Recurve.

Picture the California grid in late summer. Air conditioners hum in unison, the sun drops behind the coastal range, solar panels go quiet, and demand climbs at exactly the wrong moment. The old answer was concrete and steel: fire up a gas peaker plant that earns its keep maybe forty hours a year. Expensive. Dirty. Idle most of its life.

Recurve's answer is quieter. Somewhere across thousands of homes, a smart thermostat nudges itself up two degrees. A heat-pump water heater delays its next cycle. An EV charger waits forty-five minutes. No one notices. Added together, those small refusals look exactly like a power plant - except this one was already paid for, sitting in people's garages and hallways.

The catch, always, was proof. A utility cannot pay for electricity that was never used unless it can measure the absence of it - rigorously, defensibly, in front of a regulator who is paid to be skeptical. For years that measurement was a hand-wave, a consultant's estimate, an argument. Recurve turned it into a number you can audit.

The company builds the FLEX platform: software that reads revenue-grade data from smart meters and calculates, household by household, how much load actually shifted. It runs on open-source methods - OpenEEmeter and the CalTRACK standard - that Recurve itself helped seed. Anyone can inspect the math. Even competitors. Especially regulators.

That openness is the unusual part. Most software companies guard their core IP like a recipe. Recurve gave its measurement engine away, then built a business on top of the trust that created. When the way of counting is public, the fights stop being about methodology and start being about results.

So utilities stopped arguing and started paying. Through FLEXmarket, Recurve runs pay-for-performance markets where aggregators and contractors get compensated not for installing a device, but for the verified grid value it delivers when the grid is straining. Perform, get paid. Don't, don't.