Building Smarter Infrastructure with Tech: The Story of Flipturn and Pulley

As EV adoption grows quickly, a new challenge emerges: ensuring that actual charging infrastructure can keep up.

For commercial fleet owners or charge point operators, providing reliable EV charging isn’t just about delivering convenience, it’s about keeping operations running. Downtime in this industry means missed service and revenue, and just like permitting, it also exists within highly physical, highly-regulated infrastructure.

In this episode of Permission to Build, we sit down with Katie Siegel, co-founder of Flipturn, a company on a mission to make EV charging more reliable and efficient. We explore similarities between Pulley and Flipturn, who both operate in these high-stakes industries.

EV Infrastructure Isn’t Just Plug-and-Play

The shift to electric vehicles isn’t theoretical anymore. Major fleet operators, from delivery services to waste management companies, are electrifying fast. But installing chargers isn’t as simple as buying hardware and plugging it in.

Many sites can’t support the power demands of full-scale EV charging without significant electrical upgrades or additional approvals from utilities. Completing that kind of work takes years and millions of dollars, and even when infrastructure is in place, many operators face unpredictable utility bills driven by demand spikes creating that leaves vehicles uncharged when they’re needed most.

Enter Flipturn, which offers software to manage charging infrastructure intelligently. Katie explains, with her company’s tool, operators can:

• Dynamically distribute energy to prevent overloads
• Ensure remotely that vehicles are charged and ready on time
• Lower energy costs with smart power management
• Support flexible payments, idle fees, and usage incentives

Flipturn Helps You Bypass Complex Approvals

One of Flipturn’s most interesting unlocks is how it helps customers avoid the need for additional utility approvals in the first place.

Take this scenario: a fleet operator wants to install 20 EV chargers at a site, but the site doesn’t have the electrical capacity for all 20 chargers. Traditionally, this would require major upgrades, lengthy utility approvals, and it would delay operations by months or even years.

With Flipturn’s power management software, those 20 chargers can still be installed, and the system can automatically balance its charging load to stay within the site’s limits.

This ability to design around constraints is highly relevant to Pulley’s approach as well. In permitting, the fastest path isn’t always pushing harder. It’s also about finding smart ways to avoid friction. Sometimes that means rethinking how the scope is defined, or navigating building codes to avoid triggering extra reviews. Flipturn and Pulley take different paths, but the outcome is the same: more efficiency and predictability.

Interested in permitting for EV charging? Download Pulley's guide to EV permitting here.

When Stakes are High, Expectations Follow

When your personal EV charger at home fails, it’s frustrating. But when a charger for a fleet of 20 delivery vans or garbage trucks doesn't work, it becomes a much bigger problem. “If those vehicles are not ready to go on time, the trash doesn't get collected, which is just completely unacceptable," Katie explains.

Her team keeps these stakes in mind when they’re building: uptime is not just a success metric to tout, it’s a mandate. Flipturn’s platform runs at 99.99% uptime, which shows just how seriously they take that promise.

Similarly for permitting, high accuracy and consistency are the expectation, not the hope. When submittals get rejected and approvals delayed, the costs are high. It can mean missed leasing milestones, rising construction costs, and months or years of setbacks. Maintaining a high level of dependability is what Pulley and Flipturn are built to deliver.

Company Culture Comes From the Customer

When asked about her customers, Katie explains that Flipturn's customers don’t care about buzzwords or flashy dashboards. “Our customers are really down to earth and really practical. They just want the thing to work and they want it to work well.” Flipturn’s company culture is set around that mindset: “low BS, high transparency.” Whether they’re communicating with customers or sharing information internally, trust is a non-negotiable.

At Pulley, honesty, humility, and optimism are core tenants of our customers, and thus our teams too. In both permitting and EV charging, where there are complex projects and endless stakeholders to navigate, customers are not looking for another tool. They want partners they can trust to tell the truth, move quickly, and take ownership the outcomes they promise.

Effective Tech Keeps Human at the Center

In high-stakes industries like EV charging and permitting, the problems aren’t just technical–they’re operational, regulatory, and deeply human. Solving these problems isn’t just about shipping new tools, it's about finding ways to build smarter infrastructure and systems themselves.

That’s what companies like Flipturn (and our team at Pulley) are focused on: creating something that’s not only reliable and efficient, but grounded in the realities our customers face every day.

Progress in these industries doesn’t come from tech alone. It comes from applying technology thoughtfully to reshape processes, improve outcomes, and move faster towards the future.

‍