ai-energy
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Gridmatic Wants to Turn the Power Grid Into a Forecasting Problem
The former Google engineer behind Gridmatic is applying search-ad automation to a harder auction: electricity. The company now trades across all seven major U.S. power markets, operates batteries in Texas and California, and sells energy to businesses that need cost certainty without giving up cleaner power.
Steve Huang
Steve Huang is the founder and CEO of KiWi New Energy, a Taiwan-born, San Mateo-based startup building what he calls an operating system for global renewable energy. A serial green entrepreneur with more than 15 years across the semiconductor and solar value chain, Huang went from NVIDIA and public silicon-wafer ventures to a near-total collapse when Chinese rivals undercut his micro-inverter business, then rebuilt around an AI-driven energy datacenter that matches clean supply with retail and small-business demand in real time.
Verse
Verse is a San Francisco climate-tech company building AI software that turns messy energy, market, and financial data into decisions organizations can actually act on. Its flagship platform, Aria, helps companies forecast Scope 2 emissions, plan and procure clean power (including PPAs), optimize on-site assets like batteries, and - increasingly - get AI data centers connected to the grid years faster. Founded in 2022 by clean-energy veterans from Fluence, Tesla and AMS, Verse raised an oversubscribed $54M Series B in June 2026 led by Bessemer Venture Partners, with GV, NVIDIA and Norrsken.
Paul Huelskamp
Paul Huelskamp is the co-founder and CEO of Anode Technology Company, a San Francisco startup building AI-orchestrated mobile microgrids and battery energy storage systems that deliver grid-independent electricity to EV depots, data centers, construction sites, and live events. A renewable-energy financier turned hardware founder, he previously built and ran Moxion Power, which raised more than $110 million to replace diesel generators before it went bankrupt in 2024. In 2025 he returned with a leaner, software-first venture and $9 million in seed funding from Eclipse Ventures, determined to 'finish what we started.'
Rahul Kar
Rahul Kar is the founder and CEO of Hammerhead AI, a Redwood City startup that uses reinforcement-learning control agents to squeeze stranded power out of AI data centers. After helping build and scale AutoGrid - the distributed-energy software pioneer acquired by Schneider Electric - Kar launched Hammerhead in November 2025 with a $10M seed round led by Buoyant Ventures. His thesis is blunt: the real bottleneck for AI is not chips or models, it is power, and most data centers run at 30-50% of their allocated capacity. Hammerhead's ORCA platform orchestrates power, cooling, and compute in real time to unlock roughly 30% more usable capacity without touching the grid.