Before Lee Taylor helped other people trade the financial risks of wind and sunshine, he sold a piece of his own future. The asset was his income. The purpose was to get REsurety started. For a founder whose business would revolve around finding a suitable owner for uncertainty, it was an unusually personal first transaction.
Traditional venture fundraising had gone badly. Clean technology was an awkward pitch in the aftermath of Solyndra’s bankruptcy. Taylor turned to Upstart, which offered money today for a share of earnings tomorrow. Years later, he recalled a process that examined grades, SAT scores and employment history to put a present value on his next decade. Entrepreneurship had acquired a rather intimate spreadsheet.
He eventually bought his way out after the business landed a customer. His fiancée, an investment banker, had encouraged him to tidy up his balance sheet before their wedding. It is a charmingly financial piece of domestic advice. It also introduces the central question of Taylor’s career: who should carry a risk, and what should they be paid to carry it?
A career switch with a detour attached
Taylor had studied economics and biology at the University of Virginia. Renewable energy interested him early enough to become the subject of his undergraduate thesis. His working life then moved through economic consulting, venture capital and asset management. The interest persisted; the career was taking a different route.
He entered Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business in 2010 to change that. Starting a company was absent from the original plan. His application described an ambition to join the renewable energy rotational programs at GE or PG&E. A substantial employer, an established program, a recognizable next step: there was a perfectly serviceable plan available.
A first-year project gave him a different problem to pursue. Working with classmate Erik Kankainen, he examined how renewable generators could hedge weather risk. The research continued through independent study and an academic paper. By 2012, the question had escaped the classroom and needed a business.
Even the curriculum became something to adjust. Taylor and fellow student Wade Barnes asked faculty director Robert Hansen for an energy finance course. Hansen brought in University of Texas scholar Ehud Ronn to teach it. Taylor’s education included a practical demonstration that asking for the missing tool could be more productive than accepting its absence.
The fuel arrives when it pleases
The problem Taylor chose sounds almost too obvious to support a company. Wind and solar generation depend on the weather. Their fuel carries no purchase price, but nobody at a wind farm can order a convenient extra shipment of breeze for Thursday afternoon.
For a conventional power producer, fuel prices are a familiar financial exposure. Renewable generation changes the question. How much energy will arrive? When will it arrive? What will electricity be worth at that moment? A windy year can still contain a financially troublesome hour. An annual production total offers limited comfort if a contract goes badly during the expensive intervals.
REsurety began by developing hedging tools for that intermittency. Its work joined weather analysis to financial risk management, helping buyers and sellers understand exposures and transfer them to counterparties willing to hold them. Taylor’s first product was concerned with making revenues or purchasing costs more predictable. There was plenty to do before anyone needed a marketplace.
“got to appoint myself CEO and haven't been fired yet”
Lee Taylor, discussing REsurety’s beginnings on 8 Minutes
He can make the explanation sound conversational. Discussing his title, he jokes about having appointed himself. Discussing the underlying business, he returns to the timing of the fuel. The joke takes a few seconds; the problem has occupied him since business school.
Conceptual explanation of the problem Taylor set out to solve. No forecast or performance data shown.
Teaching a cautious market a new habit
Getting a correct answer was only part of building the business. Getting a customer to use it took longer. Infrastructure finance involves people whose decisions must survive scrutiny from lenders, investors and colleagues. A novel contract asks them to accept a new way of thinking before they have a long record of examples to consult.
By 2017, Taylor was describing adoption as a process that had taken years. Early venture fundraising had been slow and unsuccessful; early customers also needed convincing. Friends and family helped with capital, followed by investors including LaunchCapital and the Clean Energy Venture Group.
He was specific about the people who helped. Kenneth Westrick was his co-founder. Ken Davies supplied the original business-school project and remained an adviser. Barney Schauble sponsored the research and continued offering guidance. Taylor also credited his wife and immediate family for maintaining confidence through the uncertain stretches. The founding story contains more recurring names than a solitary-founder legend would permit.
The commercial evidence accumulated. In January 2019, REsurety announced that its risk-management transactions had passed 5,000 megawatts. Nineteen new transactions had closed during 2018 across several product lines. Deals that year involved companies including Microsoft, Enel Green Power North America, Engie and Ørsted.
The announcement also pointed beyond the United States, citing Australian packaging company Orora among renewable buyers adopting the products. Weather-driven uncertainty was recognizable to more than one kind of customer. A wind project’s owner might want protection for revenue; a company buying renewable electricity might want greater certainty about its costs.
The value hidden inside an hour
As the company grew, its analytical work found uses beyond supporting hedges. A dataset built to help someone underwrite risk could also help a developer choose a location or a buyer compare offers. Taylor described that expansion when REsurety introduced its REmap information product in 2020.
The details were stubbornly practical. Public information came from grid operators, weather records, energy agencies and regulatory reports. Those records had to be brought together, checked and supplemented with modeling. Knowing a plant’s monthly production did not reveal which hours supplied it, yet the hours could determine its financial value.
This creates an awkward wrinkle for anyone shopping by headline price. A cheaper power purchase agreement can be less attractive than a more expensive one if the projects produce at different times or locations. The same capacity label can conceal very different economics. Taylor’s pitch required customers to examine what lay beneath the number.
That insistence runs through the wider business. REsurety’s CleanSight software supports analysis and management of assets and contracts. Its consulting work supplies specialist judgment. CleanTrade adds somewhere to act on those judgments. Understanding an offer and being able to complete a transaction became adjacent parts of the same undertaking.
Four years between the idea and the permission
A further push came after Winter Storm Uri disrupted Texas in February 2021. Taylor has described the episode as a turning point for fixed-volume hedges applied to intermittent generation. A contract can specify an amount of electricity without conferring any authority over the weather that must produce it.
In mid-2021, REsurety began conversations with Citi’s commodities team about the marketplace that became CleanTrade. Building it involved technology and market structure, plus the work required to operate under federal supervision. Looking back in 2025, Taylor acknowledged that the effort had taken longer than expected.
His company announced CleanTrade in October 2024 alongside a $32 million Series C led by S2G and Citi, with Angeleno Group and existing investors participating. The announcement made the regulatory condition explicit: approval from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission was still required for the swap execution facility.
The CFTC approved REsurety Markets’ registration on August 25, 2025. The date is a useful distinction in a story full of overlapping development, financing and launch milestones. Announcing a market and receiving permission to operate its regulated facility are separate accomplishments.
Free fuel still needs a carefully written contract.
The financial problem behind REsurety
A swap execution facility is a regulated venue for trading swaps. CleanTrade brings that structure to transactions in power generated by particular renewable projects. The machinery includes a rulebook, participant requirements and transaction processes. Those are less photogenic than turbines, but a business built around dependable agreements has reason to care about them.
A deal in Indiana, and a different kind of progress
On August 31, 2026, Akamai Technologies executed a virtual power purchase agreement on CleanTrade for an almost 200-megawatt new solar project in Indiana. REsurety described it as the first clean energy transaction executed on a CFTC-registered exchange. A transaction involving an operating Texas wind project followed a week later.
For Taylor, the distinction lay in how the deal happened. The company had already supported more than 7,000 megawatts of clean energy transactions. Now vetted participants could see live offers and bids in a regulated marketplace. His September 30 account emphasized the difference between collecting proposals and maintaining a market where both sides can be seen.
He also linked the transaction to carbon analysis: choosing a project means considering what generation its electricity displaces. That concern connects his commercial work to a much earlier chapter. Taylor attended The Island School in fall 1999, during its second semester, and received its Founders Alumni Award in 2024. He has described leaving the school with a sense of responsibility and an ability to act on it.
The adult work is full of spreadsheets, contracts and regulatory patience. The ambition underneath it has remained recognizable. Taylor wants cleaner generation to find buyers, financing and useful ways to manage uncertainty. He began by putting a price on part of his own future. Years later, he is still working on the terms under which a future becomes possible to finance.