Mogli cofounder and CEO Darius Chaman Ara in conversation with Carbon13’s country lead Germany about Mogli’s achievements in their first year. With Mogli, renewable energy developers get an AI-native project management platform that enables them to better navigate through the complexities of their operational workflows and speed up their project timelines. Mogli emerged from Cohort 4 of Carbon13’s Venture Builder programme in Berlin. That is where Darius and Alican met, where the idea took shape, and where the foundations were laid.
Why co-found now?
Simon: Why did you think co-founding a startup was a good idea, and did you feel ready?
Darius: I’ve been asking myself that question for years. I had two small entrepreneurial chapters before — once as an intrapreneur where I´ve built an internal venture for a company, once with an external investor.
Although both chapters taught me a lot they in the end didn’t become as successful as initially planned. I’ve analysed the “why” for quite some time and identified the gaps in my skillset as a commercial co-founder.
Based on this analysis I decided to join an energy tech scale-up where I spent the past three years before starting Mogli. During that time, I learned how to build and scale teams, close large enterprise deals and navigate a sales team towards 8-figure revenues. By March 2025 I felt that I was hitting a plateau learning curve wise and so I decided to quit my job and jump back into entrepreneurship. At that time, I had no concrete idea, but I knew that the energy sector had enough problems to be solved and that the recent leap in AI had opened up totally new opportunities.
Carbon13 wasn’t on my radar in the beginning — I found it by coincidence — but the people and the process convinced me very quickly. There was nothing to lose: I wanted to build something anyway, and meet a lot of people along the way.
First impressions
Simon: What’s your first-day memory of the programme?
Darius: The atmosphere – it’s been electrifying. When I entered the room I felt a lot of energy – I could hear a lot of different accents and saw people with from all kinds of backgrounds.
And of course I enjoyed the ice-breaking activities with Paul, your storyteller in residence, where you have to make a fool of yourself and also show vulnerability.
Teaming
Simon: Did starting with a clear problem space — energy — limit how you looked for a co-founder?
Darius: Not really. I came in planning to spend 80% of my time on energy and 20% exploring other ideas, but it became clear for me very quickly that my biggest leverage was building something in the sector I already knew. And having a starting point actually makes conversations with potential co-founders easier — it gives people orientation.
Simon: You and Alican connected relatively late in phase one. What made you commit?
Darius: There’s no tick-box list of KPIs that makes you 100% sure — at some point you just need to try it out. What mattered most for me: a shared foundation of values, aligned expectations for where we wanted to take this, and a genuinely complementary skill set. I know AI conceptually and strategically, but I have no development background, so I needed that technical complement. Another important aspect for me: A lot of people look for people that are similar to themselves — that’s human nature — but being complementary, not just on skills but also in the way you look at and approach things, really can help in the long-term in my opinion, even if it’s not the easiest path.
Simon: Diverse teams tend to perform better long-term, even if it’s easier early on to work with someone who thinks like you.
Darius: Yeah, I think so too — that applies to entrepreneurial and personal relationships alike.
Ideation and the pivot
Simon: What were your assumptions before you started talking to customers, and how did they change?
Darius: I’ve spent almost ten years working on energy flexibility solutions, so my initial plan has been to stay in that field and tackle another customer segment, like e.g. helping SMEs reduce their electricity costs with interconnected solar and battery solutions. But we both felt that this field was a bit too crowded and on the other side saw huge potential in leveraging LLMs for other use cases – which is also more in line with Alican’s expertise.
Therefore, we decided to run very exploratory, unbiased customer discovery interviews, using frameworks like the Mom Test, and pushed beyond our own network to avoid biased signals.
After a couple of weeks we identified one topic that has been a priority for almost every manager in the renewable energy infrastructure space we’ve talked to: operational inefficiency.
Renewable energy projects involve developers, EPCs, grid operators, investors and many more stakeholders— a hugely complex, interconnected value chain with fragmented processes and scattered datasets which results in massive administrative and operational overhead. We very quickly got passionate about this problem space and started working on it.
Simon: Why did renewable energy developers — especially in the planning and permitting phase — become the right market?
Darius: We learned very quickly: The bigger the projects and the earlier in the development cycle, the more complex they are and the more commercial volume is at stake — in big wind projects e.g., up to €100 million. Making those kinds of projects even just one or two percent more efficient has a huge commercial lever, and it’s also where the biggest impact on the energy transition sits.
For our first product development we had a very narrow focus. Rather than trying to build a fully scalable SaaS platform from the start, we decided to pick a concrete pain point and develop and ship a solution very quickly that creates immediate value. As a result, our first MVP has been a tool for the automatic generation of very industry-specific project documents which currently require a lot of manual workload from project managers.. That got us our first paying customers.
Pitching and investors
Simon: How different is your pitch now compared to a year ago?
Darius: Quite different — the headline is similar, but the product approach has evolved a lot, and honestly the pitch needs to be updated continuously.
Simon: How different is it pitching to investors who don’t know you as well as we do?
Darius: Carbon13 invested early – mainly based on the team and how fast we moved during the initial stages of problem and solution validation. Later investors are far more KPI and traction driven. Traction doesn’t necessarily need to be revenue, it can be pilot projects or e.g. research collaborations in the case of deep tech startups. What is also very important: You have to learn and adapt to the language of investors and provide information in a way that they’re used to consuming – and you need to be very precise about why you are the right team, why this needs to be built and why now is exactly the right time.
Simon: Has the climate case mattered in those pitches?
Darius: Internally, hugely — it’s core to how we built the team and culture. With investors, it’s become less relevant on its own; they want a consistent story with real business impact, not a CO2 mitigation number on a slide. In our case there’s a direct correlation anyway, since the business case and the climate case basically go hand in hand.
Life after the programme
Simon: What’s happened since you left, what news can you share?
Darius: Our product is live, we got featured in Germany’s biggest solar magazine with our first official customer, RePower Solution, a pioneering company in the commercial and industrial solar space, and we’ve moved into a new office in Berlin in the AI Nation ecosystem. And what we’re especially excited about: Our team is growing. We’re now a team of 4, and in August we´ll be 5. We are super proud of being able to attract the best talent in energy and AI as a startup at the early stage we’re still in. A year ago this was a concept with a few validation points. Now it’s a real business.
Simon: Where do you want Mogli to be in 12 months?
Darius: I’m not a fan of unrealistic startup timelines. So realistically: We will expand our product , grow our customer base and prove real traction. Furthermore, we will track the value generated through our platform and publish case studies together with our partners. Ideally in 12 months, Mogli should look significantly different compared to now. The opportunities are there, now it’s about capturing them.
Simon: At the end, let’s create a CTA for customers, partners and investors. What is your 20-second pitch?
Darius: At Mogli, we’re unifying data silos and leveraging AI to help renewable energy developers realise more projects with the same resources. Operational overhead is one of the biggest barriers to the energy transition, and the recent leap in AI gives us completely new opportunities to solve it.