Bolt Energie

Bolt Energie is the very first energy platform that aims to make the Belgian power grid truly sustainable. Via Bolt your consumers can buy energy directly from local, green generators (producers).

The startup is disrupting the Belgian energy market with its 100% local and green approach. Its transparent platform enables consumers to select providers based on their location and the use of different renewable energy sources. From homeowners with solar panels to family farms producing biomass fuels, Bolt Energie helps people make smarter choices.

Challenges for Bolt Energie

Because Bolt is an innovative and ambitious startup, it is understandable that they wanted to create a scalable environment. To do this, Bolt aimed to grow from a bootstrapped architecture composed of multiple third-party services connected together, into a scalable and coherent environment that it could build upon and further evolve. Bolt also needed a suitable client management system, which would allow all Bolt admins to manage everything in their business. To help refactor their architecture, and centralize their business integrations, Bolt approached the eager Cyrex Enterprise team, who were equally ambitious to be of service.

Solution

After meeting and speaking with members of Bolt, Cyrex planned out their next course of action: Refactor the existing architecture which would allow all business logic and service integrations to centralize. But to do this, they needed to ensure that everything was performing in sync with one another. Thankfully, using their expertise with API Development, they were successful in completely refactoring the existing architecture with an API-first approach, thus centralizing and syncing all business logic and service integrations.

This approach was highly beneficial as Cyrex also created a standalone customer facing application for users to visualize their energy contracts, manage consumption, view producers, invoicing and more. Not only that, but they also migrated Bolt’s complete datastore to Salesforce, while adding it as another service to be consumed.

To top it all off, our team also created a client management system where Bolt administrators could manage everything, giving them total control and perfect organization in their business.

Challenges Faced

The biggest challenge our team faced was understanding the overall application architecture redesign and ensuring that the entirety of services integrations synced up correctly. Because there were so many different services (not to mention migrating and integrating with Salesforce on top of everything) it was quite complex because they would need to all integrate together correctly without any mishaps. Fortunately, this was only a slight bump in the road for the project, and the team was successful for the end result.

Misc

• Stack: React, NodeJS, mongoDB, DigitalOcean
• Team: Variable between 2-3 people
• Duration: 1 year +

Result

Cyrex were highly praised by Bolt for their work and support throughout the project:

“I had the pleasure of working with Cyrex which definitely had experience working with start-ups. They thought alongside us also from a business perspective which made sure we were developing the things that matter in correct way. Additionally, their flexibility and technical support was much appreciated!”

— Rens Van Haute, Co-Founder & COO at Bolt Energie