Sanjiv
Sanghavi

The grid was built to push power one way. Texture is rewiring it for a world that pushes back.

Somewhere in Vermont, a rural electric cooperative is quietly orchestrating hundreds of home batteries as if they were one machine. The software running that choreography is Texture, and the person who decided it needed to exist is Sanjiv Sanghavi. He runs the company as co-founder and CEO out of New York, where a 20-person team is doing something the century-old utility industry mostly assumed was impossible: shipping useful grid software in days instead of years.

The pitch is deceptively plain. Texture ingests live data from batteries, solar arrays, EVs, chargers and smart thermostats, then hands utility operators a single screen where the chaos becomes legible. It detects a load spike at the meter, traces the strain up through transformers and feeders, and flags trouble before a piece of equipment gives out. More than 50 manufacturers feed into it, Tesla and SolarEdge and FranklinWH and Honeywell and Ecobee among them, brands that historically had no reason to talk to each other.

That last part is the whole game. Energy hardware has spent a decade building what Sanghavi calls walled gardens. Every manufacturer ships its own app, its own data format, its own monitoring dashboard, and none of them interoperate. The grid, meanwhile, was engineered for electricity flowing in a single direction, from a big plant to your wall. Rooftop solar, vehicle chargers, home storage and data-center demand have turned that one-way street into a two-way intersection with no traffic lights.

Sanghavi's read on the problem is less about technology than about manners. He did not set out to crush the existing data trackers and monitoring vendors. He set out to convince them to share. "Why don't we work together?" became an actual go-to-market strategy. The argument he makes to a skeptical OEM is mercifully simple: open up, and the market you can sell into stops being your own customer base and starts being everyone's.

It is a counterintuitive thing to lead with, in a market where most founders promise to disrupt the incumbents. Sanghavi's wager is that the energy transition is too big and too fragmented for any single winner-take-all platform, and that the durable position is to be the connective tissue everyone else stands on. The technology stack accelerates the people building on top of it rather than competing with them. That stance shapes the whole product: open integrations, standardized customer profiles, live data streaming, and an architecture that reacts to events as devices report them rather than polling on a schedule and hoping.

A finance degree, then a decade of refusing to use it.

Sanghavi studied finance and operations management at Boston University and graduated in 2004 into the obvious next step: an analyst seat at a capital partners firm, then years as an associate at an investment bank. The interesting part is what happened when he walked away from all of it.

In 2010 he and Payal Kadakia started Classtivity, a search engine for fitness classes pitched as OpenTable for workouts. It did not work. The early product booked roughly ten reservations a month, because finding a fitness class turned out to be an aspirational, easily-postponed act rather than a transactional one. The team burned through serious money learning that lesson. Then they pivoted: a pass that let people sample many studios on one membership. Sanghavi moved on as the company rebranded to ClassPass in 2014, but the thing he helped build went on to a billion-dollar valuation.

What followed reads like four startups stacked in a trench coat. He founded Tulip. He ran product as VP at the flexible-office company Knotel. Then, in 2020, he took the role that pointed him at his life's current obsession: Chief Product Officer at Arcadia, one of the largest supply-side energy data companies in the world. Energy, it turned out, was the messiest and most consequential data problem he had ever touched. He spent a stretch as a climate-focused venture partner at Day One Ventures, kept hearing the same complaint from utility cooperatives, and finally did the founder thing.

There is a pattern across fitness, real estate and energy that is easy to miss. Sanghavi keeps choosing industries with no shared language and then building the dictionary. The unglamorous middle layer, the thing that lets incompatible parties coordinate, is the part most founders skip and the part he keeps running toward.

What Texture has put on the board.

Series A co-led by VoLo Earth Ventures and Equal Ventures, with Lerer Hippeau and Abstract Ventures. Earlier seed backers include Day One Ventures and Arcadia CEO Kiran Bhatraju.

Treat the grid like a real-time network, not a pipe.

The bet underneath Texture is that distributed energy stops being a liability and becomes an asset the moment everything can coordinate. A neighborhood full of batteries and EVs is either an unmanageable threat to a transformer or a virtual power plant, and the difference is software. Texture charges by megawatts under management and sells to the people closest to that hardware: installers offering monitoring plans and the operators stitching together virtual power plants.

The product philosophy is event-driven and OEM-backed, which in plain terms means it reacts to what devices are actually doing and integrates at the source rather than guessing from the outside. The deployment promise, days rather than years, is a deliberate jab at an industry famous for software rollouts that outlast the careers of the people who approved them.

EV charging is the part of this that has gone from abstract to urgent. A street where three neighbors plug in at 6pm can stress a local transformer in ways the original engineers never modeled, and that is before you add rooftop solar pushing power backward and a data center down the road pulling like a small city. Texture's argument is that you cannot manage what you cannot see, and almost nobody operating a distribution grid can currently see this in real time.

The customers who feel this first are not the big investor-owned utilities with deep IT budgets. They are the rural electric cooperatives, the municipal utilities and the installers, the operators who want to run demand-response programs and battery fleets but were never going to get custom software built for their scale. That is the gap Sanghavi kept hearing about, and it is why a partnership reaching 850 utility cooperatives matters more than the dollar figure attached to it. The distribution of grid software, not just the code, is the thing he is trying to fix.

The ClassPass lesson, applied to electrons.

There is a thread connecting the fitness search engine that failed and the grid platform that is working. The first version of Classtivity assumed a behavior that did not exist, that people would transactionally book a workout the way they book a table. The lesson, paid for with real money, was that you build for how people actually behave, not how you wish they would. Sanghavi seems to have carried that into energy. Texture does not ask utilities to adopt a new mental model or rip out their existing vendors. It meets them where they are, plugs into the hardware they already have, and earns the next step by being useful in days.

The other inheritance is patience for the boring layer. ClassPass became valuable because it solved coordination between studios and members, not because of any single flashy feature. Texture is the same shape of bet, one rung deeper in the stack, in an industry where the stakes are reliability and the climate rather than spin class attendance. For a founder who could plausibly have chased something flashier, choosing the plumbing of the energy transition is its own kind of statement.

Five lines that explain the man.