From Data to Driveways: Naman Ajmera Is Quietly Re-engineering Shared Electric Mobility

When Naman Ajmera joined Los Angeles–based Envoy Mobility as a junior data analyst in 2019, electric vehicles (EVs) still represented a niche. Worldwide sales were just cresting 2.3 million that year. Fast-forward to 2023 and the International Energy Agency counts nearly 14 million electric cars sold—18 percent of all new cars globally—after a 35 percent year-on-year surge.

An Analyst’s Eye for the Gritty Details

Ajmera’s own trajectory has been just as steep. “My first dashboard was a single Power BI tab that told us which cars were sitting idle,” he laughs. “Today I’m responsible for everything from reservation flows in the app to the telematics stack that powers real-time support.” Over five years he has rotated through customer support, hardware quality assurance, software QA, project management and, finally, product management—each move sharpening his systems view of mobility.

That breadth proved invaluable during the pandemic. With travel halted and uncertainty high, Ajmera temporarily shifted to customer support to assist riders directly. Envoy, meanwhile, launched initiatives to support frontline workers—offering discounted access to healthcare professionals in New York and prioritizing frequent vehicle cleanings. “For many nurses, our cars were safer than public transit or traditional car share,” Ajmera recalls. “It felt good to be part of something that actually helped.”

Sizing the Opportunity — and Fixing the Friction

The jump in EV adoption masks an equally important shift: how urban residents access those cars. McKinsey estimates that shared mobility—from car sharing to scooter subscriptions—could generate US $500 billion to $1 trillion in annual revenue by 2030. Within that universe, car sharing and “EV-as-an-amenity” services aim to solve a glaring infrastructure gap. A typical multi-family building in the United States still offers fewer than 0.2 dedicated charging stations per dwelling, according to the U.S. Department of Energy—a ratio Envoy is determined to improve.

Ajmera frames the challenge bluntly: “Buying an EV is easy; regularly charging one in a city apartment is not. We put the car, the charger and the insurance in the garage you already use, then hand you an app that lets you tap ‘unlock.’”

Executing that vision demanded ruthless attention to operational friction. Shortly after Ajmera became product manager, a third-party identity-verification provider shut down with less than a day’s notice. “We had thousands of drivers who suddenly couldn’t get legally cleared,” he says. Over a frantic week, Ajmera orchestrated legal approvals, APIs and front-end changes to bolt in new vendors Clear and Checkr. The switchover, completed in under seven days, kept Envoy’s 45-state fleet on the road without a single compliance lapse.

Such scrappy execution is yielding commercial results. Envoy’s revenue grew 40 percent last year, while monthly active users climbed 45 percent. Internally, Ajmera’s rebuilt reservation flow lifted trip conversion and pushed the Net Promoter Score from 5.2 to 7.5 in nine months. “We don’t celebrate vanity metrics,” he cautions. “But when retention and NPS move together, you know the fundamentals are working.”

Industry analysts believe the fundamentals of shared EV usage are strengthening as well. McKinsey projects the shared micromobility segment alone could be worth US $50 billion to $90 billion by 2030, expanding roughly 40 percent annually from 2019 levels. Ajmera interprets that forecast as validation rather than victory: “Growth at that clip will expose every bottleneck in software and ops. My job is to spot the cracks before riders do.”

Building the Infrastructure You Don’t See

Ask Ajmera about features, and he talks first about plumbing. Over the past 18 months he has overseen 36 releases (including app + backend), integrated telematics provider Invers for real-time vehicle health, and rolled out Power BI dashboards that pipe fleet data to property managers and city partners. One internal tool automatically reconciles toll-way CSV files with Envoy’s backend, generating charges to the correct user in seconds instead of hours.

“Great product managers build two things: what the end user taps on a screen, and the invisible scaffolding that makes that tap reliable,” he says. That philosophy underpins Envoy’s next milestone: a fully automated alert engine scheduled for Q3 2025. Alerts will range from low-battery pings to predictive maintenance flags drawn from vibration data—technology Ajmera believes will shave 20 percent off downtime hours.

Yet he insists technology is a means, not an end. “Real estate developers don’t wake up wanting APIs—they want occupancy rates and green-building points,” Ajmera notes. By integrating directly with property-management systems, Envoy gives landlords granular usage reports that count toward sustainability certifications such as LEED. It is a symbiosis that rivals like Zipcar and Free2Move, which rely on street-parking hubs, struggle to match.

Ajmera is also eyeing partnerships with automakers Tesla and Rivian. “OEMs realise that curbside test drives sell cars,” he explains. Letting residents book a Polestar 2 or Tesla Model Y on their own property can become the ultimate showroom. The strategy aligns with broader EV economics: the IEA expects battery costs to continue falling despite raw-material volatility, expanding the addressable pool of drivers.

For now, Ajmera’s focus remains on execution. He budgets weekly time in the call queue to hear unfiltered rider complaints, a habit from his pandemic support days. “You find out quickly whether an elegant KPI really matters when someone’s late for the night shift,” he jokes.

That frontline empathy may be his quiet advantage. As the shared-mobility boom accelerates—and as landlords, cities and climate deadlines converge—the sector will need leaders versed in both SQL queries and driveway politics. Ajmera, the analyst who kept asking “what else can I fix?”, looks ready for that collision.

“I still introduce myself as a data guy,” he says. “But data is only useful when it gets someone home faster, or makes a property manager say, ‘We need three more EVs.’ If I can keep turning spreadsheets into better streets, that’s success.”

At just 28, Ajmera has already woven those spreadsheets into the asphalt of dozens of American cities. The next challenge—automating fleets at national scale—may require an even bigger toolkit. Judging by his rise from dashboards to driveways, he is more than prepared to build it.

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