Mogli cofounder and CEO Darius Chaman Ara in conversation with Carbon13’s country lead Germany about Mogli’s achievements in their first year. With Mogli, solar companies get an AI operations copilot that enables them to generate documents instantly, answering questions about their projects in seconds, and keeping every project moving forward with clarity and all stakeholders aligned. Mogli emerged from Cohort 4 of Carbon13’s Venture Builder programme in Berlin. That is where Darius and Alican met, where the idea took shape, and where the foundations were laid.
Why co-found now?
Simon: Why did you think co-founding a startup was a good idea, and did you feel ready?
Darius: I’d been asking myself that question for years. I had two small entrepreneurial chapters before — once as an intrapreneur, once with an external investor — and I knew my gap was the commercial/strategic co-founder skillset. So I joined a scale-up for three years, helped it become Europe’s leader in residential energy management, and learned how to build and scale teams. By March 2025 I’d hit a plateau there. I quit without a concrete idea, but I knew the energy sector had enough opportunity. Carbon13 wasn’t even on my radar — I found it by coincidence — but the process convinced me fast. There was nothing to lose: I wanted to build something anyway, and meet a lot of people along the way.
First impressions
Simon: What’s your first-day memory of the programme?
Darius: The atmosphere — super diverse, a lot of energy, different accents and backgrounds. And the ice-breaking exercises with Paul, our storyteller in residence, where you have to make a fool of yourself and show vulnerability.
Teaming
Simon: Did starting with a clear problem space — energy — limit how you looked for a co-founder?
Darius: Not really. I came in planning to spend 80% of my time on energy and 20% exploring other ideas, but it became clear my biggest leverage was staying in the sector I knew. And having a starting point actually makes conversations with potential co-founders easier — it gives people orientation.
Simon: You and Alican connected relatively late in phase one. What made you commit?
Darius: There’s no tick-box list of KPIs that makes you 100% sure — at some point you just try it. What mattered most for me: a shared foundation of values, aligned expectations for where we wanted to take this, and a genuinely complementary skill set. I know AI conceptually and strategically, but I have no development background, so I needed that technical complement. A lot of people look for people just like themselves — that’s human nature — but being complementary, not just on skills but character, really helps long-term, even if it’s not the easy path.
Simon: Diverse teams tend to perform better long-term, even if it’s easier early on to work with someone who thinks like you.
Darius: Yeah, I think so — that applies to entrepreneurial and personal relationships alike.
Ideation and the pivot
Simon: What were your assumptions before you started talking to customers, and how did they change?
Darius: I’d spent ten years on energy flexibility — helping SMEs manage solar and batteries more efficiently. But we ran very exploratory, unbiased customer interviews, using frameworks like the Mom Test, and pushed beyond our own network to avoid biased signal. We kept hearing about something else entirely: operational inefficiency. Solar projects involve developers, EPCs, grid operators, investors — a hugely complex, interconnected process with many stakeholders and datasets. We got passionate about solving that root cause instead.
Simon: Why did energy developers — the planning and permitting phase — become the right market?
Darius: The bigger the project, the more complex it is and the more commercial volume at stake — in big wind projects, up to €100 million. Making that one or two percent more efficient is a huge lever, and it’s also where the biggest impact on the energy transition sits. We started narrow: an automated document generation tool for a real pain point in project realisation, rather than trying to launch the full platform immediately. That got us our first paying customers.
Pitching and investors
Simon: How different is your pitch now compared to a year ago?
Darius: Quite different — the headline is similar, but the product approach has changed a lot, and honestly the pitch always needs updating again.
Simon: How different is it pitching to investors who don’t know you as well as we do?
Darius: Carbon13 invested early based on team dynamics and how we adapted. Later investors are far more KPI- and traction-driven — traction doesn’t have to be revenue, it can be pilot projects or research collaborations. You have to learn each investor group’s language and be concrete about what you’ve learned that others haven’t.
Simon: Has the climate case mattered in those pitches?
Darius: Internally, hugely — it’s core to how we built the team and culture. With investors, it’s become less relevant on its own; they want a consistent story with real business impact, not a CO2 number on a slide. In our case there’s a direct correlation anyway, since the business case and the climate case are basically the same thing.
Life after the programme
Simon: What’s happened since you left, what news can you share?
Darius: Our product is live, we have our first officially announced customer — a pioneering company in the commercial and industrial solar space — we’re featured in Germany’s biggest solar magazine, and we’ve moved into a new office in the AI Nation ecosystem. Our first hires have started too: a US product intern, a forward-deployed engineer, and a commercial associate starting August 1st. A year ago this was a concept with a few validation points. Now it’s in business — it gets real.
Simon: Where do you want Mogli to be in 12 months?
Darius: I’m not a fan of unrealistic startup timelines. Realistically: expand the product with our current friendly customer group, grow the customer base, and prove traction through concrete case studies. Significant revenue, a growing team — though we’re not hiring further this year, that’s planned for early next year.
Simon: At the end, let’s create a CTA for customers, partners and investors. What is your 20-second pitch?
Darius: At Mogli, we’re unifying data silos and using AI to help renewable energy developers realise more projects with the same resources. This operational bottleneck is one of the biggest barriers to the energy transition — and the recent leap in AI gives us a completely new way to solve it.