Okay. I think we're good to start. Welcome, everyone, to the afternoon session of day one of the 28th Annual Needham Growth Conference. My name is Chris Pierce with the Needham Research Team. It's my pleasure to introduce Badar Khan, CEO of EVgo. Badar, I'd like to give you 30 seconds, a minute or so, just kind of introduce yourself, talk about your role prior to EVgo, kind of what led you to EVgo, and then we can have a fireside chat conference format, and we'll take some questions from the room as well.
Perfect. Yeah. So I've been with EVgo for about, all told, about three and a half years. First year and a half, I was there as the lead independent director and CEO for just over two years. And I have had a career in the power and utility space, so running a utility company, National Grid, up in the Northeast, and an energy company based in Texas for about 15 years. And EVgo I really came to just because I saw utterly enormous growth opportunity.
Okay. Calendar turn recently. Why don't you talk about 2025 accomplishments, challenges, just kind of lay the year out for investors, and then we can talk about 2026 and moving forward.
Perfect. Yeah. I mean, I think that, if it's okay, Chris, just take a broader step back. If I look back over the last three and a half years, revenue's grown through using the guidance that we provided for 2025. I'm not doing any selective disclosure for the Q4 in this fireside chat.
Yeah, I'm with you.
But if I look back, we've grown maybe 17-18-fold in revenues. If I look at our charging peers, I don't think anywhere is anyone anything close to that.
Okay. Can I stop you there? Do you have public peers? I mean, you sell electricity. Others sell equipment. How do you sort of rank yourself within that? And is that sort of still a struggle to kind of get over the hump with investors that your business model versus what people think of as charging peers?
That's a great question. We're at a great point. We are an operator of fast charging infrastructure. So we own and operate the equipment and the network, and we focus on fast charging. And so, to your point, many of our public competitors either sell equipment or software, or they operate in the slow charging space. So there really aren't any comparable peers that are public companies other than Tesla's charging business, which is obviously a very small part of the larger Tesla business. But if I look ahead to 2025, that revenue growth continues beyond just the sort of three-and-a-half period. Specifically, there are two things that I think really stand out here. One is usage per stall. We go to a tremendous level of detail outlining our unit economics. So what are the cash flows on a per stall basis?
So people can understand what the returns look like on a project basis. And our usage, so the amount of energy that we dispense per stall is up sixfold in the last three and a half years. And the number of stalls has also grown significantly. So we have about 5,000 stalls in operation at the end of the year, of which almost just under half were deployed in just the last two years. So huge rate of growth. Those are the two things that have grown revenue. In terms of 2025, if I look back, I'm really excited about that. I'm also particularly excited about our financing. We ended 2024 with a $1.25 billion loan with the Department of Energy Loan Programs Office. And I think going into 2025, we certainly had a number of investors ask us how we felt about that loan.
Here we are a year later. We've drawn on it three times under President Trump's administration, most recently just a few months ago in October. So we feel pretty good about the loan. I think more importantly, on financing, we closed what I consider to be a more strategic and more transformational financing, which is the closing of a commercial bank financing facility. The LPO provides financing as a bridge to bankability, going back to their mission statement under George W. Bush. And essentially, with our commercial bank financing, we had a group of syndicated banks kick the tires and conclude that the cash flows are strong at a pretty low cost of capital. So we feel great about that.
So when we think about 2026, it's about leveraging those sources of cash flow into putting more stalls on the ground and sort of more throughput per stall, kind of the right sort of playbook to think about things? Is there anything missing?
There's a lot of execution in those few words, but that's basically right. We're just executing. The financing that we have in place fully finances our stall buildout for the next several years to self-funding our own cash flows. Specifically, if you think about 2026, we said that we haven't provided guidance yet, of course, for 2026. We will in the next earnings call, but we said our rate of growth should be similar to a forecast we provided earlier in the year. That shows the number of stalls we're deploying in 2026 for our owned and operated business roughly double 2025. I think that's a material step change. I think between 2025 and 2026, I think it's really important to understand we said in our Q3 guidance call that we'd be EBITDA positive for Q4 2025 and potentially for the full year 2025.
This is a business that was a negative $80 million in EBITDA in 2022, getting to break even. I think it's a phenomenal milestone. I think what's even more exciting is that the operating leverage in this business, which is that almost two-thirds of our G&A is largely fixed, all the additional contribution margin that we generate from stall expansion and rising throughput per stall goes straight to the bottom line, and so the rate of EBITDA growth is at a higher rate of growth going forward, and I'm quite excited about that.
Okay. One sort of macro, big picture question. Talk about EV adoption, pull forward of EV units in Q3 with the eradication of the tax credit. How do you sort of push back against investors who talk about EV adoption as a sort of an overhang on the business?
I mean, it's certainly not an overhang on our business. We saw about 1.2 million EV sales in 2025, slightly similar-ish to 2024. Our business, of course, is not really driven by annual sales. In fact, annual sales of EVs, as just a matter of fact, becomes a smaller and smaller share of the total EV park, and it's the total number of EVs on the road that actually drives our business, which is rising every single year, and so if I think about the forecasts, I think these forecasts for the EV park, not annual sales, have come down significantly in the last two or three years. Perhaps they were overestimated three or four years ago, and I actually think that they're probably overly pessimistic today.
I think the cars that people can buy. There's 100 battery electric vehicle models that people can buy today versus only about 30 three and a half years ago when I first joined the company. These are generally better. They're faster. Most importantly, they're more affordable. But even these pessimistic forecasts that we have for the EV park after 2030, it's still 3x where we are today. And so I look at that, and I think for our business, which is serving the total number of EVs on the road, it's why our revenues have grown 17, 18-fold over the last three and a half years and why we expect them to still grow another three or four-fold over the next four or five years.
So just to sort of make sure we're on the same page, EV pessimism is nothing new. EV forecasts have been too optimistic, but your business has continued to show high growth cadence throughout that period.
Our business, our revenue, our charging business has grown at double the CAGR of the EVs on the road. And EVs on the road are growing at an enormous CAGR. Annual sales are up or down, but the total number of cars on the road just continue to grow.
Okay, and one last sort of big picture industry question. You still see studies, people say charger reliability, charger availability. That's sort of a headwind to EV adoption. I guess I'd love you to talk about statistics earlier that you guys provide. Talk about sort of what you see on the network, loop in EVgo One & Done. And sort of just when you see those headlines, you sort of just roll your eyes because they're not as true as they used to be, or what's the right way to think about it?
Yeah. Look, so we have been very transparent around all of our unit economics, all the things that we just talked about, but also around customer experience measures, and there's several of them that matter to us, but I won't go through them all. You can find them in our materials. The one that you're referring to is a One & Done metric, which is the percentage of times of all charging sessions where a customer can charge their electric vehicle on the first attempt and reasonably quickly as opposed to waiting around for a long time. When we first started reporting that back in 2023, it was around in the 80% level. Today, it's at 96%. It's such an important area of focus for us.
We've got all sorts of activities like remote diagnostics, a program where we are renewing or replacing some of the stuff that we've put in the ground many years ago. We've been around for 15 years. But most importantly, over the next couple of years, a next generation architecture that we are co-designing with one of our supply chain partners that I think materially separates ourselves from the competition, but also transforms the customer experience to the next level. And that's what we're aiming for.
Okay. Can we talk about competitive dynamics?
Of course.
Who are your competitors? How do you compete against them? Is it speeds? Is it availability? Network density? How should investors think about what's out there and how EVgo is separating themselves?
Yeah. I think a good framing for that is I mentioned earlier that usage per stall, so the amount of energy that we dispense on a per stall basis is up sixfold in the last three and a half years. I think many people would, I think, should ask, well, how does that compare to anybody else? Almost nobody else is public, to your point earlier. So what I can share with you is a macro indicator that could drive usage per stall, which is the number of cars per charger. So the number of battery electric vehicles per charger nationwide, so our chargers and everybody else, that ratio is up about 20%-25% in that three and a half years. We're up sixfold. So I think the question is, well, why are we up sixfold? And the macro driver that should drive that is only up 20%-25%.
That's largely because, well, two things. One, people are charging at public fast charging more than they used to be, which benefits everybody. But secondly, we are just building charging stations at better locations where people charge. That's location and site selection is a huge area of focus for us. We are building machines that are faster. We're building 350 kilowatt machines, so that's how fast the energy gets dispensed into the vehicle. We're building charging stations that have, we just discussed reliability, a whole bunch of other customer sort of measures that matter for customers. And so we think we're doing a great job. To your question about who else is in the market, there's about 50, close to 60 fast charging operators in the United States.
Over half of them are small private companies who average maybe a couple of hundred charging stalls per company. We have 5,000, and so I think a lot of those companies have been around, I would suggest, because they were chasing incentives that no longer exist and really don't have a balance sheet, so I really just set all of those aside. There are companies in the fast charging space that are backed by auto companies. You could argue, or I would suggest that Tesla, which is the current leader in the fast charging space, is obviously in that category. When Elon began building out the fast charging business, the Supercharger business, they were deployed across highways, and really the whole goal was to get over the psychological barrier of buying an EV. Highways is not where people charge.
People typically don't charge at highways as much as they do in the parking lots of grocery stores, retail stores, which is where we put our charging stations, where they're just running their errands, going about their lives. The fast charging companies that are backed by OEMs appear to me to be following that model, which is the priority is to sell EVs as opposed to maximizing profitability from cars. A couple of other segments of competitors, those that are backed by retail or grocery stores, so they're not owned by charging companies, but they're owned by retail or grocery stores. Again, I think that that's a space that's perhaps been driven through ESG goals over the last few years, which I think is likely to not be such a big priority.
Then we've got a couple of companies that are backed by oil and gas, which have not really achieved very much in the last several years.
Okay. Since you hit on grocery stores, do you want to talk about this morning's announcement with Kroger? And how does something like that come about? Why do they decide to partner with yourselves versus, like you talked about, others that own the equipment themselves? And what do the economics look like when you guys don't own the real estate when you partner with someone like that?
Yeah. Look, we've got a ton of partnerships at the national and regional level with retail and grocery stores. And the reason these folks work with us is because we pay them rent to lease a spot in their parking and as opposed to making them pay us for equipment. And also, I think what they've all found is that we bring potentially slightly more affluent EV owners to their sites who are leaving their vehicle while it's charging and in the store spending money. So we have great relationships with retail and grocery stores. We announced this morning with Kroger that we'll be deploying at least 150 stalls a year for the next 10 years. If I put that into context, this past year, we deployed 1,200 charging stalls. Our long-term forecasts take that up to 4,500, 5,000 charging stalls a year.
It is relationships with people like Kroger and others that are allowing us to execute on that journey. We think it's been great.
Okay. And then just lastly, can you talk about customer segmentation on the big picture side of the world? You've got your shoppers going to Kroger, but then you've got rideshare as a large part of the business as well. How do you kind of target different drivers? How do you kind of segment them so that you can kind of get the most per segment?
Yeah. So we have folks, sort of public network drivers. So kind of retail customers would be like you, perhaps you and I. Three and a half years ago, only about 10% of our network was rideshare, so drivers with Uber and Lyft. Today, it's fully a quarter of our network. I think what's really interesting and important to bring out here is that rideshare is electrifying. I think it's a really important thing to pay attention to. Uber said over the summer that their rideshare drivers globally, sorry, EV drivers globally were up 60% year over year. In the United States, only about a third of their EV drivers have access to charging at home. So they're reliant on public fast charging.
That is one of the several reasons why the public share of public fast charging versus at home or workplace has been rising and will continue to rise, and so we're thrilled with that. We do a ton of work engaging, identifying. We've got 1.6 million customer base. We think that that's now at a level of scale that gives us network effect, meaning customers are coming to our charging stations because they've got some prior experience of us somewhere else that they've been, and so we do a ton of work engaging customers, retail customers, a ton of work in partnerships with rideshare programs, with rideshare drivers, which often come with discounted rates, and we work to ensure that over a 24-hour day, we are really shaping who is charging at what time of day.
When I first joined the company, we were delighted when anyone was charging at our network. We were at utilization levels of five or six%. Today, we're in the mid-20s, and it's not about just a utilization level, but really proactively influencing who's charging at what time of the day, and I think that makes a huge difference for us.
Okay. And then on customer segmentation, just lastly, can you hit on autonomous and sort of what that looks like for the future? Customers you have now, how investors should think about that?
Autonomy is a huge area of growth for us in the long term. I mean, these cars are all electric. I'm not sure if I'm aware of any autonomous vehicle company that's not electric, and they'll all be charging at fast charging. I think that if you're an owner of the infrastructure, autonomous vehicle, you're not going to be wanting it to be sitting around for 10 hours charging at a slow charging location, not generating any revenue, so electric, all fast charging is really interesting to me how much kind of buzz there is about autonomous vehicles, but not as many people have connected the dots to our company because we are a provider of fast charging for electric vehicles. Future mobility is certainly going in that direction, I think. I think most people would agree, and we, of course, have relationships with the largest AV companies already.
We're building fast charging locations on a dedicated basis, so exclusively for the autonomous vehicle company. These are contracted cash flow contracts as opposed to charging the stalls available. And so we will likely continue to grow that business, and we're thrilled with it.
Okay. When you guys do report a lot of KPIs, what's the most important KPI? Throughput, throughput per stall, growth of throughput per stall, and sort of what should investors focus on, and what are the underlying drivers that have been pushing those up and to the right?
Yeah. It's throughput per stall per day, as I mentioned earlier, or usage per stall. That's gone up sixfold in the last three and a half years. We put out long-term targets, so kind of where we think we'll be in 2029. And that growth, it's only about another 50%-70% from where we are today. So in other words, sixfold growth in the last three and a half years, 50%-70% growth over the next four years is the most important metric. And I think when you look at our unit economics, we get down to cash flow per stall per year. It is that usage per stall per day that drives it.
Cash flow for the top 15% of our network in terms of usage per stall is now already, when we last reported that, which was in Q2 of 2025, at $50,000 per stall per year. I think that's important in terms of returns because our Net CapEx is only $75,000. It's a pretty remarkable payback. It just continues to grow quarter after quarter.
And when you put these new stalls in place, you talked about the internal data you have. How do you mirror the trajectory of growth you've seen from prior vintage stalls with these new stalls? Has it come down to EV adoption, or it's just the data you have behind where to put them, rideshare drivers, etc.? How do you kind of marry all those statistics together to create a steep ramp?
I mean, I think the starting point is that there are more cars per charger today than there were yesterday. We're building excellent locations. So each vintage of charging stations that we put in the ground, whether that's sort of annual vintage or half-annual vintage, is getting better and better for us. And we're just laser-focused on site selection in the way that much of our competitor landscape that we just talked through, I don't think is. So we're thrilled with that. I think that we look at our ramp rate. So how long does it take for a brand new station to get to some level of maturity or average of the rest of the market? It used to take six to nine months when I first started for a brand new station to get to a level of maturity that's sort of consistent with the average.
Today, it's more like three or four months, and that's all because we've got scale relative to our competitors. We're deploying fairly sophisticated pricing and customer engagement where customers are identifying that the charging station exists and using it and getting up to the average in record time.
Okay. And then just lastly, can you hit on, it's outside of your control, but a tailwind, as these OEMs introduce cars that can take charge faster or solid-state battery, like all these things that are decreasing the time cars spend at an EVgo station, which is actually positive because then more cars can come in. How does that sort of play a role?
Huge. Actually, there are two tailwinds I just talked through. One is one that you just mentioned just now, which is the charge rates in the batteries themselves. OEMs, the car companies, are building vehicles that charge faster per minute, so even if you have charging at home, and we just talked through how a lot of folks don't have charging at home, but even if you do, you can charge your vehicle so much faster today than yesterday and tomorrow. That charge rate has gone up in our network by about 67% in the last three and a half years. Our long-term forecast assumes a much slower rate of growth in charge rate over the next four years, so that is another tailwind that we benefit from just because the car companies are bringing out faster charge rate vehicles.
Maybe another benefit tailwind that we're benefiting from is the standardization of the cable. All the car companies have agreed to, in the last couple of years, standardize the cable and the port that the charging station plugs into in the vehicle. And the reason that's exciting is that in the U.S. today, about 5.5 million EVs, again, growing about 1.2 million a year or potentially faster over the next, well, certainly faster over the next decade. But today, over the 5.5 million, maybe just over three million are Tesla vehicles, maybe just under 2.5 for non-Tesla vehicles. Today, Tesla vehicles charging in our network need an adapter, but with a standardized cable, they won't need an adapter. And I think why that's exciting and relevant for us is our charging stations are about 40% faster than Tesla's Supercharger network, and we're located closer to where people live and work.
We're not highway-focused. We're retail, urban, suburban-focused. And I think those two things alone opens up over half of the market that's really not charging our network. So I just talked about revenue growth of getting up to 20x in the last three and a half years, usage per stall of sixfold. That's just through serving less than half the market. So I consider that a fairly significant upside and tailwind that we're going to benefit from over the near term and long term.
Okay. We have about 10 minutes left. If there are any questions from the room, I just want to give you an opportunity. If anyone has any questions, just raise your hand.
Yeah. The last thing you were just talking about with the change of the cable and the port, does that mean that you have to retrofit all of your 5,000 to something else, or is there? Having an electric vehicle myself, I know having those little adapters with you is kind of a thing, but.
It is. Yeah. Yeah. So we've retrofitted already. What we announced in our Q3 call back in November, about 100 cables. We spent a good part of 2025 testing the cables that are available from different cable manufacturers. We have, as I mentioned earlier, we have 350 kilowatt machines, which are 40% faster than the Tesla Superchargers. So we need liquid-cooled cables that can take that kind of speed. So making sure that we had the right cables with the right quality control was our number one priority in 2025. We started deploying them, and we're deploying them at locations strategically across the United States. Just looking to test because what we're trying to learn over these next couple of months is where do we deploy cables that allow us to ramp up the NACS cable as quickly as we can. Today, we've got CCS cables that are very productive.
I just talked about the cash flow per stall out of these cables, and I don't really want to pull them out, put in NACS cables, and then wait a year before Tesla drivers identify them. Right? So that is a super important priority for us. Chris asked about one of our priorities for 2026. That is a pretty big priority for us. Really spending several months of this test and learn since October with 100, and then a much larger deployment of NACS cables in 2026 on a retrofit basis. And at some point in 2026 for brand new stations, we will always have both. We are looking for our network to broadly mirror the vehicle park. So today, the vehicle park is maybe 60-65% NACS, 30-35%, maybe something like that, so CCS.
We're going to look for our network to look as much like that mix. That mix will change. It'll become more NACS than CCS over the next five years. We're going to try and mirror that as much as possible locally.
It sounds like maybe having locations that have both types of cables.
That's exactly what we have. Yeah. The ones where we've retrofitted the cables, they have both CCS and NACS for exactly that reason. We don't want to sort of attract Tesla vehicles and then unattract everybody else.
Okay.
One more question.
Go ahead. Fire away, please.
You mentioned the customer engagement. I just wondered if there's anything you can do that maybe bridges the gap between what people have charging at home and going out to an EVgo site, or as you talked about, 25% or so utilization of the things that are out there, can you vary the pricing so you might be able to get people that find a deal and maybe you can fill up your chargers more often?
Yeah. Look, utilization's been that 22%-24% over the last year. It was 5% or 6% three and a half years ago. There's very little reporting on utilization across the industry. I would tell you that anecdotally, what I see is our overnight utilization, so this is utilization in the midnight hours. First of all, it's double-digit, which is kind of remarkable. But secondly, anecdotally, it is greater than almost all of our competitors' daytime utilization. So I think we're doing pretty good. And through all of our customer engagement activity, we launched something called dynamic pricing a couple of years ago, which is really looking at trying to identify the right offer for the right customer segments and encourage people to charge throughout the 24 hours and not just the daytime hours.
This is not. You need to be really relatively sophisticated to be able to execute that. I think many of our competitors in this space or peers likely don't know what I'm talking about, never know how to execute it.
Thank you.
I was going to ask next on dynamic pricing. So I think we're good there though. But thank you for that. EVgo eXtend, legacy program, I think, former management team. What do investors need to know there? Does it mostly run off in 2026, early 2027, and that's not really a growth driver? And is it something investors should focus on, not focus on? What's the right way to think about that program? Because given it kind of drives revenue volatility.
Yeah. So today, about 60% of our revenue is this charging business that we've spent almost all our time talking about, which is our core business. And it's the one with kind of remarkable payback and returns. And we're talking about a business that gets to mid-30s% adjusted EBITDA margins. So it's great. 40% of our revenue today is either eXtend, which is primarily a contract we have with Pilot Flying J, which is the Berkshire Truck Stop company, to deal with it a few years ago where we're deploying 2,000 fast charging stalls across the United States. We're about halfway through. We did say that revenue for 2026 for eXtend will be broadly similar to revenue for 2025, so not as much volatility as we have had in the past. But that contract will be complete by 2027. And this is an equipment sale with some O&M.
It was super important for the business because it drives revenue. We did that during the pandemic when I think no one really knew whether they'd be leaving their homes. We aren't expecting to do more of those kinds of contracts unless the economics were closer to the economics of our own operating business. The other piece of our revenue mix, which may be just important to mention, is ancillary, we call it, which is primarily the revenue associated with our partnerships with autonomous vehicle companies. That is lumpy. These are long-term contracts that are effective contracted cash flows. And so we have complicated lease accounting to kind of work through. And so we get gain on sale when we open a charging station with one of those companies, and that creates a bit of lumpiness.
I would say to investors, at least for the next few years, to focus on the charging business because that's where the economics are so strong. It's what we put all our attention. It's what's growing. I think in the longer term, the autonomous vehicle space will be a very attractive one, and again, we work with the AV companies, but it's likely not going to be as material in the near term.
Okay. And then just lastly, I'd love to let you run with fixed first variable in cost of revenue and in OpEx because that sort of gets to the juice you were talking about, things flowing down the bottom line.
That's the operating leverage. That's right, Chris. So maybe just for context, again, to help people illustrate this, since 2022, revenue has grown by about $300 million. Our G&A has grown by about $30 million. And that's because so much of our G&A is what we call largely fixed. And specifically, there are two elements of operating leverage. One is actually not in the G&A, but within our cost of sales for our charging business, where about 30% of our charging cost of sales is largely fixed. It's rent, the lease with our site hosts that you mentioned earlier, property taxes, maintenance expenses, kind of largely fixed. And so as usage per stall rises, that doesn't. It's why our charging gross margins have gone from 15% in 2022 to, what, mid- to high-30s% today. And that's not because of any increase in price, just operating leverage and gross margin.
The second source of operating leverage is G&A being two-thirds fixed. As revenue and contribution margin rises, once you exceed your fixed costs, all that growth goes straight to the bottom line. It's really why we put our long-term forecast. You can see the business getting from negative 80 back in 2022 adjusted EBITDA to, we said, it would be break-even, maybe a little bit more, depending on where the year ends out, to up to $500 million in adjusted EBITDA by 2029. That's just the operating leverage in the business. We're very excited that that is operating leverage combined with relatively modest usage per stall increase and the number of stalls being deployed increasing.
Again, we deployed 1,200 stalls this past year, and we expect to grow that to 4,500, 5,000 stalls a year, all of which is fully financed.
Okay. Last call. Questions from the room? Great. Well, why don't we leave it there? Badar, thank you for your time.
Great. Yep. Thanks, Chris.
Good luck in.