Volta Knowledge: Origins of Volta

Every great company has an origin story. Denis Kouroussis, Founder & CEO of Volta Insite, joined Tyler Kern to talk about the factors that led to the creation of Volta energy. But first, Kern wanted to learn a bit of Kouroussis’ personal origin story.

Kouroussis describes himself as a tech geek from birth. He also possesses a lifelong love of cars, which fueled an interest in engineering. “When I was thirteen, I opened up a fuel injection box,” Kouroussis said.

“This was from an old Cadillac that my father used to have. It was the first throttle-body fuel injected system in the industry, and the car at the time was old, so he allowed me to play with it. I opened the ECU, and there were many chips, and I was like, this is fascinating. You’ve got electronics controlling an engine—I want to learn more.” And this led Kouroussis down the path of electrical engineering.

Volta started in 2009. Kouroussis saw the shifts in automotive manufacturing leaning towards electric vehicles as the potential for increased pressures on the grid. “We founded Volta specifically to address that problem through power management, or demand management,” Kouroussis said.

Although Kouroussis saw the forthcoming issues back in 2009, the investment world was slower to catch up. So, while Volta waited out the future, it began to tackle real-world manufacturing issues through consulting work fixing motor issues and other related production challenges. “Through the consulting, we came across this concept of electrical signal analysis, and that’s where Volta Insite was born.”

Volta takes its name from Alessandro Volta, the Italian physicist, and pioneer of electricity and power. “Telsa Motors had come out, so I thought Volta would be an interesting sort of parallel company,” Kouroussis said. “Alessandro Volta was the first electrical engineer, in a sense, because he put the first battery pack together.”