Fleet electrification should reduce operating costs, not add a new line of billing complexity
The moment a commercial depot electrifies, it encounters demand charges. On a 30-vehicle charging estate drawing 150–200 kW during an unmanaged overnight charge, the 15-minute peak kW can add $3,000–$8,000 to the monthly utility bill — on top of the energy cost. Most EV charging software handles scheduling in the sense of turning chargers on and off. None of it treats the demand billing structure as a hard constraint the optimizer must satisfy.
Celaxis was founded in Portland in 2025 to close that gap: a scheduling engine that ingests live tariff feeds, models the exact billing structure your utility uses, and produces a charge plan that your vehicles depart from fully charged without generating a demand peak that resets your monthly bill.
Ingrid spent seven years at the intersection of utility rate design and fleet operations software. From 2017 to 2022 she worked as a demand response program manager at a Pacific Northwest investor-owned utility — on the side of the table that sets the rate schedules, designs TOU windows, and writes the ratchet clauses that commercial customers later discover buried in their bills. She left in 2022 to join a fleet logistics software company as a product lead, where she spent three years watching fleet operators incur five-figure monthly demand charges that no one in their software stack was designed to prevent. The utility knew how to bill for it. The fleet software didn't know the rate existed. That gap is what Celaxis is built to close. She founded the company in Portland's Pearl District in 2025.
Four people. One product. One problem.
We are not building an EVSE hardware platform, a fleet management system, or a general sustainability reporting tool. Celaxis does one thing: optimize charge scheduling against real utility tariff structures so demand charges drop. Every person on the team was hired for what they know about that specific problem — utility rate structures, dispatch constraint modeling, or fleet depot operations.
Previously built real-time automated demand response dispatch systems for an ISO-NE-connected aggregator — the same constraint-satisfaction problems Celaxis solves, just from the grid side. Leads the MILP optimizer architecture and the utility tariff ingestion pipeline.
Managed EVSE infrastructure and depot operations for a regional transit authority operating 38 battery-electric buses before joining Celaxis. Brings the dispatch-first perspective into every onboarding — she's the one who catches optimization decisions that look good on paper but break morning dispatch.
Maintains the tariff data pipeline and keeps 200+ US utility rate feeds aligned to actual billing structures — including demand period windows, seasonal TOU transitions, and ratchet clause updates. When a utility files a rate case and changes its Schedule 48, Ravi's job is to have the model updated before the next billing cycle.
How we think about the work
No phantom schedules. Every optimization decision is logged with the tariff data that justified it. If we saved you $1,240 this month, you can see exactly which charge windows were shifted and at what rate differential.
Optimization never overrides operations. The departure SOC floor is a hard constraint, not a penalty term. Celaxis will authorize on-peak charging rather than produce a schedule that sends a vehicle out with insufficient range. We do not treat a missed departure as an acceptable tradeoff for a lower utility bill.
Every dollar saved is visible and auditable against the utility bill. We don't ask you to trust our ROI claims — we give you the data to verify them yourself. Your accountant should be able to trace the numbers.
Portland, OR
We're based in Portland's Pearl District, in the middle of one of the most active clean energy and fleet electrification ecosystems in the US. The Pacific Northwest is an early-adopter region for EV fleet transitions — a natural proving ground for what we're building.
Oregon's utility landscape — Pacific Power, PGE, and EWEB — provides real-world TOU complexity we've built our tariff engine against from day one.
Celaxis, Inc.1120 NW Couch Street, Suite 300
Portland, OR 97209
+1 (503) 861-4270
[email protected]