In Rakhesh's words: "Hachiko is a software platform for maximizing the financial returns from portfolios of batteries" — mostly stationary batteries, with transportation to come with time. The pitch to customers: "we'll absorb that complexity away from you — you just focus on building the biggest portfolio you can, and we'll make it sing."
More from this episode
The problem it solves: battery storage as a technology vertical is booming, and people are building batteries across lots of sites with different technical configurations and different market exposures — accounting for those differences is really tricky. Meanwhile the transactions are enormous: infrastructure investors spend a hundred to two hundred million dollars per transaction, expecting a minimum 12% internal rate of return — a six to seven year payback if you're lucky — on assets built for a minimum of 15 years of useful life.
The founding trigger was personal frustration. In 2024, Rakhesh was personally exposed to around $500 million worth of project capital that could have been allocated but wasn't, because software in the market wasn't catering to these customers and investors weren't comfortable the returns would come. "I could see a very clear gap that software could have solved even in those transaction meetings... if nobody else is gonna build this, I suppose I should do it." There's a macro tailwind too: with AI's growing energy consumption, supposedly the biggest constraint — "that's what a lot of people are saying at the moment" — is "whether data centers can get access to the grid and have the energy they need in order to train their models."