Every day, millions of commercial vehicles keep modern life functioning: police cars and ambulances, the vans of water utilities and grid operators, delivery trucks moving goods between warehouses and stores. These vehicles belong to what the industry calls fleets, groups of vehicles owned and operated by a single organisation. And among them, a special category stands out: critical fleets. These are the vehicles of emergency services, utilities, and infrastructure operators. If they stop running, society notices immediately that something they’ve taken for granted is missing.
Almost all of these vehicles still run on diesel. That is increasingly a problem, and not just an environmental one. Switching fleets from diesel to electric is one of the highest-impact, lowest-cost decarbonisation measures available. It actually saves money over the lifetime of the vehicles. Regulation is reinforcing the economics: the UK's ZEV mandate requires 24% of new vans to be electric by 2026, rising to 70% by 2030. Public sector fleets must be fully electric by 2027, and the UK water sector alone is investing billions in fleet decarbonisation.
And yet, heavy and distributed fleets remain stubbornly diesel-powered. We invested in TUAL because we believe the bottleneck isn't the vehicle. It's the charger. And TUAL has built the answer.
The thesis: charging infrastructure is the real barrier, and the most underserved one
Capital has flooded into EV charging for private cars, homes, and retail locations. Heavy vehicles, leased depots, and critical infrastructure have been left behind, precisely where the problem is hardest.
Consider a typical scenario: a fleet operator stores vehicles overnight at a rented depot. The site's grid connection can't support charging multiple heavy vehicles at once. Upgrading the connection through the local network operator takes years and can cost more than the vehicles themselves, an investment nobody makes in a site they don't own. The result is a structural deadlock: operators face mounting regulatory and commercial pressure to electrify, while the infrastructure to do so remains out of reach.
For critical fleets, there is a second, non-negotiable requirement: absolute reliability. Police stations and ambulance services keep their own fuel reserves precisely because their vehicles must run even in a blackout. These operators will only electrify if charging meets the same standard. A police car that can't charge during a grid outage is not an option. This is why critical fleets, despite being among the most motivated to electrify, have been among the slowest to do so. No one has built charging infrastructure they can actually trust.
What TUAL is building
TUAL produces battery-integrated DC chargers for commercial fleet operators. Each PowerUp unit combines large-scale battery storage, starting at 180kWh, with output of up to 360kW, enough to fast-charge heavy electric vehicles. The battery continuously trickle-charges from the existing grid connection, even where supply is limited, then delivers power when vehicles need it.
The implications are practical and immediate. Operators can charge multiple heavy vehicles overnight on their current grid capacity. Units connect to a standard on-site connection: no grid upgrade, no civil works, no multi-year wait, no sunk investment in rented sites. And because the battery provides a buffer, vehicles can be charged even during a grid outage. That is the resilience requirement that makes electrification viable for blue-light and critical infrastructure fleets in the first place.
TUAL builds for 99.9% uptime, meeting critical infrastructure requirements and exceeding both the industry standard (98%) and the UK government's target for public charging (99%).
Why this matters: from deadlock to deployment
TUAL turns fleet electrification from a multi-year infrastructure project into a deployment decision. Reference conversations with fleet operators confirmed the pattern again and again: what they need is practical, flexible charging that avoids grid constraints, paired with the reliability and service guarantees their operations demand. Remote sites with grid connection quotes exceeding £85,000, leased depots where permanent upgrades make no sense, logistics routes where a single charging failure can jeopardise an entire load. These are the realities TUAL was designed around.
The early traction reflects it. TUAL has closed its first commercial deal with a leading utility, the UK's frontrunner in fleet EV adoption among water companies, and built a strong pipeline across utilities, public sector, and logistics, accelerated by the UK government's Depot Charging Scheme.
Why this founder
Phil Clarke took an unusual path to TUAL: he started with the problem, not the product. Before building anything, he and his team interviewed the 52 largest fleet operators in the UK to understand exactly where electrification breaks down. TUAL emerged from years of ideating and iterating through hardware concepts with the very customers it now serves.
Phil brings two decades of company-building experience. He co-founded Market Gravity, scaling it to 60+ people across three continents ahead of its acquisition by Deloitte, and previously led innovation at VocaLink (Mastercard), where he launched the UK's first real-time account-to-account payment service. Around him, he has assembled a senior team with the hardware, software, and operational depth to scale, a remarkable feat given the lean budget the company has operated on to date.
Why we're excited
TUAL sits exactly where PT1 likes to invest: at the point where the transformation of real-world infrastructure stalls, and where the right technology, deployed pragmatically, breaks the deadlock. The environmental argument for fleet electrification is proven. The economic argument is proven. What has been missing is hardware that works reliably under real-world constraints, wrapped in the service guarantees that critical operators require.
This isn't a problem that needs better EVs or smarter software. It needs infrastructure that works, especially for the fleets society cannot afford to see standing still. That's what Phil and his team are building.