Seven months to connect one EV charger
Stina Brock spent two years as a lead engineer at a Portland-based demand response software startup, where her team was tasked with expanding their platform from solar inverters to EV chargers. What was scoped as a four-week project turned into seven months of protocol research, reverse engineering, and vendor API negotiation before the first EV charger command went through in production.
The problem wasn't the team's skill — it was the absence of any abstraction layer. Every new device category meant rebuilding auth, normalization, and error handling from scratch. Stina realized that every other DER software company in the ecosystem was solving the same problem independently, and no one was publishing the work.
Stina partnered with co-founder Marco Delgado (ex-grid operations at a major regional utility) to build an internal integration library during a weekend hackathon. Within three months they had normalized schemas for four vendor APIs and two protocol adapters. When a second Portland-area startup asked to license the library, they formalized Derapi as a standalone API product.
Derapi now provides a hosted API service covering 40+ DER hardware vendors across five device categories, with a sandbox environment and webhook event engine built for the full development lifecycle from prototype to production.
