Andrew Kittleson: Hello and welcome to Your Gateway to Wealth and Fulfillment podcast. I'm Andrew Kittleson, senior vice president with UBS in Charlotte, North Carolina. We can be reached at 704-362-8260. Very excited today to have our guest, Denis Kouroussis, whose co-founder of one company, founder of another.
Denis Kouroussis: Co-founder in that one too.
Andrew Kittleson: Co-founder in that one too. Okay, very excited to have you here and for this discussion. Denis's views and perspective are his own and not UBS's, and with that welcome Denis. I'm very excited to learn about your businesses, but like to start with you as a person and your influences in becoming an entrepreneur. I know your father was very much an important influence in your life. Can you talk to us a little bit about that and getting started in what you're doing?
Denis Kouroussis: Yes, absolutely. Well, thank you for the opportunity. We immigrated to Canada when I was six years old. My father was a mining engineer and I think one of his first, and this was in the '80s, so I'm dating myself. One of his first jobs was in Northern Ontario as a mining engineer, and then there was a recession. So we ended up in Toronto. He was looking for jobs, there were no jobs at the time, and ultimately he started... somehow he ended up doing door-to-door sales with Electrolux at the time, I think, like vacuum cleaner sales. And through that cold calling that he was doing, he actually ran into another buddy of his from the army in Greece and his buddy told him, "Well, you're wasting your time. Why don't you try to start a cleaning business?" Because that was popular within the Greek community back then in the '80s.
And my father actually attempted it and within six months he had a small business up and running cleaning offices. And over time I ended up in that business as a kid, like vacuuming, cleaning, washrooms and so forth. So that was kind of the spark on the entrepreneurial side to who cares about title, just do the work and invoice and create a living, so to speak. So that's how it all started. But because my father was an engineer by training, it was really important that I continue on to school and go do engineering and so forth, which the story I like to tell people in the '90s, I could strip and wax floors and make probably a thousand bucks a day. I had to go to school, right? It would've been a different story if I had taken over the cleaning business potentially, but that's what it is.
Andrew Kittleson: Good. What was The path from getting your degrees? Because you have multiple degrees.
Denis Kouroussis: Sure, yeah.
Andrew Kittleson: Did you work for someone else and then start your business or did you start kind pf right out of school?
Denis Kouroussis: So a little bit on the engineering side, I always had a passion for cars. I love cars since I was, I don't know, four years old or something like that. So I think when I was maybe five, I saw the internals of the internal combustion engine, like the pistons and everything, and I found that fascinating. So engineering was kind of like a fit for me. And I think when I was 14 or 15, I was actually dabbling in cars like my dad's cars and fixing them a little bit. One of the things that I had taken apart was the fuel injection computer, one of the first of a kind and I saw a whole bunch of microchips and I go, "Wow, this is fascinating. I really want to go study this."
So that's how I ended up in electrical engineering specifically. Undergrad, I did power and power systems, rotating machinery, I found that fascinating. Masters, I did a power electronics. Thesis, I actually built a 50 KVA arc lamp system, multiple power supplies and all the firmware behind it. So that was a fascinating project to work on. And then when I graduated, there were no jobs in power so much back then. I ended up in the semiconductor company called ATI, the competitor to NVIDIA at the time, a graphics chip manufacturer, and I ended up in the semiconductor industry. So I worked there for a couple of years and then I went back and did a PhD in CAD tools for VLSI. So this is on the software development for engineering layout on the actual semiconductors.
So that's the quick summary. After the PhD, I did go back to ATI, worked for a couple of years again, and then I ended up in a Silicon Valley startup that had commercialized my PhD thesis in parallel, like no significant overlap, and I worked for them for about a year and I kind of got the bug. I had the entrepreneurial background from the cleaning business back in the day, and I saw that this team had built a software platform that was being used by Intel, Broadcom, and a bunch of other companies, including ATI. That's how I met these people and I said, "Yeah, I'd love to do this on my own at some point. So that's where the whole entrepreneurship journey began.
Andrew Kittleson: Okay. Then you go start your own company by yourself and have to build out your team. I'm sure you've learned a number of lessons.
Denis Kouroussis: A lot of lessons.
Andrew Kittleson: Hiring people and maybe having to let people go and just getting the right people around you and allowing them to do what they do well.
Denis Kouroussis: Yes. Yes. So in the early days, clearly didn't know what I was doing. I'd like to make that bold statement or very true statement. I started a company in 2009, Volta Energy to do EV charging, believe it or not, way ahead of its time. So we actually built a little bit of technology to do demand management. If the chargers are all out there in the field in one location, you're going to get overloading on your transformer upstream. Had a small team of engineers, we built some stuff. I didn't know how to sell it, I didn't know how to get traction, ran out of money. We had raised a little bit of money from friends and family at that time, and once I saw the bank account decreasing, even though we had built some technology, I didn't know what to do next. I couldn't raise money at the time.
That was not something I had experience with, so I had to downsize. My friends all understood, my engineers who were also my friends at the time all understood and sent them home and I started consulting and contracting as a solopreneur in the moment. So we started getting a couple of jobs, and then I think I hired my first engineer to support me after a few years, but it was in the data center space, and that's how I kept going for a number of years until met a couple of partnerships. We started at Empower with Ryan Kennedy, a co-founder at that time, and then built that first company. And it was an interesting learning experience, right? In terms of putting the right people around you, absolutely. I mean, that will either create a significant impact in the marketplace with good culture or you're not going to win effectively.
Andrew Kittleson: You'd mentioned data centers, which obviously are AI data centers are where so many people are focused now, and from my understanding, our energy demand only increases by a few percent a year, but we're now starting to see that spike with the demand from data centers. We did a podcast with Ryan and Adam Power and how they fit into the sort of power system ecosystem. Can we talk a bit about Volta, right, in the management data collection, trying to get ahead of power problems and issues by making electrical systems more reliable, safer, using predictive power analytics using real-time electrical data. Tell us about that, how all that works.
Denis Kouroussis: Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. So Volta Insite is a cloud-based monitoring solution for critical electrical assets is a cloud-based monitoring solution for critical electrical assets. It was actually born out of the consulting that I was doing as a solopreneur. In the early days, I would get called into certain manufacturing facilities or commercial facilities where people were having electrical problems and they didn't understand why they were having these problems. And in some cases those problems would be really expensive. So a motor and VFD setup would be blowing up and they would've possibly replaced it twice at a hundred thousand dollars a shot.
You can't keep doing that. So I'd show up with oscilloscopes and different equipment and try to get all that data and try to understand, "Okay, this is the actual problem." The idea for Volta Insite effectively came out of building a more intelligent system of that data collection on the electrical side. So we have our own sensor, let's call it that measures voltage and current in high. So you have continuous waveform capture, and then we've built that intelligence in the cloud to be able to analyze, like an electrical engineer the waveforms and come up with predictions and recommendations as to what needs to get addressed before it gets even worse and creates a catastrophic failure potentially.
Andrew Kittleson: We, early on, early innings of what you do with this data collection, and I've heard this term fault library of data. So I imagine that's collecting information from these different systems that continues to grow that ultimately makes it even more efficient. Am I understanding that correctly?
Denis Kouroussis: Absolutely, yes. So every piece of equipment has its own operational electrical signature fundamentally. And so there's two aspects. One is power is provided to the piece of equipment through the voltage that you give it, and it consumes power through the current that it uses. So if you look at voltage, it's an indicator of what is happening upstream on your electrical system. And if you look at current, it's what is happening on the actual piece of equipment. So by using some algorithms and some intelligence, now you can build up the library as you call it, for specific pieces of equipment and say, I'll use two examples.
One is a voltage variation, a transient, a small transient that happens on the voltage. That could be a contactor, right? Your startup contactor for your chiller motor, for example. And then if you see something like a single phasing event where your voltage in and of itself is fine, so you see current that single phase is, then it means something is happening downstream. So probably at your motor itself is shorting out. So these are things that we have built up over time and for different pieces of equipment, including large manufacturing hydraulic couplings, you can see all kinds of degradation throughout the system. So if you can catch it early, you can prevent a lot of catastrophic failure.
Andrew Kittleson: Some of these failures that the industry was not able to identify before, I've heard this term, ghost electrical problems, is that collecting this data is ultimately really exposing those problems and the ability to address them, like you said before, they become too big of a problem and too expensive.
Denis Kouroussis: Correct. So the ghost electrical problems are typically transient events. Something is happening on your electrical system that no one can identify, no one can understand, and it can come from a number of different things. In a large manufacturing facility, one example is if you have two large induction motors in your process and you start up an induction motor and then you start up the second induction motor around the same time, you may collapse the voltage. There's too much inrush current, but you may not know that in a large facility that this is happening. So just having that instantaneous data and the alert that this is happening, you can just go and potentially fix in your PLCs and your process software to just delay the start of one motor and it makes those ghost electrical problems go away. So that voltage collapse is uniquely a consequence of something happening, but no one understands why. But if you have the electrical data, you can go back and pinpoint exactly what happened.
Andrew Kittleson: Okay. So if we bring that to, let's say, a real life example, and obviously energy and power is such an important component to our economy, moving products and people around the planet, and fairly recently we had a shutdown at Heathrow Airport, which I believe was maybe due to the failure of a power station. In an example like that. How could Volta have helped?
Denis Kouroussis: Sure. So I don't know the exact details of the failure. It's only whatever minimally I heard through the news. I think there were a couple of problems. One was that it was a substation. There was no redundancy to the substation, and most likely it was overloading or there was some kind of shorting that happened within the transformer, for example. In my mind, in this world, nothing fails absolutely catastrophically immediately. There's always some indicator on the front end of that. So in my opinion, if there was real-time monitoring, if there was high-resolution, real-time monitoring on the voltage and current of that substation, there would've been some early indicators through voltage transients, let's call it, or some intermittency that would've been seen in the electrical signature, and that could have been addressed way in advance before that catastrophic failure happened. So that's something that absolutely in my mind, could have been prevented
Andrew Kittleson: And preventing that. Obviously if you're at Heathrow Airport and you're down for a while, that's a tremendous amount of downtime. You're losing money. So any business that experiences that downtime, that's going to affect their bottom line. So you're able to help prevent that. Is there a way to quantify it?
Denis Kouroussis: Absolutely. So some of our bigger customers and manufacturing, the examples I like to use, we can prevent or we can predict when something might fail. We can eliminate the cost of an induction motor failure, which might be $20,000, right? So the motor might start single-phasing, we catch it early, we send out a technician, tightens down some lugs or changes a contactor. It's a $200 replacement. If that motor were to go into single-phasing during loading conditions and fail, it would be a $20,000 motor rebuild, for example. That's not the biggest cost. The biggest cost is the eight hours of downtime to actually replace that motor. And if you're a big manufacturing facility, that might be a hundred thousand dollars an hour. So now we're talking almost a million dollars of production losses, and that's what really we're addressing with our solution.
Andrew Kittleson: You mentioned manufacturing facilities, because I immediately think of data centers, manufacturing facilities, what other kind of customers applications I powers and everything, so you might say any industry.
Denis Kouroussis: Any industry that has criticality behind it, right? So healthcare, we're in a few hospitals at this point. Infrastructure power, whether it's pumping facilities for utilities, moving water, moving oil and gas potentially through pipelines, data centers are a big one. Anything that's critical and you need it to operate 24/7 and you can't get that time back if it goes down. Yeah, absolutely. That's where we fit
Andrew Kittleson: A lot of applications it seems. You mentioned technicians. I know within the electrical industry and other trades, we have a shortage of people in those trades.
Denis Kouroussis: Massive shortage from what I understand. Yeah.
Andrew Kittleson: Yeah. Yeah. So particularly if a lot of these data centers, I know I keep going back to data centers, it might be in rural areas where there's maybe you don't have, there's already a lack of trades folks. And if you have an area like that where there's not the talent, say to work on this new equipment that keeps evolving, that's certainly something where I would imagine Volta and your products and services can help mitigate that lack of talent, right?
Denis Kouroussis: Yes, absolutely. So especially within data centers, you can now, I mean traditional colos as they're called, colocation data centers, they might be three or four megawatts, but now the new AI factories as they're called, they're starting to be a hundred megawatts. There's talk about a gigawatt data center, and what you need to realize and almost appreciate quite honestly, is they're very lean in terms of human staffing within these locations. So you might have a hundred megawatt facility with only a few electricians, a handful of electricians, so there's a lot of electrical assets within that facility, especially if you're looking at something like a megawatt rack density power that's coming down the pipe at this point in the new data center designs.
So now you have liquid cooling and you need pumps to run that liquid cooling. You want to ensure all that electrical infrastructure is pristine and up and running, and how do you diagnose if something's misbehaving early on? I think you need a solution. So those technicians, part of the way we've designed our solution is to just monitor. There's no human intervention. If something goes wrong, an email gets sent out to the individual that needs to take care of that asset, and they can go and specifically put eyes on it and address the issue early on. It's a massive sort of jump in this maintenance category of electrical systems, especially when there's no people able to do the maintenance.
Andrew Kittleson: If I'm building a manufacturing facility or a data center and I'm looking at what equipment to put in there, what's more important or what's the order of operations? Should I be figuring out what equipment I need to build this and then attach the monitoring system to it, or should I be thinking about the monitoring system first? And I'm not in this industry, so I might not be asking this question the right way.
Denis Kouroussis: It's an interesting question. I haven't thought about it that way, but it's a good question. I would say that go build out what you need, and then the way typically that any manufacturing facility or any data center is designed, there's some electrical drawings. The engineer will spec out stuff depending on the needs, possibly on a data center. You start at the rack and then work backwards, how many racks you have, how much power does it need, define your gensets. I think all that is good, and I think that's still the way to design things.
One of the projects that we're working on is using our tool to characterize the one megawatt rack that's coming from NVIDIA, the Blackwells, and understand that load profile for a specific use case. So if we can do that, now you have even more data to be able to go back and work backwards to build your data center, for example. So if you have the ability to characterize something, your loads, and then you can go back and design, that's great. If you can't do that, then deploy us anyway on commissioning and we can help ensure that the beginning design actually makes sense, if that makes sense as an answer.
Andrew Kittleson: Yeah, it does. Thank you. So I don't know how you do what you do. You're running two companies right now, Atom Power and Volta, so I appreciate, again, you fitting us in and taking the time. Related to a power system, how do the two work together? Let's say, could you have Atom power in Volta working together in a particular facility?
Denis Kouroussis: Yeah, I think there's a lot of synergy moving forward potentially. So Atom Power developed the world's first solid state circuit breaker, so it's in circuit protection. The new data center architecture that's coming down the pipe is an 800 volt DC architecture. So the idea is to distribute 800 volts to each and every single rack. When you go to 800 volts DC protection becomes harder. DC protection on circuit side is harder because there's never a zero crossing. So realistically, the only solution that exists is a solid state circuit breaker for that application.
So now we have, maybe the timing is just right for us somehow, we lucked into it, I don't know, but our solid state circuit breaker now has a very unique application where the cost kind of makes sense, right? It's a more expensive product. And from the Volta Insite side, if you have a granular high level of monitoring, now you can actually characterize your loads and understand your loads better on a very granular level so that you can ensure that the electrical distribution is up and running continuously. So we can build a lot of resilience in the system by using good protection and monitoring, in my opinion. There's quite a bit of overlap in this game of uptime for the data centers.
Andrew Kittleson: And between these two businesses, from my experience working with a lot of entrepreneurs, and you touched on it early on, you didn't know exactly what you were doing, and a lot of it is learning on the fly and learning as you go, and again, building the right team to give them the autonomy and help you really leverage growing the business. Are there lessons that you learn from each one of these businesses that you apply to the other?
Denis Kouroussis: All the time. I think as advice to entrepreneurs, try to stay lean for as long as you can. Not having loads of money is sometimes a benefit. It's a blessing because it makes you efficient and it keeps your team efficient as well, and you have to solve problems. Maybe taking a step back, what is the market demand for whatever it is you're doing? That's the first thing that you should focus on as an entrepreneur. What value are you creating in the marketplace, and then how can you create that value at the lowest cost so that there's adoption? In order to do that, guess what? You need to be lean as a team, so you need to be efficient as a team. I think that's the biggest lessons that I kind of concluded over time without anyone having to teach me that necessarily.
Andrew Kittleson: You learned a lot from your father, it sounds like, but most of it you've learned on the fly.
Denis Kouroussis: Oh, absolutely. Yes. Yes.
Andrew Kittleson: You don't learn it in the classroom.
Denis Kouroussis: Sink or swim.
Andrew Kittleson: As we wrap up, any other advice for say young entrepreneurs out there that are getting going? You just gave a couple good pieces of advice. Anything else you'd like to add?
Denis Kouroussis: Yeah, I mean, I try to tell people, stay away from entrepreneurship. It's very difficult. You may not like it. However, a more realistic approach is you could be an entrepreneur within a lot of organizations, large and small. If you can find that team that's already building something amazing and join that team at the startup level, you have a higher probability of success than if you try to go at it on your own, right? Less painful, let's call it. So maybe that's an approach.
Andrew Kittleson: Okay. Letting somebody else make the initial mistakes.
Denis Kouroussis: Yes, absolutely.
Andrew Kittleson: Yeah. Very good. Well, it's been a great conversation, Denis. I really, again, appreciate the time and wish you all the success in the world, very excited to see where things go and as they're moving so rapidly in our world with AI, with these data centers and the need for power. Your work is very important and we appreciate what you're doing. So thank you very much.
Denis Kouroussis: Thank you for that, Andrew. Thank you, and I appreciate the opportunity.
Andrew Kittleson: All right, have a great day.
Denis Kouroussis: You too.
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