Our Employee Spotlight series celebrates and highlights the EVLO team’s unique talents, achievements, and perspectives. This month, we’re highlighting Martin Rheault, Vice President of Business Development and Sales, and his impressive career and history at EVLO.
Q: What was your professional journey leading up to EVLO?
A: Supporting renewable energy became a passion of mine early on, since it brought an opportunity to use my electrical engineering skills to make the world a better place. Right out of university, I began my career with the first boom of the wind industry. Working on the first wind projects in my firm and growing a team around trailblazing renewable energy projects was so exciting. After growing my technical field work and design experience, I consulted for most of my career – developing new services and businesses for a large firm – before joining EVLO.
Q: How did you find and decide to work at EVLO?
A: As I grew my expertise in energy storage consulting, helping clients build projects until they could pursue them independently, I realized I wanted to lead these projects from start to finish – to have more of a sense of ownership in them.
So when an opportunity to do that came, in the middle of the storage boom and backed by Hydro-Quebec, a highly respected organization practically in my own backyard, I knew that now was the time. Even though EVLO was still in the R&D stage – they didn’t even have a website for me to fact-check them yet! – the growth potential, timing, and reliability of Hydro-Quebec provided the perfect opportunity for me to help build something from the ground up.
Q: What do you like most about your job? Can you share a proudest EVLO moment?
A: Every first is huge — our first EVLO 1000 sale, our first US contract, and our first EVLOFLEX deal really stand out. These moments confirm the work that our teams put into creating the safest, most reliable and high-performing energy storage solutions possible.
What I like most is building: creating products, projects, and teams. I love the beginning-to-end process of developing a product and strategy, and then assembling skilled teams to execute it. I also find building relationships with our clients, finding the best-fit solutions for them, very rewarding.
Q: What have you helped build at EVLO?
A: While I was hired for sales and business development, I soon was asked to act as interim CTO because of my technical background. These two roles complemented each other, because helping design our products gave me the deep knowledge foundation needed to sell them. I helped create our business plan and go-to-market strategy. We defined the EVLO identity – safety first – and designed our offerings, including the original EVLO 1000, to be demonstrably among the safest and most reliable on the battery storage market.
Developing EVLO’s identity and assembling our incredible team are things I’m very proud of, and I’m very glad I said “yes” to the CTO role.
Q: As VP of Business Development & Sales, what are your current priorities?
A: Now that we’ve built an incredible team, we’re working to increase our sales, develop key accounts in strategic markets, and execute our growth plan. My job is making sure we give full attention to the needs of our prospective and current customers, while continuing to develop our business development, account management, and marketing strategies.
Q: What most excites you about the future of EVLO and the energy storage industry?
A: I’ve seen firsthand how storage evolved from “pipe dream” to an affordable, commercial, scalable reality in under two decades. It’s thrilling to be part of this revolution as an engineer at EVLO. The energy storage market continues to grow rapidly — even our most positive forecasts keep getting surpassed, which is extremely exciting.
For EVLO, we’ve just signed our first major US deals, fulfilling a goal we set out to achieve years ago in our business plan. Our recent successes and expansions confirm that we’re serving a global need for safe and resilient renewable energy storage. We continue developing our offerings and remain the industry leader in battery storage safety and performance.
Q: What is your message for those interested in joining the storage industry and EVLO?
A: There are exciting roles and jobs in this booming industry for everyone. I joined EVLO for the opportunity, excitement, and possibility to build a lot of things. There’s so much potential here for electrical engineers, and others interested in the field, to help support the clean, renewable grid of the future.
