Sam Tegel

A trader walks up to the grid and asks: what's an hour of power worth?

In February 2026, a battery operator in Texas could do something that had never been possible inside a U.S.-regulated venue: buy or sell a single megawatt-hour of electricity, for one specific hour, and have it settle in cash almost in real time. The exchange behind that trade is ElectronX. The person who steered it from a regulatory idea into a live market is Sam Tegel.

For most of the last quarter century, trading electricity meant phone calls and over-the-counter blocks - four to eight hours of power at a time, bought in chunks worth tens of millions of dollars. Tegel and his backers like to describe that world bluntly: power markets that look like securities markets in the 1990s, or online advertising in 2005. Antiquated. Coarse. Missing the granularity that every other modern market took for granted years ago.

Tegel's bet is that the grid can no longer afford to be coarse. Wind and solar surge and vanish with the weather. Batteries charge and discharge on the hour. Bitcoin miners flip enormous loads on and off chasing cheap electrons. The result is intraday volatility that the old block-trading machinery was never designed to price - and ElectronX exists to put a number on it, hour by hour.

Equities. Fixed income. FX. Futures. Digital assets. Now electrons.

Tegel did not arrive at energy from a wind farm. He arrived from the engine rooms of electronic trading. He began trading independently in global electronic markets around 2001, then climbed through the kind of firms that show up in market-structure war stories: he ran the U.S. equities market-making team at Sun Trading, headed trading at Caherciveen Partners, and built global market-making businesses across several asset classes as Head of Liquidity Strategy at Jump Trading - one of the fastest, most secretive high-speed shops in the world.

At Millennium, one of the largest multi-strategy hedge funds on earth, he served as Senior Strategy Development Officer to the Chief Trading Officer, advising on higher-turnover strategies and proprietary trading investments. In 2018 he hung out his own shingle, founding Sage Capital Markets - a C-suite advisory firm selling market-structure expertise, corporate strategy and deal flow to trading firms, investors and technology providers.

The through-line is liquidity. Tegel's career is a long study in the unglamorous question of how you get buyers and sellers to show up in a market that does not yet exist. That is exactly the problem a brand-new electricity exchange has to solve.

It also explains why investors with no obvious interest in power - quantitative trading firms like XTX Markets, Five Rings and GTS - wrote checks. They recognize the playbook. A market is only as good as the depth on its order book, and Tegel spent twenty years on the other side of that equation, learning what makes liquidity appear and what makes it flee. He is, in effect, building the venue he spent a career trading on.

A winter storm became the pitch deck

If you want to understand why anyone funds a power exchange, look at Texas in February 2021. As Winter Storm Uri froze the grid, electricity sold at 40 to 80 times its typical price per megawatt-hour. Fortunes were made and unmade in hours. The lesson ElectronX took from it: the people most exposed to those swings - the renewables owners, the storage operators, the retail providers - had almost no precise way to hedge them.

Tegel frames the volatility as structural, not freakish. As he put it at launch, intraday power-price swings have "sharply increased in an environment of growing power demand, intermittent renewable energy generation, and adverse weather, including extreme temperature events." The fix, in his telling, is not better forecasting. It is better plumbing: "Marketplace solutions must include broader access to derivatives for an increasingly decentralized industry with newer business models and innovative technologies."

The boring, brutal work of regulatory approval

Anyone can dream up a contract. Getting the U.S. government to bless an entirely new exchange is the hard part. Tegel assembled a board and advisory bench drawn from the institutions that referee American markets - FINRA, CME Group, Nodal Exchange, and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. In late August 2025, the work paid off: the CFTC granted ElectronX status as both a Designated Contract Market and a Designated Clearing Organization. In plain terms, ElectronX is allowed to both run the market and clear the trades.

The money followed the milestones. A $15 million seed round led by Innovation Endeavors in mid-2024 became a $30 million Series A in November 2025, led by seed investor DCVC and joined by quantitative trading heavyweights XTX Markets, Five Rings and GTS, plus energy funds NGP and others. Returning backers Systemiq Capital, Equinor Ventures and Shell Ventures - the venture arms of two of the largest energy companies in the world - came back for more. Total raised: north of $55 million.

The first products are deliberately small: hourly bounded futures and binary options in 1 MWh sizes for ERCOT, the Texas grid, cash-settled in near real-time across a 120-hour trading window, spanning five ERCOT hubs and two hub averages. Small size is the whole point - it lets a single battery, a single miner, a single retail desk participate instead of just the giants who could clear eight-figure blocks.

Texas first. Then the rest of the grid.

ERCOT was the proving ground - fitting, given it is home to some of the most violent price action on the planet. A limited soft launch ran in December 2025; the full launch landed in February 2026. The roadmap points outward from there. ElectronX plans contract suites for PJM, the largest grid operator in the country, and CAISO in California through 2026.

Tegel's read on the moment is that he is not pushing a market onto a reluctant industry - the industry is pulling. "ElectronX's Series A," he said, "captures the rising momentum from all industry angles for financial infrastructure innovations in U.S. power markets." And looking ahead: "We look forward to expanding into PJM and CAISO as energy market participants in both regions consider emerging solutions like ElectronX to address rising prices and acute grid stress."

It is worth being precise about one thing the press sometimes blurs: Tegel did not found ElectronX. Co-founders Evan Caron, a former ERCOT power trader, and Philip Krim, started it. Tegel is the operator who joined in 2023 and carried it through the unglamorous gauntlet - regulators, clearing, liquidity, launch. In a startup, those are the verbs that decide whether the idea ever takes a breath.

There is a tidy symmetry in where he landed. The clean-energy transition is usually told as a story about hardware - panels, turbines, batteries, transmission lines. Tegel's contribution is the part nobody photographs: the financial infrastructure that lets all that hardware get financed, hedged and de-risked. Innovation Endeavors called ElectronX "a core piece of infrastructure and a true catalyst for the clean energy transition." If that bet is right, the quiet exchange in Chicago matters as much to renewables as any solar farm. Tegel has spent his whole career building the plumbing behind markets. Now the market is the grid itself.