Defining Innovo: Our CEO on vision, ambition, and what comes next
May 16, 2025
Innovo's co-founder and CEO discusses the future of electricity, innovation, and the significance of small moments in shaping a groundbreaking company.
If you ask Pratik, co-founder and CEO of Innovo, what defines him, he won’t give you a rehearsed answer. His person is not defined by being a founder, a trader, or a father. It’s not even building Innovo, at least not in isolation. “Life is a mosaic,” he says, “the pizza slice you order, the people you meet, the chances you take, each adds its own charm to the big picture”
Take, for instance, his love for pizza: a classic cheese slice from Joe’s in New York, eaten on a paper plate. It has a kind of sacred symmetry. “It’s not too sweet, not too spicy. The crisp is perfect, just the right amount of cheese. A perfectly balanced slice.” He paused for a wide smile. The pizza, taste aside, is a memory rooted in place and ritual. When in Chicago, he always gets a deep dish from Pequod, controversial for some, but not for Pratik. He first tried it after a half-marathon, ravenous and triumphant, splitting two mediums among three friends. “It’s a memory that’s burned into my brain,” he says.
That comfort shows up in other moments, too. Like after a polished investor dinner, sushi, formal smiles, buttoned-up conversation, when he stopped by Pequod on the way back to the hotel to pick up a pie. “Eating Pequod, aren’t you?” read a text from Chris Kohler, Innovo’s CSO. “That tells you everything,” Pratik says. “That kind of comfort level; it’s rare. That I can be on my best behavior and still leave to go get pizza after.”
Innovo is a mosaic of familial interactions, shared visions and the desire to keep pushing ‘further’, (we’ll come back to this later). It’s more than just a software company. It is a gut instinct shared by the team. “Successful teams complement each other, instead of overlapping each other”, Pratik emphasized, “It has to fit together, and if it doesn’t, then you’re in a chapter: a phase and moment in time. We have to look at the big picture, and come down to individual pieces.”
For Pratik, Innovo is meaningful because it’s new. Because it’s never been done before. “When you’re doing something you’ve never done, even the tiniest accomplishment feels massive,” he says. “It doesn’t define me, but I love to create.”
What did define him once was a fear of failure. That used to be the motivator. “When I was younger, the only choice was success. That’s what success looked like growing up: monetary, linear, predictable.” Today, success for Pratik extends beyond Innovo. It is reading his one year old daughter dense nonfiction. “All she needs to hear are words, and I rarely have the time to read, so you start being creative.” Sometimes success is a new product launch, having a quick workout followed by a pizza slice. It's almost magical, the power small wins and moments have. But that’s the thing about power, it fuels and pushes people, households, cars, and buildings to survival.
“It came down to a single question, ‘What is the cost of power?’ reflected Pratik. “And then came down to electricity…that’s what stuck.” What started as a casual “we should do something for ourselves” and “if people with less experience and less talent can be entrepreneurs, why not us?” quickly turned into late nights for Pratik and John; building pitch decks and trading voice notes. Chris was their third hire (after Pratik and John), and “something just clicked.” It was not strategic or perfectly planned, it just happened, and that’s how the best things start.”
At its core, Innovo is betting on a future defined by an electricity supercycle. As Pratik puts it, “If you believe in the rise of AI in renting computers and in a shift toward digital labor, you have to believe in power infrastructure. “Electricity is going to drive the next demographic evolution.”
And then it clicked, what’s missing is software. Especially in renewable energy; in markets where financial sophistication and user experience haven’t caught up with the pace of change.
“We want to bring financial tools and seamless design into places that actually need them. Places that have been overlooked,” he explains. “We’re building a new kind of infrastructure, digital, yes, but tied directly to the cost of power and the way that electricity enables life.”
The goal isn’t just disruption for the sake of it. “In 20 or 30 years, I want our model to be the one people replicate,” he says. “Not because it’s flashy, but because it works. Because it’s grounded in something real.” That perspective, he says, also maps onto how he sees Innovo’s evolution. “We’re refining it all the time. Feedback shapes it. Our people shape it. It’s not fixed. That’s the whole point.”
So what’s next? “Further,” Pratik says. “That’s the word I keep coming back to.”
Further in how Innovo thinks about electricity. Further in how financial infrastructure works. Further in how people interact with systems that used to be opaque. “We’re just getting started. And we’re building for the long run. I want to create a seamless network where all that can run at a lower cost.”
Even now, he insists the moment he’s most proud of hasn’t happened yet. That’s the kind of mind he has, restless, ambitious, quietly reflective. “I have such high expectations from myself, nothing is ever good enough. When I’m a little bit gentler as in the company, we’re doing things a lot better, be it Danny at 23 running operations or Chris being incredibly hyped up every time he speaks to a potential investor.”
His background in financial markets, trading, and being close to digitization supports his career. The transition from big banks to a startup where he’s in charge only brought him closer to adding another piece to the mosaic that is his life. But, in all fairness and big talks aside, if you catch him walking out of a dinner, pizza box in hand, that’s not a contradiction. That’s clarity. A small, personal ritual in the middle of building something bigger. Or it’s just his unconditional love for pizza, the kind that makes him respond to every slack message with a pizza emoji.