The retail energy business used to run on phone calls, faxes, and spreadsheets. A Northwestern Ph.D. named Hamed Babai looked at that and saw a marketplace waiting to be built.
Picture an energy broker at 9 a.m. A client wants the best electricity rate for six office locations across three states. In the old world, that meant a morning of calls, a stack of supplier PDFs, and a spreadsheet that never quite agreed with itself.
Now that broker opens one browser tab. Power Kiosk is already talking to a network of roughly 110 suppliers. Rates come back side by side. An AI layer nudges: this supplier, this product, right about now. The contract executes without a single fax machine warming up. The broker looks like a genius. The client saves money. Nobody notices the plumbing - which is exactly the point.
That is the quiet trick of Power Kiosk. It didn't invent energy. It didn't invent brokers. It took an industry that Babai bluntly describes as fragmented from every angle and stitched the pieces into something a person could actually use.
Above: the Power Kiosk badge, mounted like it earned the wall space. A logo for a company that sells clarity has to look, well, clear.
Figures self-reported by the company. Numbers this round tend to be milestones, not spreadsheets - treat them as the shape of the thing, not the decimal.
The industry was failing to evolve and was fragmented from every angle. Everything ran slow and inefficient.- Hamed Babai, Founder & CEO
Babai emigrated to Chicago at 21 with about $4,000 to his name and no credit history. He went on to earn a Ph.D. from Northwestern University. His first startup failed in 2013 - the kind of setback that either ends a founder or sharpens one.
It sharpened him. Out of that failure came a single observation about the retail energy market: everyone was buying and selling power through channels that hadn't changed in decades. The information was scattered. The process was slow. The barriers to entry were high enough to keep good brokers out. Babai's fix was almost insultingly simple to describe and genuinely hard to build - put it all in one place, and make it transparent.
Born in Chicago out of the ashes of an earlier venture, aimed squarely at the fragmentation of retail energy.
Babai closes a seed round and brings on partner Steve Joung. No outside funding has been accepted since.
Recognized on the Inc. 5000 list, citing roughly 250% three-year growth - built without the fundraising treadmill.
Same broker. Same client. The difference is where the friction went - which is to say, away.
Request pricing from a large supplier network, compare offers, and execute electricity and natural gas contracts in a single workflow.
AI-driven pricing trends, live supplier rates, and automated buy-time alerts so brokers can advise clients on when and what to buy.
Centralize energy data and contracts, monitor usage in real time, manage demand peaks, and trim charges.
Source renewable energy and track emissions with live analytics for transparent ESG reporting.
Quote faster, close more often, and start a brokerage across North America without a warehouse of supplier relationships.
Reach a wide pool of brokers and end-users, and compete on rate and product where the buyers already are.
Get advised into the lowest available rate, then track usage and emissions from the same dashboard.
Our mission is to make sure our customers always find and pay the lowest available rate.- Hamed Babai, Founder & CEO
In a startup culture where the fundraising announcement often is the headline, Power Kiosk did something almost old-fashioned. It raised once, in 2017, and then let the business fund the business. No mega-rounds. No valuation theater. Just a marketplace that got more useful as more suppliers and brokers showed up on it.
The two-sided marketplace design is the engine here: suppliers want brokers, brokers want suppliers, and Power Kiosk keeps both sides transacting. Every new supplier makes the platform more valuable to brokers, and every new broker makes it more valuable to suppliers. That flywheel, not a war chest, is what carried it onto the 2025 Inc. 5000 list.
Wilde would approve: the company resisted the temptation of every round it could have raised - and there's nothing quite so telling as what a founder refuses.
Links point to searches rather than a single official clip - the safest route when a canonical video URL isn't confirmed.
Return to that broker at the start of the day. Six locations, three states, one anxious client.
The morning that used to eat itself alive is now a coffee's worth of clicks. The supplier rates arrive together. The AI whispers its timing hint. The contract signs. The client gets the lowest available rate, and the broker gets their afternoon back. Multiply that by 16,000 customers and 34 markets and you get the real product Power Kiosk sells: not electricity, but the hours and headaches that used to stand between a business and a fair price.
Babai set out to simplify complexity with transparency. The measure of whether he pulled it off isn't in a pitch deck. It's in how boring buying energy has quietly become - and boring, in this corner of the world, is the highest compliment a founder can earn.