rebuilt ad platform powered by AI

Jack Dorsey-backed Vine reboot Divine launches to the public

OpenAI releases GPT-5.5, bringing company one step closer to an AI ‘super app’

💸 Fundraising

AI customer service startup Netomi raises $110 million

Parallel Web raises $100M to build a parallel web for AI agents

German robotics startup Sereact raises $110M

Israeli AI startup Aidoc raises $150m for medical tools

* sponsored

Fail(St)ory

IPO to Zero

EO Charging entered administration in April 2026 after a failed sale process and another liquidity crunch.

Five years earlier, it was preparing to go public at a $675M valuation.

This is what happens when you try to build a global infrastructure company before the infrastructure market is ready to behave like one.

What Was EO Charging:

EO Charging started in the UK in 2014 with a clear idea: fleets were going electric, but the infrastructure required to support them didn’t exist yet in a usable form. Logistics operators didn’t just need chargers. They needed depots that worked reliably every morning when vehicles rolled out.

EO built itself around solving that operational gap.

Instead of selling standalone chargers, the company handled the full rollout inside fleet depots. That included site planning, grid upgrades, hardware installation, charging management software, and ongoing maintenance support. 

If a company wanted to electrify hundreds or thousands of vehicles, EO could make the transition actually work on the ground.

By the early 2020s the company had deployed roughly 50,000 chargers across more than 35 countries. Its customers included Amazon, DHL, Tesco, Uber, and Go-Ahead.

At the center of the system sat EO Hub, the company’s charge point management platform. It coordinated charging schedules, integrated with fleet telematics tools, and helped operators manage power usage across entire depots. 

In August 2021 EO announced a planned Nasdaq listing through a merger with First Reserve Sustainable Growth Corp. The deal implied a $675M enterprise value and more than $150M in expected cash. At the time, EO presented itself as a European fleet-charging leader preparing to scale globally.

The listing never happened. The SPAC deal was terminated in March 2022 as market conditions shifted and growth infrastructure companies suddenly became harder to finance.

EO responded the way many climate infrastructure startups did during that period: It kept expanding.

In 2023 the company raised around $80M and pushed further into international markets including the US, Australia, New Zealand, and Italy. The strategy aimed to turn EO into a global fleet electrification platform before the category consolidated around a few dominant providers.

That expansion came with operational weight. Each new geography required local grid coordination, installation partners, permitting workflows, and support coverage across active depots.

By late 2025 the company started narrowing its focus again. EO exited the US market, sold its domestic charger manufacturing business, and shifted attention toward its cloud charging platform. The plan was to simplify the business and move closer to a platform-led model built around software and fleet charging management.

A few months later the company began a sale process. No transaction followed.

The Numbers:

  • 📅 Founded: 2014

  • 🌍 Chargers deployed: ~50,000 across 35+ countries 

  • 🏢 Major customers: Amazon, DHL, Tesco, Uber, Go-Ahead

  • 📈 SPAC valuation attempt (2021): $675M

  • 💵 Equity round (2023): ~$80M

  • 👥 Employees at administration: 93

  • ❌ Immediate layoffs: 69

Reasons for Failure: 

  • The business model looked scalable on slides, not in depots: EO sold a clean promise. One partner handles everything. Hardware, installation, grid coordination, software, uptime support. Fleet operators loved that. Startups usually don’t. Every depot became its own infrastructure project. Custom timelines. Custom engineering constraints. Custom integrations. That slows revenue recognition and eats working capital fast.

  • International expansion arrived before operational leverage: PwC administrators explicitly connected losses to overseas expansion across the US, Australia, New Zealand, and Italy. Expanding a hardware-plus-installation model internationally is not like opening a sales office. It means new permitting systems. New grid relationships. New subcontractors. New reliability expectations.

  • The SPAC collapse removed the fuel mid-flight: In 2021 EO expected more than $150M from a Nasdaq listing. That capital would have funded deployment capacity, hiring, and inventory. Infrastructure companies scale through balance sheets as much as through revenue. When the deal disappeared in 2022, the plan didn’t disappear with it. The company kept moving as if the market would reopen. It didn’t.

Why It Matters: 

  • Enterprise infrastructure customers scale depot by depot, not quarter by quarter. Their rollout speed quietly sets your growth ceiling.

  • One-stop-shop positioning turns you into the system integrator holding everyone else’s risk. Grid delays, installs, and timelines all land on your balance sheet.

Trend

Claude Goes After Designers

Claude Code already changed how a lot of people build software.

Now Anthropic seems to be aiming that same playbook at design.

In the last two weeks, it launched Claude Design and Claude for Creative Work, connecting Claude to tools like Adobe Creative Cloud, Blender, Autodesk Fusion, Ableton, SketchUp, Splice, Affinity, and Resolume.

AI design is not new. But a Claude Code-style workflow for design would be.

Why it Matters

  • Claude is moving into tools AI usually could only talk about: Blender, Fusion, Ableton, Adobe, and SketchUp are not simple text boxes. If Claude can help operate those tools through natural language, complex software becomes easier to use without making the software itself dumber.

  • The workflow is starting to connect instead of resetting every time: Most AI creative tools are impressive until you need to keep working. Claude Design plus the connectors suggests a different direction: generate the rough asset, refine it, export it, move it into Canva, Adobe, Blender, or Claude Code, and keep going.

Claude Design

Claude Design launched on April 17 through Anthropic Labs as a research preview for Claude Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise users.

The basic idea is simple. You describe what you need, and Claude creates a visual draft. That could be a prototype, a pitch deck, a one-pager, a slide, a dashboard, a landing page, a marketing asset, or some HTML-style output.

Then you keep working on it.

You can refine it through conversation, leave inline comments, make direct edits, use custom sliders, and export the result to formats people actually use: Canva, PDF, PPTX, standalone HTML, or Claude Code.

That matters because AI design tools often break down right after the first output. The first draft looks impressive, but then the real work starts somewhere else. Rebuilding it. Editing it. Making it on-brand. Turning it into something a team can actually use.

The Claude for Creative Work Connectors

To me, this was the more revealing announcement, even if it got less attention than Claude Design.

Anthropic announced a new set of connectors with tools across design, 3D, music, video, and live visuals. The list includes Adobe Creative Cloud, Blender, Autodesk Fusion, Ableton, Splice, SketchUp, Affinity by Canva, and Resolume.

This is what makes the Claude Design launch feel less isolated.

Claude Design gives Claude a visual workspace. The connectors give it a path into the professional tools where the work already happens.

Adobe brings Claude into the Creative Cloud world, including tools like Photoshop, Premiere, and Express. Affinity by Canva focuses on production tasks like batch image edits, layer renaming, exports, and custom feature generation inside the app.

Blender gives Claude access to its Python API and documentation. Autodesk Fusion lets people create and modify 3D models through conversation. SketchUp can turn a prompt into the starting point for a room, furniture setup, site concept, or 3D scene.

The common thread is simple: creative work is full of tool friction.

The tools are powerful, but they are deep, messy, and fragmented. A lot of the work is not some grand act of creativity. It is changing formats, finding the right command, applying the same edit twenty times, cleaning up files, moving assets around, or turning a rough idea into something editable.

The connectors allow Claude to handle all of these. So, it seems to me that design may be getting its Claude Code moment.

As Claude Design keeps improving, and more tools get connected to it, Claude has a real shot at doing for design what it already did for software engineering: make expert work faster, more accessible, and much easier to iterate on.

Help Me Improve Failory

How useful did you find today’s newsletter?

Your feedback helps me make future issues more relevant and valuable.

Login or Subscribe to participate in polls.

That's all for today’s edition.

Cheers,

Nico