Beyond the plug: Inside Willbert by Euroloop's bet on the connected charger
Beyond the plug: Inside Willbert by Euroloop's bet on the connected charger
Zabierzów sits just outside Kraków, an unremarkable stretch of industrial road that gives little away. Inside, though, is a 2,000-square-metre manufacturing plant where Euroloop builds the hardware behind Willbert, its EV charging brand, and where the company’s international engineering team is driving the next phase of roadside retail electrification.
"We are not a pure-play hardware provider or hardware manufacturer," said Piotr Krzemiński, VP and CMO at Willbert by Euroloop, during a site visit hosted for MobilityPlaza. "We are a vertically integrated company that develops and provides solutions for roadside retailers, and at the same time we happen to do chargers."
Founded in 2017, Euroloop has spent nine years building toward that vertical integration: hardware, software, and payments under one roof, all developed in-house rather than assembled from third-party components. It's a model more commonly associated with Western European or Asian technology firms than with a manufacturer based an hour from the Polish-Slovak border, and it's part of a broader story: Poland's emergence as one of Europe's more technically sophisticated players in mobility infrastructure, not merely a low-cost production base for it.
The problem with charging as it stands
Ask any fuel and convenience retailer what keeps them up at night on the EV question, and the answer usually isn't demand but economics. Charging infrastructure is expensive to overbuild and painful to underbuild, and in growing markets like Poland, where utilization is still ramping up, getting that balance wrong can sink the business case entirely.
"The challenge our customers experience here is that utilization is not as high as expected," Piotr explained. "Our customers have to be very careful not to overscale the system they are building. They are looking for a solution that's crafted very well to the utilization they're getting, to the grid connection they're getting — and they still need to fight for return on investment. That's very challenging if you have a solution that is overbuilt or overscaled."
In more mature markets, the pressure runs the other way. Demand for charging is real and growing, but grid capacity hasn't caught up. Either way, retailers are stuck: build too much and the ROI math doesn't work; build too little and you can't serve the drivers arriving at your forecourt.
Modular power, built for the grid you actually have
Willbert's answer starts with hardware architecture. The company's S-HUB (Standalone Hub) system allows individual chargers to be connected to separate, often pre-existing, low-voltage grid connections rather than requiring a single new medium-voltage connection to be built from scratch, the single biggest capital cost and delay in deploying a site.
"Our chargers are capable of being connected to separate grid connections, and most of the time those grid connections already exist on the site," Piotr said. "That makes it faster to implement such a site, but the customer also doesn't need to invest in an additional medium-voltage transformer. The system just summarises the power and makes it available to each plug, because the chargers exchange power on a DC level."
Two sites visited during the reporting trip illustrate the range of what that architecture can do. At Atut Ruczaj retail park in Kraków, three interconnected Wilbert Amber II chargers form what the company describes as the first flash-hub deployment of its kind: rated at 540 kW today, with an extension option up to 1 MW, drawing on three separate low-voltage grid connections summarised into a single DC-level system. In Skawina, working with new partner Pevna Energy, Willbert has installed Poland's first S-HUB deployment powered by two decentralized low-voltage connections. It currently runs at 200 kW, scalable to 720 kW without major hardware changes once grid capacity allows.
The modularity cuts both ways: retailers can start with only as much hardware as current demand and grid capacity justify, then scale up as utilization grows, rather than sinking capital into capacity they may not use for years. In more developed markets, the same DC-native architecture lets Wilbert chargers integrate battery storage and photovoltaics directly, avoiding the multiple AC-DC-AC conversion stages that typically add cost and inefficiency to hybrid sites.
The conversion problem: a driver who never leaves the car
Grid economics solved, there's a second, less obvious problem that Willbert's software stack is built to address, and it's arguably the more urgent one for retailers' bottom lines.
"On well-developed markets, more than half of EV drivers stay in the car," Piotr said. "This is a shift in the entire customer journey. Drivers are not obliged anymore to visit the shop, and in most cases retailers just lose the opportunity to cross-sell. The charger becomes the only point of contact with the end customer."
That's a structural threat to convenience retail's economics, where non-fuel margin has always depended on foot traffic into the store. Retailers Piotr's team works with report that their non-fuel margins fall as energy sales grow, precisely because EV conversion into the shop lags behind fuel-pump conversion.
Wilbert's response is BuyBERT, a module that turns the charger itself into what Piotr calls "a kiosk" — a full interactive screen through which drivers can browse and order food and drinks before or during a charging session, for pickup in-store or delivery to the bay. During the demo, ordering two flat whites through the charger interface took under a minute, folded directly into the payment flow for the charging session itself.
"That's what makes our chargers more aligned with roadside retail," Piotr said. "The end customer can purchase goods directly from the charger and then collect them at the store, or even have them delivered to the bay." The first live BuyBERT deployment is running near the Kraków headquarters; Willbert is now in discussions with retailers in more developed markets, including the UK, where the in-car-conversion problem is most acute.
Payments without the friction
Underpinning both the charging session and the retail order is PayBERT, Willbert's own payment module built to avoid the app-download friction that has dogged EV charging's reputation industry-wide. Drivers pay directly by bank card, set a budget for the session, and add non-fuel items to the same basket, all through local, integrated payment terminals rather than a third-party app. Piotr was clear that owning this layer, rather than outsourcing it, is what makes the cross-selling functionality possible at all: "We are in control of the entire technology stack, from charger to software that controls not only the charger but also the payment — and only that way are we in a position to provide such advanced functionality."
Where it's heading
Wilbert's roadmap reflects a company already operating from a position of strength rather than one still proving the model. In Poland, the company's footprint keeps deepening, with partnerships like the Pevna Energy collaboration in Skawina alongside a premium OEM partner Piotr confirmed will soon be unveiled behind the Atut Ruczaj network. Beyond its home market, Wilbert has built a solid client base in more mature European markets. The company's growth has also been backed institutionally: Orlen VC invested in Wilbert in 2023, a signal of confidence from one of the region's largest energy players.
What stands out from a day spent moving between Wilbert's headquarters and its live sites isn't any single piece of hardware, it's the refusal to treat charging as a commodity problem. Grid access, payments, and in-store conversion are, in Willbert's telling, one connected problem, and the company's bet is that only a vertically integrated provider can solve all three at once.
