He decided that buying electricity should not require a fax machine and a leap of faith.
Open the energy-procurement industry circa 2011 and you found a cottage of brokers, phone calls, and PDFs that aged like milk. A small business wanting a better electricity rate had to trust a middleman who was, himself, drowning in price quotes that expired by the hour. Hami Babai looked at that and saw a marketplace waiting to be born.
Power Kiosk is the platform he built to deliver it: a cloud system that lets energy brokers compare supplier offers, manage contracts end to end, and launch a business without renting an office or hiring a quant. Today it spans dozens of states and provinces, carries more than 16,000 customers, and connects them to over a hundred suppliers. The pitch is almost suspiciously simple - simplify complexity with transparency.
The number sticks with you. Babai arrived in Chicago at twenty-one with four thousand dollars and no credit history - the financial equivalent of showing up to a marathon barefoot. He came from Iran. He left with a plan to study, and study he did: a master's degree from the University of Maryland, then a Ph.D. in engineering from Northwestern University.
His training was in transportation, logistics, and civil engineering - the unglamorous mathematics of moving things efficiently from one place to another. It is a detail that turns out to explain everything. When he later looked at energy markets, he did not see kilowatt-hours. He saw a routing problem. Buyers here, sellers there, friction everywhere in between, and a giant optimization waiting for someone with the patience to model it.
Before Power Kiosk he was chief technology officer at Best Energy, an energy brokerage. He learned the business from the inside - and watched it strain against its own inefficiency. Then, in 2013, the startup he was working for went under. For a lot of people that is the end of a chapter. For Babai it was the prompt. Rather than find another job inside a broken model, he built the thing the model was missing.
The industry was failing to evolve and was fragmented from every angle. Everything ran slow and inefficient.
That is the founder's instinct in its purest form: discomfort with how things are, paired with a refusal to accept that they must stay that way. He had spent years watching brokers overextend themselves chasing price quotes while customers squinted at options nobody had bothered to make legible. The fix was not a better broker. It was better infrastructure.
Here is the part venture Twitter tends to skip. Babai self-funded Power Kiosk for roughly four years before taking a cent of outside money. No seed deck victory lap, no Series A confetti - just a founder funding his own conviction while the product earned the right to exist. The company grew from a single desk in Chicago's River North into a team spread across headquarters and a second office in Atlanta.
It was only in 2017 that he closed a first funding round and partnered with investor Steve Joung, who came on as a managing partner. By then the question was not whether the thing worked. It was how fast it could scale. The seed money was an accelerant, not a life raft - a meaningful distinction, and one Babai clearly preferred.
We connect buyers and suppliers of energy with the mission of securing the best energy plans that fit the customer's and broker's needs.
What does the platform actually do? It collapses a sprawling, manual process into software. A broker logs in, pulls live supplier offers, compares them, builds a contract, and manages it through its full life - all in one place. The unglamorous middle of the energy economy, finally given a dashboard. Babai likes to point out that a broker can now start their own business overnight, in any North American market, without a large investment. The barrier to entry he removed used to be the whole game.
And the marketplace logic is the quiet genius of it. Babai is precise about why these things succeed or fail: the value is not in listing offers, it is in getting both sides to actually transact. A marketplace that only one side shows up to is a directory. Power Kiosk's job is to make the supplier and the broker both want to be there - and then make the deal close.
The key to a marketplace being effective is how well it engages both parties to successfully transact with one another.
Energy brokers can start their own business overnight in all North American markets without a large investment.
We connect buyers and suppliers of energy with the mission of securing the best energy plans that fit the customer's and broker's needs.
The industry was failing to evolve and was fragmented from every angle. Everything ran slow and inefficient.
His academic field was transportation and logistics. He took the math of routing trucks and pointed it at routing electrons. The boring degree turned out to be the secret weapon.
Power Kiosk runs out of 350 North LaSalle Drive in Chicago's River North - a long way from a $4,000 arrival a couple of decades earlier.
Hami is the handle, Hamed is the name on the diploma. Both his Twitter and Facebook presence run under the Power Kiosk brand, not his own - the founder hiding behind the product.
Four years of self-funding before outside capital. In a world addicted to raising, he treated fundraising as optional until the product had earned it.