Two years as Head of US Strategy at Swobbee — the market plan, the investor narrative, the first team, and the policy wins that unlocked ~$4M in follow-on funding.
Swobbee · Jersey City station · 2025
Funding Supported
Policy Strategy
Events Supported
Pilots Launches
The challenge
Swobbee had built one of Europe's most mature battery-swap networks for light electric vehicles — but the company was nearly invisible to US operators, investors, and city transportation departments who were rapidly making long-term infrastructure decisions without them.
The engineering was done. The narrative wasn't. Fleet operators weren't asking "does swapping work?" — they were asking "do you have regulatory approvals," which would take much longer to secure than the team anticipated. Moreover, the existing deck did a poor job of aligning specific problems to specific users, and the relevant business models.
The Approach
I came in to start building partnerships while regulatory approvals were pending. We connected to communities most in need of their solutions, the places in NYC hit hardest by battery fires – Chinatown. I secured the first in-person meeting with a community organization in the US which quickly followed with many more to a variety of last-mile logistics and food delivery organizations.
From there, the work compounded:
Rewrote the investor narrative around unit economics, not station counts
Mapped the regulatory and incentive landscape across five priority states
Defined a business model strategy for university deployments, pilots underway as of 2026.
Negotiated three pilot agreements with transit authorities.
I helped identify and write the proposal to secure a $3.7M federal grant.
Did the busy work of identifying 100s of possible site locations in NYC to increase team's bandwidth and momentum of full roll-out.
Swobbee · Battery Cabinet
Outcome
By end of 2025, Swobbee had completed its US beachhead — three operating pilots, scaling to a larger roll-out, a dedicated US team, a policy footprint in five states, and ~$4M in funding from grants and follow-on funding from a combination of strategic and institutional investors.
More importantly, the company had a story that worked in American rooms — one that led with operator and rider economics and safety.