Profile / Clean Energy
Christopher Gosline
The operator who wanted renewable assets to stop sitting still - and helped build the machinery to make them work.
The operator who wanted renewable assets to stop sitting still - and helped build the machinery to make them work.
Most people look at a solar farm and see a finished thing. The panels are up, the sun is out, the power is flowing. Christopher Gosline looked at the same field and saw a job half done.
The panels generate electricity, sure. But who is selling that power into the market at the right hour? Who is bidding the battery when the grid is short? Who is awake at three in the morning when a price spike turns idle megawatts into real revenue? For most renewable projects, the honest answer was: no one in particular. That gap - between a clean asset that exists and a clean asset that actively earns - became the founding idea of SYSO Technologies.
Gosline co-founded the Boston company in 2019 with Nicholas Speyer, and served as its first chief executive. The pitch was deceptively plain. Take the passive renewable and storage projects scattered across the country and turn them into active participants in the wholesale power markets. Do it with software, a round-the-clock operations desk, and people who understand how electricity actually gets bought and sold. SYSO now runs more than 4.5 gigawatts across 300-plus sites and seven major US markets, from ISO New England to ERCOT to CAISO.
That five-word vision was easy to say and brutally hard to build toward. Gosline was not the founder who wanted to invent a shiny new device. He wanted to build the unglamorous layer underneath - the market operations, the monitoring, the bidding logic - that lets clean power behave like a dependable business rather than a science project.
His route there was not a straight line. Gosline studied Geographic Information Systems at the University of Vermont, graduating in 2000, then went back for a master's in Energy Policy at the University of New Hampshire. Maps and rules. In hindsight it reads like ideal training for a career spent figuring out where clean power flows and who is allowed to sell it.
The formative decade came at EnerNOC, one of the pioneers of demand response - the business of paying customers to dial power down when the grid is stressed. There Gosline ran an energy intelligence software unit that pulled in more than $100 million a year, serving utilities and large enterprises worldwide. It was, in effect, a masterclass in the thing SYSO would later sell: using software and market mechanics to squeeze value out of the grid's quiet corners.
From 2015 to 2019 he was senior vice president at BlueWave Solar, where he launched a cloud-based solar management platform and stood up the teams behind BlueWave's community solar and solar loan products. The thread running through all of it is consistent. Someone has to operate the clean grid, not just build it. Gosline spent 20 years being that someone.
SYSO grew up during one of the least forgiving stretches for climate startups in recent memory. Gosline led the company through a $10 million Series A from Lacuna Sustainable Investments in 2022, then a $14.5 million Series B led by Kimmeridge in 2024, at which point roughly 2.5 gigawatts were under management. A later Series B extension pushed total funding to about $33.5 million and assets under management past 4.5 gigawatts. Raising that capital while investors were pulling back said as much about his credibility as any deck.
And yet the people who worked alongside him tend not to lead with the funding. They lead with the team. Colleagues describe someone marked by integrity and humility, generous with his time and resources, and unusually good at forming real connections across different cultures. What he was proudest of, by those accounts, was not a round or a revenue line. It was the group of people he had gathered around the idea and genuinely believed in.
Gosline was hard to fit in one box, and that seems to have been the point. Away from the operations center he was a skilled boater and fisherman, a recreational pilot, a hiker and runner and snowboarder, and - in a detail that delights everyone who hears it - a keeper of chickens. From childhood he had a natural pull toward nature and a tinkerer's love of electronics, forever taking things apart and building structures outdoors long before he was building companies.
Those who knew him say he put his family first, finding his deepest satisfaction in active parenting and in hauling everyone off on adventures in the mountains and on the water. It is a rare founder profile: someone who could hold the family-first line and still help nudge an entire industry forward. Gosline made a career, and a company, out of proving those two things do not have to be at odds.
SYSO carries the same bet forward today under co-founder Nicholas Speyer. The vision has not changed since Gosline first wrote it down: a power grid without fossil fuels, built one actively managed asset at a time.
Figures reflect SYSO Technologies' publicly reported milestones. Bars scaled for illustration.
Clean assets sitting idle earn nothing. Gosline's whole career was about the operating layer - the software and market work that turns generation into revenue.
SYSO pairs a cloud platform with a 24/7 operations center. The bet is that markets are too fast and messy for code alone, and too big for people alone.
By every account, the part he was proudest of was the group he assembled - people he believed in, motivated by a vision bigger than any single round.
Renewable projects were being treated as things you install and forget. Gosline argued they should be run like living businesses - watched, optimized, and traded. SYSO is the company built to prove it.
He is the co-founder and first CEO of SYSO Technologies, a Boston company that manages and optimizes renewable energy and storage assets in wholesale power markets.
SYSO turns passive solar, wind, and battery projects into active market participants, using a cloud-based energy management platform and a 24/7 operations center across seven US power markets.
He spent about a decade at EnerNOC running a $100M+ energy intelligence software business, then served as Senior Vice President at BlueWave Solar.
A bachelor's in Geographic Information Systems from the University of Vermont, followed by a master's in Energy Policy from the University of New Hampshire.
Roughly $33.5 million in total, including a $10M Series A and a $14.5M Series B, with a later extension bringing assets under management to about 4.5 GW.