Tech industry veteran Ellen Kugelberg joined Einride in September 2020 as Chief Operations Officer to scale the operations team and strengthen customer and data driven operations and development. In early 2022, Kugelberg moved into the Chief Product Officer role where she oversees the entire product, technology and manufacturing function at Einride, leading teams across all electric, autonomous and digital product offerings and driving continued technical innovation.

With an engineering background from KTH, EPFL and MIT she spent almost five years at McKinsey and five years at Telenor driving a large turnaround, sales transformation and running the most profitable customer segment SME. Before joining Einride, she served as CIO at Education First (EF) managing a global IT transformation and large global team. Kugelberg also founded and served as President and member of the board at LegiLexi, a foundation with a mission to support and empower teachers in Swedish schools with concrete tools to help all children learn to read and give students a motivation for a life of learning.

At Einride Mesh, Ellen will, together with Einride’s Saga Product Manager Sabina Söderstjerna, deep-dive into how, together with customers, Einride Saga's intelligence has allowed us to overcome barriers to electrification and cater solutions to their specific needs.

Get to know more about Einride Mesh from Ellen.

What do you see as one of the most important trends for 2023?

Definitely AI, and leveraging machine learning in improving intelligence, decision making, and automation. However to leverage AI in transportation, one must first digitalize with a partner that is driving innovation and developing these types of products, today and continuously. 

What does "Make intelligent moves" mean to you?

To leverage the latest digital, electric, and autonomous technologies to get the best shipping solution that maximizes productivity and efficiency in a sustainable way, and that gives you the power to make better business decisions through visibility and insights, and reduces risks. 

Einride is rethinking the road freight system from scratch, can you elaborate on how this is being done?

The current industry has evolved over the last 100 years based on combustion engines and mostly manual processes, highly fragmented with low utilization of the overall system. It is dirty, inefficient and with low margins for most of the players in the ecosystem, yet still low satisfaction from shipper customers. To solve many of the root causes, we need to rethink more than applying new technology to existing structures and ways of working. Electrification would be very difficult to make profitable if only replacing vehicles one to one, even if the technology is superior in many ways and cheaper per km. So by rethinking the way we solve our customers' transport needs we can deliver cleaner transportation, cost efficient and with higher satisfaction.