At six in the evening, an electricity grid begins to reveal the private choreography of a country. Ovens warm. Lights come on. Electric water heaters replace the heat spent on showers. The demand curve rises just as solar production disappears. Grid planners see a peak. Jon Kornik sees a scheduling problem.
That difference in framing sits at the center of Plentify, the smart-energy company Kornik founded in 2017. Its premise is wonderfully domestic: a home has many electrical loads, but not every load must run the instant it asks to. Water can be heated earlier. A battery can charge when solar power is plentiful. An appliance can wait out an expensive half-hour without its owner noticing. Put software around those decisions, coordinate them across thousands of homes, and the waiting itself becomes a grid resource.
Kornik did not arrive at this idea by starting with a gadget. His career moved through the institutions that decide how energy systems get financed and built. After studying business science and finance at the University of Cape Town, he worked at McKinsey. He started Selador Capital, a social venture firm, and established the Sub-Saharan African office of carbon-finance company South Pole. At Google, he led clean-energy work in Africa, funding major wind and solar projects and developing ways to expand access to electricity.
Those are jobs concerned with supply: more generation, more capital, more connections. But renewable supply has a stubborn personality. The sun keeps its own calendar. The wind declines to read the dinner schedule. A clean-energy system can produce plenty over a day and still strain when households need power at the same moment. Kornik's second act began with that gap between abundance and availability.
The battery hiding in hot water
In South Africa, an electric water heater is called a geyser. It is also one of the home's largest electrical loads. The useful output is not electricity; it is hot water held in an insulated tank. That distinction matters. The tank already stores energy, just as heat rather than electrons. If it reaches the right temperature before a morning or evening peak, the heater can remain off while the grid is tight. The household still gets its shower.
Plentify's HotBot controller turns that thermal slack into something measurable and manageable. It learns consumption, controls heating and can detect leaks. SolarBot adds forecasts, household demand and solar production to the calculation. The system is designed to make a sequence of small choices: heat now, wait, charge, hold, or warn. None is dramatic on its own. Across a fleet, they begin to resemble dispatch.
Two curves, one awkward day
The pitch is partly about avoiding a costly habit. Electricity systems traditionally make supply chase demand. When demand spikes, operators call on storage, peaking plants or extra generation. Kornik argues that flexible household demand can provide part of the same balancing service for far less. In 2024, he put Plentify's claimed cost advantage at 75 percent compared with batteries.
A company built across the stack
Hardware makes climate-tech narratives less tidy. A controller must survive heat, voltage fluctuations, installation errors and years inside a home. Firmware has to behave when the internet does not. Models must be useful with imperfect data. The app has to explain enough without turning the owner into an energy trader. And the entire system must cost little enough for partners to deploy at scale.
Plentify chose to own much of that complexity. Its South African team designs hardware and firmware, builds analytical, optimization and predictive models, and develops the software that customers and partners use. The analytical models look for equipment that is not operating as expected. Optimization chooses when appliances should run. Prediction estimates future solar production and demand. Artificial intelligence is not the decoration; it is most useful in those forecasts that feed the rest of the system.
The company itself is a partnership in complementary experience. Co-founder and chief growth officer Kailas Nair brought years at McKinsey and the insurance-behavior company Vitality. Machine-learning adviser Jay Taneja had led energy research at IBM Research Africa before joining the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Kornik's role sits among those specialties: hold the energy-system thesis steady while the product, commercial and technical pieces learn to speak to one another.
That translation matters because the buyer is not always the user. A utility may want peak relief. A solar installer wants a system that captures more value from rooftop generation. A property manager wants lower operating costs and a report that explains them. The resident wants the water warm and the app calm. One device has to make sense in each of those ledgers. Plentify's partner model turns that complexity into distribution: the household gets a useful service while the upstream energy system gains a controllable asset.
This full-stack approach grew in a country where energy technology must prove itself without generous assumptions. South Africa's years of load-shedding made reliability immediate. Rising tariffs made savings legible. Rapid rooftop-solar adoption created homes with abundant midday generation and weak incentives to export it. Plentify had to make load management valuable under those conditions, at a competitive price, before the idea could travel.
Kornik now treats that difficulty as preparation. The mismatch between renewable generation and human routines is not uniquely South African. Markets removing solar subsidies, utilities confronting evening peaks and households trying to get more from batteries all encounter versions of the same clock. A product designed around constraint can become relevant as the constraint spreads.
The virtual plant with no chimney
A virtual power plant sounds grander than its parts. There may be no central site at all. Instead, software coordinates distributed assets - water heaters, batteries, rooftop panels and other loads - so that together they can respond like one power resource. The value comes from aggregation. One heater waiting is a rounding error. Ten thousand heaters waiting at the same useful moment are capacity.
That introduces a delicate bargain. The grid wants flexibility. The customer wants hot water, lower bills and no homework. A successful system must preserve the service while moving the electricity behind it. Plentify's customer-centric challenge is therefore an exercise in invisibility: expose insights and controls when they help, automate the rest, and never confuse participation with inconvenience.
This is also why Kornik's story connects finance to product. A megawatt of generation, a megawatt-hour of storage and a megawatt of flexible demand do different jobs, carry different costs and attract different capital. Kornik has worked on each side of that conversation: the consultant modeling markets, the investor evaluating projects, the corporate energy lead funding assets and now the founder asking investors to price a new kind of infrastructure.
His public honors trace the same line. The Archbishop Tutu Leadership Fellowship selected him in 2016. Echoing Green named him a Climate Fellow in 2017, backing an early vision of connected home systems making African cities more resilient. At the UNLEASH Innovation Lab that year, his team won the Water track. The recurring theme was not a single device. It was the use of finance, technology and business models to widen access to essential services.
Begins his consulting career at McKinsey.
Starts Selador Capital and builds South Pole's Sub-Saharan African operation.
Works on energy and sustainability at Google, later leading African energy access and investments.
Founds Plentify and joins the Echoing Green Climate Fellowship.
Plentify closes an oversubscribed Series A for global rollout.
The export is a way of seeing
By late 2025, Plentify had raised nearly $15 million in total capital. Its oversubscribed Series A brought together long-term African backers and new investors, money intended to deepen adoption in South Africa and support expansion abroad. Kornik called the round validation that technology built in South Africa had global relevance.
The larger claim is cultural as much as technical. Energy debates favor visible assets: a solar farm spreading across a plain, a battery container beside a substation, a transmission line cutting toward a city. Demand flexibility looks like almost nothing. The water is already hot. The appliance simply waited. The peak is smaller than it might have been.
Kornik likes the line “Opportunities multiply as they are seized.” Plentify's opportunity began with a water heater, then widened to solar, batteries, utilities and virtual power plants. Each new layer depends on the same modest observation: electricity is more valuable at some moments than others, and many homes have more control over those moments than they realize.
The grid of the future will still need steel, copper, panels, turbines and storage. Kornik is making the case for another material: consent from millions of small machines to adjust their timing. It is infrastructure expressed as coordination. And at six in the evening, when the curve starts climbing, a quiet decision inside a house may be exactly the help the grid needs.