The Electric Vehicle (EV) revolution is here, but scaling charging infrastructure and integration with the energy system presents challenges— rapid power supply and demand fluctuations, billing complexity, and real-time availability updates. Virta, a global leader in smart EV charging, is leveraging real-time data streaming to optimize operations, improve user experience, and drive sustainability. By integrating Apache Kafka and Confluent Cloud, Virta ensures seamless energy distribution, predictive maintenance, and dynamic pricing for a smarter, greener future. Read how data streaming is transforming EV charging and enabling scalable, intelligent infrastructure.
I spoke with Jussi Ahtikari (Chief AI Officer at Virta) at a HotTopics C-Suite Exchange about Virta business model around EV charging networks and how they leverage data streaming. The following is a summary of this excellent success story about an innovative EV charging platform.
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The global shift towards electric vehicles (EVs) is accelerating, driven by the surge in variable renewable energy (wind, solar) production, need for sustainable and more cost-efficient transportation solutions, government incentives, and rapid advancements in battery technology. EV charging infrastructure plays a critical role in making this transition successful. It ensures that drivers have access to reliable and efficient charging options while keeping the costs of energy and charging operations in check and energy system in balance.
The innovation in EV charging goes beyond simply providing power to vehicles. Intelligent charging networks, dynamic pricing models, and energy management solutions are transforming the industry. Sustainability is also a key factor, as efficient energy consumption and integration with renewable energy system contribute to environmental, social, and governance (ESG) goals.
While the user and charged energy volumes grow, the real time interplay with the energy system, demand fluctuations, complex billing systems, and real-time station availability updates require a scalable and resilient data infrastructure. Delays in processing real-time data can lead to inefficient energy distribution, poor user experience, and lost revenue.
Virta is a digital cloud platform for electric vehicle (EV) charging businesses and a global leader in connecting of smart charging infrastructure and EV battery capacity with the renewable energy system via bi-directional charging (V2G) and demand response (V1G).
The digital Virta EV Energy platform provides a comprehensive suite of solutions for charging businesses to launch and manage their own EV charging networks. Virta full-service charging platform enables Charging Network and Business Management, Transactions, Pricing, Payments and Invoicing, EV Driver and Fleet Services, Roaming, Energy Management, and Virtual Power Plant services.
Its Charge Point Management System (CPMS) supports over 450 charger models, allowing seamless integration with third-party infrastructure. The platform also includes advanced features for energy optimization, helping to reduce grid load and operational costs.
The Virta platform is utilised by professional charge point operators (CPOs) and e-mobility service providers (EMPs) across energy, petrol, retail, automotive and real estate industries in 36 countries in Europe and South-East Asia. Virta is headquartered in Helsinki, Finland.
Virta manages real-time data from well over 100,000 EV charging stations, serving millions of EV drivers, and processes approximately 40 GB of real-time data every hour. Including roaming partnerships, the platform offers EV drivers access to in total over 620,000 public charging stations in over 60 countries.
With this scale, real-time responsiveness is critical. Each time a charging station sends a signal—for example, when a driver starts charging—the platform must immediately trigger a series of actions:
At the early days of electric mobility all of these operations could be handled in a monolithic system using tightly coupled and synchronized code. According to Jussi Ahtikari, Chief AI Officer at Virta, this would have made the system “complex, difficult to maintain, and hard to scale” as data volumes grew. Therefore the team identified early a need for a more modular, scalable, and real-time architecture to support its rapid growth and evolving service portfolio.
Virta is also exploring new opportunities in the EV ecosystem through its partnership with Valeo, a leader in automotive and energy solutions. The companies are working on integrating Valeo’s Ineez charging technology with Virta’s CPMS platform to enhance fleet charging, leasing services, and vehicle-to-grid (V2G) capabilities.
Vehicle-to-grid technology enables EVs to act as distributed energy storage, feeding excess power back into the grid during peak demand. This innovation is expected to play a critical role in balancing electricity supply and demand, contributing to cheaper electricity and more stable renewables based energy system.
Sustainability and environmental responsibility are key drivers of ESG initiatives in industries such as energy, transportation, and manufacturing. Data streaming plays a crucial role in achieving ESG goals by enabling real-time monitoring, predictive maintenance, and energy efficiency improvements.
In the EV charging industry, real-time data streaming supports:
Foreseeing the growing need for these real-time insights led Virta to adopt a data streaming approach with Confluent.
To maintain its rapid growth and provide an exceptional customer experience, Virta needed a scalable, real-time data streaming solution. The company turned to Confluent’s data streaming platform (DSP), powered by Apache Kafka, to process millions of messages per hour and ensure seamless operations.
Virta’s rapid growth to scale of millions of charging events and tens of gigawatt hours of charged energy on a monthly basis in Europe and South-East Asia resulted in massive volumes of data that needed to be processed instantly. Something legacy systems, based on sequential authorization, would have struggled with.
Without real-time updates, large scale charging operations would face issues such as:
Initially, Virta worked with open-source Apache Kafka but found managing high-volume data streams at scale to be increasingly resource-intensive. Therefore the team sought an enterprise-grade solution that would remove operational complexities while providing robust real-time capabilities.
Confluent has become the backbone of Virta’s real-time data architecture. With Confluent’s event streaming platform, Virta is able to maintain a modern event-driven microservices architecture. Instead of tightly coupling all business logic into one system, each charging event—such as a driver starting a session—is published as a single, centralized event. Independent microservices subscribe to that event to trigger specific actions like billing, mobile app updates, roaming notifications, fraud detection, and more.
Here is a diagram of Virta’s cloud-Native microservices architecture powered by AWS, Confluent Cloud, Snowflake, Redis, OpenSearch, and other technologies:
This architectural shift with an event-driven architecture and the data streaming platform as central nervous system has significantly improved scalability, maintainability, and fault isolation. It has also accelerated innovation with fast roll-out times of new services, including audit trails, improved data governance through schemas, and the foundation for AI-powered capabilities—all built on clean, real-time data streams.
As a fully managed data streaming platform, Confluent Cloud has eliminated the need for Virta to maintain Kafka clusters manually, allowing its engineering teams to focus on innovation rather than infrastructure management:
To navigate the evolving data streaming landscape, Virta chose a cloud-native, enterprise-grade platform that balances reliability, scalability, cost-efficiency, and ease of use. While many streaming technologies exist, Confluent offered the right trade-offs between operational simplicity and real-time performance at scale.
Read more about the different data streaming frameworks, platforms and cloud services in the data streaming landscape overview:
By leveraging Confluent Cloud as its cloud-native and serverless data streaming platform, Virta has realized significant business benefits:
Virta’s teams can now deploy new app features, charge points, and business services more quickly. The company has regained the agility of a startup, rolling out improvements without infrastructure bottlenecks.
With real-time data streaming, Virta can update station availability and configuration changes in less than a second. This ensures that customers always have the latest information at their fingertips.
Virta’s shift to a usage-based pricing model has optimized its operational expenses. Instead of maintaining excess capacity, the company only pays for the resources it consumes.
Virta is building the future of real-time analytics, predictive maintenance, and smart billing by integrating Confluent with Snowflake’s AI-powered data cloud.
By decoupling data streams with Kafka, Virta ensures data consistency, scalability, and agility—enabling advanced analytics without operational bottlenecks.
Virta’s success with real-time data streaming highlights broader applications across the energy and ESG sectors. Similar data-driven solutions are being deployed for:
The transition to electric mobility requires more than just an increase in charging stations. The ability to process and act on data in real time is critical to optimizing the use and costs of energy and infrastructure, enhancing user experience, and driving sustainability.
Virta’s usage of a serverless data streaming platform demonstrates the power of real-time data streaming in enabling scalable, efficient, and future-ready EV charging solutions. By eliminating infrastructure constraints, improving responsiveness, and reducing operational costs, Virta is setting new industry standards for innovation in mobility and energy management.
The EV charging landscape will tenfold within the next ten years, and especially with the mass adoption of bi-directional charging (V2G), integrate seamlessly with the energy system. Real-time data streaming will serve as the cornerstone for this evolution, helping businesses navigate challenges while unlocking new opportunities for sustainability and profitability.
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