Crijn Bouman and the dream of self-driving mobility

It’s 2017, and Crijn Bouman is standing inside a massive warehouse in San Francisco. For the first time, he’s watching self-driving cars move effortlessly across the streets. He’s impressed – but one detail catches his eye. After hours of operation, the vehicles quietly roll into a corner and stop. A person walks over and plugs them in – manually.

“Why isn’t the charging automated?” Bouman asks.

The answer is simple: focus on one thing at a time – getting the vehicles road-ready. Yet, that small inefficiency plants a seed – a seed that would eventually grow into Rocsys, a company dedicated to automating the charging of autonomous vehicles.

But turning ideas into reality is nothing new to Bouman. As a child, he was full of ideas and projects. “I wouldn’t call myself an entrepreneur back then,” he says, “but my mother always said I was constantly starting things and finding creative solutions.”

At six, he and a friend opened a small flower shop, gathering flowers and plants from their own gardens – and, admittedly, from neighbors’ gardens as well – to sell on the street. When his mother found out, she made him buy replacement flowers from a florist. “An early lesson in responsibility and sustainability. That’s when I realized you can’t build something lasting by stealing from others.”

Bouman studied Industrial Design Engineering at Delft University, a programme combining technical knowledge with product design and marketing. Even then, he wasn’t dreaming of working at a big corporation. “It was always about what I could start, what I could create with friends,” he explains.

From Epyon to Rocsys

Rocsys is Bouman’s second company. His first, Epyon, grew from the same passion. For a final elective in university, he wrote a business plan for fast-charging electric vehicle batteries – and Epyon was born. Founded in 2005, it initially focused on small electric vehicles at airports before shifting to passenger cars, just as Tesla launched its first model. Epyon quickly gained traction and was eventually acquired by ABB.

Bouman stayed for six years, managing ABB’s EV charging product portfolio. While the experience was exhilarating – revenues surpassed $100 million and the EV industry boomed – corporate life didn’t fuel his entrepreneurial drive. “I missed building something new”.

The idea for Rocsys took shape in that San Francisco warehouse. Seeing fully autonomous vehicles, yet manual charging, highlighted a gap in the system. Two years later, in 2019, Bouman met Joost van der Weijde and Kanter van Deurzen, both with strong backgrounds in robotics. Bouman himself knew little about robotics, but together they started discussing how to solve the problem of automatic charging using robotic arms combined with computer vision and artificial intelligence. Could it be cost-effective? Could it scale? And how would they bring it to market, given that autonomous vehicles were still confined to labs?

In the beginning, the team also explored a wide range of potential use cases – from mining to electric buses. But the bus market proved overly complex, tied up with government tenders and city-specific requirements. Mining, meanwhile, was too small and fragmented, with each site requiring its own solution. 
Step by step, they worked through the questions and identified logistics and ports as the most logical first markets, since autonomous vehicles were already operating there. Warehouses and port terminals became the first proving grounds.